Living Theology (Trinity Sunday C)

 

El Greco, The Holy Trinity

Living Theology

Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

Sunday after Pentecost, 15 June 2025
Homily preached at 9:00 a.m. sung Eucharist 
Parish Church of St. Mark, Medford Oregon

The Rev. Fr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15; Psalm 8

God, take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

When I was a boy, I looked forward to the delivery each day of the local newspaper.  I always turned first to the comics page, and read Charles Shultz’ Peanuts.  My favorite Peanuts strip of all time had Lucy van Pelt and her younger brother Linus seated at a window looking out on a downpour of rain.  Lucy says to Linus,  “Boy, look at that rain. What is it floods the whole world?”  Linus replies, “It will never do that.  In the ninth chapter of Genesis, God promised Noah that would never happen again, and the sign of the promise is the rainbow.”  Lucy smiles and replies, “You’ve taken a great load off my mind.”  Linus replies, “Sound theology has a way of doing that.”  

 

 

 

Today is Trinity Sunday, a celebration of a doctrine in theology.  For many of us here in the Pacific Northwest, both those words—theology and doctrine—tend to be trigger words.  They have an intimidating, threatening ring to them.  For many of us, they are redolent of dry and dusty intellectualism that at best kills love and the spirit, and, at worst, hurls authoritarian anathemas and excommunications and burns witches and heretics.  This is particularly the case with the doctrine of the Trinity, since it is not a biblical doctrine (it was developed by the the Cappadocian fathers centuries after the last books of the Bible were written.  The Bible itself has contradictory ideas on these issues, and the later theologians used Greek philosophical tools to help "square the circle" and reconcile the monotheism of some verses with the clear drift in others that Jesus of Nazareth and the spirit of God experienced by individuals in their lives are divine as well.  And we moderns just generally don't think in the Greek philosophical categories used by the Cappadocians, ideas like "substance," "being," or "hypostasis." 

 

But I have to tell you, I am a Trinitarian.  The processional hymn we sang today, "Holy, Holy, Holy," is one of the reasons I left the Mormonism of my youth and became an anglo-catholic Episcopalian.  When I first heard it, I realized that it expresssed my faith, one that affirms the oneness of God even while accepting the divinity of Jesus and the Spirit.  

 

So I want to talk a little today about how theology—and in particular the Church’s theology on the Most Holy Trinity—is actually connected to our life in all the ways that matter.  

 

C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity mentions a friend who says he prefers the reality of experience, the spirituality of going out and experiencing the beauty of God’s creation, to the unreality of the dry and deadly musings of theologians any day.  Lewis writes:

 

“[A person who] look[s] at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, … also will be turning from something real to something less real… The map is admittedly only colored paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based upon what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map” (p. 154).

 

The important thing to remember when you talk about theology and doctrine is this:  the heart of Christianity is not in theology or doctrine.  It is in the experience of the living God in our lives and our loving service to and compassion with others.  “The first commandment is love God.  The second is on par with this: love your neighbor.”   This is the life-giving heart of the Church.  The early Church leaders got into the business of theologizing and defining doctrine only when they realized that some ways of thinking about God and ourselves were not life-giving, and in fact got in the way. 

 

How you think impacts on how you experience life and the world.  How you believe colors how you live.  If you believe that God is a violent, bloodthirsty deity, you probably will not have much difficulty in warlike behavior of your own.  If you believe that God is a complete mystery, unrevealed and unrevealing, that kind of takes away any ability for God to actually touch you or change your life.   If you believe you are at heart a depraved wretch, you may from time to time actually act like one.  If you believe that the face of God was revealed in the face of Jesus of Nazareth, you will probably take very seriously who he was and what he taught.    What you believe colors how you live and experience the world. 

 

 “Heresy” in Greek simply means a choice, or alternative.  The Church over the centuries has identified many such “choices” as something to be avoided.  The history of theological controversy makes a very sorry story, one where Christians on all sides have not been their best at following Jesus.  But the Church first began to be concerned about such things only when it saw the harm that some “choices” of belief wrought on a comprehensive and healthy Christian life.  

 

Even judging by today’s broad inclusive standards, many of these condemned ideas are problematic.  Believing that the Son was created or begotten in time, and that Jesus thus became the Son, technically called Arianism or subordinationism, suggests that the only relationship possible with God is simple submission to higher authority.  This works all sorts of mischief in the life of the Church. 

 

Believing that the father, son, and holy spirit are simply three separate masks of, three separate ways we experience, or three different functions of, the one person God, technically called modalism, also robs us of community at the heart of all things and also reduces our relationship with God and each other simply to submission to domination. 

 

I know how beloved some of the newer more gender inclusive three-fold ways of talking about God are for many of us here.  “Earth maker, Pain bearer, Life Giver” touches us because it is grounded in things we touch and feel.  But I fear it obscures the inter-relationships at the heart of God.  “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” may indeed be too androcentric.  But when Jesus taught us to call God our father, our abba, he was not emphasizing gender, but parental intimacy.  Perhaps “Parent, Child, and Sacred Breath” might work.   Or better, this phrasing from St. Augustine, "Lover, Beleoved, and Love Itself."  These preserve the relationships in the Trinity rather than giving us different functions and reducing each of the persons to one of these.   It is important to be gender inclusive, especially in our ways of talking about God.  But it is also important to keep a clear focus on the social nature at the heart of God. 

 

The doctrine of the Trinity is hard to grasp. Believing that God the Father was the God of the Old Testament, with Jesus being begotten as his Son in the New Testament, is a common way Christians have of trying to make sense of it.   But this too is subordinationism, and it tends to bifurcate the Bible into a bad “Old Testament” and a good “New” one.  Judaism is seen as primitive, good only insofar as it points to Christianity.  This form of Arian belief leads often to what is called “supercessionism,” the idea that Christianity has replaced Judaism as God’s true people.  This belief is the source of most historical anti-Semitism, even secular anti-Semitisms that reject Christianity.

 

Liberation theologian Leonardo Boff writes the following: 

 

“We believe that God is communion rather than solitude.  Believing in the Trinity means that at the root of everything that exists and subsists there is movement; there is an eternal process of life, of outward movement, of love.  Believing in the Trinity means that truth is on the side of communion rather than exclusion; consensus translates truth better than imposition; the participation of many is better than the dictate of a single one” (Leonardo Boff, Holy Trinity, Perfect Community).    

 

Here is the core of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.  Community, consensus, free give and take and mutual service. 

 

Henri Nouwen says that at the end of each day there are basic questions that we must ask ourselves to see whether we are following Jesus.  They for me also tell us whether we are living the theology of the Trinity: 

 

“Did I offer peace today?  Did I bring a smile to someone’s face?  Did I say words of healing?  Did I let go of my anger and resentment?  Did I forgive?  Did I love?  These are the real questions.” 

 

In the name of Christ,  Amen.

 

 

 

Other No More (Pentecost C)

 

“‘Other’ No More”
Feast of Pentecost (Whitsunday); Year C
7 June 2025
Homily
Emmanuel Parish Church, Coos Bay Oregon

The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson

Acts 2:1-21; Psalm 104:25-35, 37; Romans 8:14-17 ; John 14:8-17, (25-27)

God, take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

 News that the President has, over the objections of the governor of California, has called out the national guard to suppress civil unrest in Latino majority areas of Los Angeles, brought to mind to me, on this Pentecost Sunday, a couple of incidents from my youth.  I was raised in Moses Lake, an agricultural town in Eastern Washington, where a third of our population was Hispanic, mainly seasonal agricultural laborers.  Once, in junior high, I was in the locker room with two of my classmates, who were both speaking Spanish to each other.  I resented it.  I thought they were talking about me (and they may well have been, since my resentment was leaking even before they seemed to turn their attention to me).  With all the entitlement of a thirteen year old white boy growing up in the 50s, I said, “You’re in America.  Why don’t you speak English?”  The older one, somewhat physically intimidating to me, looked at me, and said in absolutely clear English.  Most of the West of the US used to be Mexico.  Why don’t you speak Spanish?”  And then he smiled. I later learned his name, Ronnie Medrano, and we actually became good friends.   

 

A couple of years later, I was working at the city swimming pool as a lifeguard.  There was a group of sketchy looking Mexican teenagers sitting on the bleachers outside the pool fence, looking at the scantily clad white girls who were swimming.  I again let my resentment leak, and this time, the objects of my resentment responded physically:  they started tossing hard pine cones at me.  When one that hit my head really hurt, I went in to the guard station and came out with a pith helmet on to protect my head.  The sight was so amusing, they boys broke into laughter, stopped the rain of pinecones, and spent the rest of the evening quietly enjoying the view. 

 

I was raised in a church that taught that God’s chosen people, the church, was like the Isra’elites of old:  they needed to keep their lineage pure, not intermarry or even mix much with pagan foreigners.  In fact, foreigners were seen as threatening.  I think that is why I had that resentment in the first place.  The idea is part and parcel of the Christian nationalism that is behind many of the current regime’s policies that have caused such turmoil.  But this fear or even contempt of the foreign is not Christian at all, as we will see in today’s scriptures. 

 

Today is Whitsunday or Pentecost, and all our scriptures are about the Spirit in one way or another. 

 

The Acts reading tells of the outpouring of the spirit on the Day of Pentecost.  So what’s Pentecost?  It is the feast of Shavuot, or Weeks, fifty days after the Feast of Passover (“Pentecost” is Greek for “50”).  It was a festival of the first fruits, where the very earliest produce of the agricultural year was becoming available.  In those days, you stored food in the winter by drying, salting, or smoking it, and saving roots and cabbages in cool cellars.  By early spring, your larder was pretty low, and fresh fruits and vegetables only a vague memory. So the earliest produce of spring signaled that hardship was over, and prodigal summer was arriving soon. On Shavuot, the first produce was given back to God in thanks, and then you held a big party with fresh produce, not dried and stored food.  

 

Elsewhere, Paul uses this very image—first fruits—to describe the Spirit.  Paul sees the world in which we live both as an early spring on the verge of a rich summer, or a woman in labor, suffering great pain in hope of a new life being delivered.  The spirit is a sign that the baby will be born, that produce will come.  The Spirit is like the first fruits in the spring, after our larders have run bare:  it is a sign of better things to come, of more and more life and abundance. Paul also calls the spirit “an anointing, an authenticating seal, a first installment” (2 Cor 1: 20-22): 4-7), and in today’s epistle, an “adoption” by God that makes us heirs. 

 

Paul’s letters tell us that early Christians experienced the Spirit in community by some kind of ecstatic utterance that he calls at one point “tongues of angels,” vocalizations that absent someone else to interpret them were meaningless (1 Cor. 13:1; 14:6-19).   It was the fact that this gift was equally shared by Jewish and Gentile Christians alike, regardless of their conformity to Jewish Law, that led the early Church to accept Gentiles as full members without insisting that they become Jews first (Galatians 2:14; Acts 1-15).

 

In the Gospel of John, the Spirit comes upon the disciples on the evening of Easter Sunday in that upper room with closed doors: when Jesus appears, he breathes on the disciples and says “receive the Holy Spirit.” 

 

But Luke, as part of his declared purpose in the Gospel and Acts of setting down in “a reasonable order” Christ and the apostles’ ministry, somewhat artificially places the coming of the Spirit ten days after the ascension of the resurrected Jesus at the end of his forty-day minister.  And what day was that?  Pentecost, Shavuot, the day of first fruits and early payment of God’s promises. 

      

Luke-Acts recasts the ecstatic speaking in angelic tongues as the miraculous speaking of other people’s languages, breaking down linguistic and cultural barriers. And this is where we learn the error of so-called Christian nationalism. 

 

In Book of Genesis, there is an ancient folk myth that tries to answer the question “Why are there so many different languages and cultures?”  The story of the Tower of Babel, however, is much more an example of bigotry, linguistic division, and tribalism than it is a real explanation or remedy of the toxic diversity it seeks to explain.  Told from the point of view of a nomadic Hebrew living in the land of Canaan, itis loaded with ridicule and slurs against urban Mesopotamians living in Babylon, or Babel as the city was known in Hebrew.  A ziggurat, or temple tower, is caricatured as an arrogant effort to displace God.  The xenophobia buried in the story becomes clear with the pun of its good-old-boy humor punch line.  God decides to destroy the tower and disperse the urbanites by confusing their language.  The Hebrew word for confuse is close to the Hebrew name for the city. Thus the moral of this “Just So” story is this: “That is why they called the City Babylon, because God caused them to ‘babble on’ to each other!”  

 

The real cause of cultural and linguistic division is far deeper and intractable than this myth imagines.  It is rooted in the way our brains are hard-wired.  Researchers on the development of the brain in early childhood have recognized that a chief element of our becoming able to make distinctions in interpreting faces, their expressions, and the sounds they make (language) is the brain’s tendency early on to block out less-frequently-encountered faces or language as “other,” and not worthy of the same amount of effort.   Only thus is the brain able to refine and tune the complicated business of understanding verbal and non-verbal cues in communication.  Six-month-old children of whatever culture or race tend to react more attentively and discriminatingly to faces of the colors, shapes, and setting the children are most exposed to, while bracketing out the less familiar, and tending to give them the cold shoulder.   When a person of European-extraction says “all Asians look alike to me,” we might think that this is just an artifact of bigotry.  But there is an actual neurological reason behind such statements: our brains tend to process faces of types with which we are less familiar generically and not individually.  Living in China and in Africa, I have heard friends in both places admit with a bit of embarrassment, “All you whites tend to look the same to me.”   

 

Similarly, the sounds, rhythms, and accents of the languages used regularly in the home pique the child’s interest, as shown in elevated brain-wave activity.  The sounds and rhythms of other languages increasingly are treated as so much meaningless noise by 3- to 12-month-old brains.  Where there is some brain defect that interferes with this normal process and the young brain is unable to filter and block such sounds out as ‘foreign’, the child’s ability to learn its mother language is usually seriously damaged or destroyed.

 

Luke’s casting of the coming of the spirit as the undoing of Babel tells us much we need to know about “the Spirit.”  And it isn’t that the Spirit endorses racism under the guise of “keeping God’s chosen people pure.”  Living in the Spirit means engaging with the new, the foreign, the strange, the ‘other.’  It means getting to know strange faces and making them familiar enough that they no longer all look alike.  It is putting aside the fear that is the foundation of all tribalism, sectarianism, faction, and distaste for the new, the strange.  It is the way God leads us to give an affirming and thankful “yes” to life in all its variety and glory, and put away any stingy and defensive “no.”

  

Tribalism, chauvinism, partisanship, racism, and jingoism come from fear, self-seeking, and that part of us that resists God.   Paul urges us, in contrast, “Live by the Spirit.  … [in] love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Gal 5:16-23). The promise if we do so, is great: God’s power, working in us, will “do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine” (Eph 3:20-21). 

 

This week, I want each of us to reflect on areas where we are saying “no” to the foreign, to the strange, whether this is because of national origin, race, or language, or because they differ from you in their hopes for society.  Let’s ask ourselves seriously whether this “No” is really what God has in mind.  Reach out. Maybe try harder with that new language on Rosetta Stone. Build bridges, not walls.  Break down barriers, and try to understand people who puzzle us. And as relationship builds, explain your own strangeness to them.   Let us pray for the Spirit to remove from us undue fear, and to create in us a new heart, and empower us to say “yes,” and “welcome.”  

 

In the name of Christ, Amen.

 

 

As We are One (Easter 7C)

 

As We Are One (Easter 7C)

Homily delivered at Emmanuel Episcopal Parish, Coos Bay, Oregon

Sunday June 1, 2025 9:00 a.m. Sung Holy Eucharist

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Acts 16:16-34; Rev 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21; John 17:20-26; Psa 97

 

God, take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

It’s really good to be here with you today.  I want to thank Sister Patti for asking me to do supply here throughout the summer and her sabbatical.   

 

When I first moved to China, I took a year of language courses and cultural studies.  We learned that Chinese culture values the group rather than the individual, as we do here in the West.  That Chinese culture is all about harmony and order, not pursuit of personal interest.  But when I arrived in China, the first time I saw the traffic patterns, I was appalled:  chaos, every man for himself, and an apparent total disregard for even their own rules of the road.  And line behavior!  Or rather crowd scrumming behavior before a ticket booth:  there were no lines to speak of.  I wondered, “Where is the harmony?  Where is the valuing of group over self?  I realized quickly that, for good or for ill, there were certain patterns of behavior behind such unfair and prejudicial stereotypes in the West as “a Chinese fire drill.” 

 

The next time I was in a class where “Chinese culture” was discussed, I mentioned the contrast to my teacher, who also was stressing the relatively heavier weight Chinese philosophers and moral teachers put on community, group, and harmony than their Western counterparts.   The teacher was wise.  He resolved my conflict for me.   “You must remember,” he said, “that a culture often desires most what its people lack the most.   We Chinese value and talk about harmony and community so much because at heart we are such radical individualists, selfish for ourselves or our little group (family, village, schoolmates).  You Americans talk about community values too—in some ways, Americans and Chinese are very much alike, despite the differences in history, language, and political systems.  That’s why, I think it is so easy for Americans and Chinese to become friends.” 

 

Think about it:  we Americans talk and talk about family values, but have such a high divorce rate and rates of infidelity.  We talk and talk about individual freedoms and liberty in a setting where we regularly use foreign policy and military power to force our ways on others, and where domestically we tend to be creatures of predictable herd behavior. Those who support gun rights the most tend to people who feel the most fear and insecurity in their own lives.  Those who are most worked up about imposing their codes of sexual morality on others sometimes seem to be the ones most conflicted about their own sexual drives. 

 

Now we Christians talk a lot about unity.  About being one.  About charity and love in community.  But from the beginning, we have been a fractious lot, excommunicating and anathematizing others because they disagree with us on all sorts of things, but mainly esoteric points of abstract doctrine.  We read plenty of passages in the New Testament, like today’s Gospel, about being one, about being unified and loving.  But even in the New Testament are dozens of examples of serious division, infighting, schism, and mutual exclusion within the larger Christian community. 

 

We tend to value and talk about the things we feel the most need for.  But talking about unity and love doesn’t create it.  Often, appealing to the need for Christian love ends up being a none-too-veiled effort to force someone into submission.  You know the line “we need to love each other, to be one: so give up on your wayward ways or wrong opinions, your heresy, and join us in one big happy loving Christian family.”  Such appeals to unity, while common, are to my mind, nothing more than weaponizing Jesus, turning the Gospel of Peace into a club with which to beat others into submission to us. 

 

So how do we avoid the trap of talking peace while actually are waging war? 

 

I think part of it here is found in being honest about what behaviors and attitudes build unity and mutual love and which mimic unity and love while actually undermining their achievement. 

 

First, is a commitment to each other.  In the words of the great adventure novel, The Three Musketeers, we must be all for one and one for all.   We together must take to heart the needs and aspirations of each of us.  But each of us must be willing to sacrifice our own comfort and priorities for the common good. 

 

Second, we need to invest in the relationship.  That means taking time to join in common work, service, and ministry.  It means putting such time commitments on a relatively high priority.  It means sacrificing our wealth and resources for the joint ministries and the ministries of those with whom we are in relationship.  Remember that Jesus said, where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. 

 

Third, we need to remember the importance of honesty, tempered with compassion, in all relationships.  We need to learn to “fight fair.”  If someone offends us, whether personally or on a matter of principle, we need to show that person the dignity and respect of telling them.  Not in accusatory, passion-enflaming words, but with “I” statements:  “I feel  (give emotion) when you (state the behavior, not some kind of attribute or way of being) because (explain why the behavior provokes the feeling you have, again, in non accusatory language).”   We need to be honest and talk to each other, and take responsibility for our own feelings and opinions.  No manipulation through third parties or anonymous “some people are saying.”  The key here is not letting things get bottled up, piling deeper and deeper until they explode in a horrible scene of mutual accusation and rejection.

 

Fourth, remember that we are all in this together.  It never should be about me versus you or us versus them.  This is the idea that lies behind the practice of compassion that prevents honesty from becoming brutal manipulation. 

 

Fifth, listen to the other person’s viewpoint and experience.  Don’t reject them out of hand.  Embrace diversity, even diversity on important things, as valuable.  Don’t let your own experience and struggles with something blind you to the person in front of you.    When Jesus says that way to salvation is narrow and the gate to it hard to pass through, he is not restricting salvation to the very few elite.  He is saying we cannot move forward and make progress in the Spirit without getting rid of the baggage that burdens us down and makes it hard to get through the door. 

 

I think that in community life, in any relationship, it is important to keep saying “I’m not giving up on you yet!”  And “I hope you’re not giving up on me yet!”  An open heart and mind is the way forward, not a heart and mind that says “I know what’s what, and that settles it!” 

 

Again, the habits of being united in charity and love are 1) commit to each other, 2) invest time and money to build the relationship 3) be honest in differences and learn to “fight fair,”  4) talk and think in terms of us not you and me, and 5) embrace diversity and listen to each other.  

 

One for all, and all for one.  Let’s listen to and heed what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”  Rather than just talking a good game, let’s act and actually follow Jesus.  In the face of all the rotten and scary things we are seeing, I pray that each of us can do something—even if it’s small—to help bring the Reign of God closer.  Let us remember that to be one as the Father and the Son are one, we need to remember the rules of the road for basic relationship and community. 

 

In the name of God, Amen

 

 

One for all, and all for one.  To help us remember this, as you leave the Church today there will be baskets of Three Musketeer bars (and some sugar free equivalents for those with sugar issues).  I am told that they got their brand  because originally they were packaged large, with two scores across each of them.  You were supposed to share them with two friends, like the Three Musketeers.   These mini bars here today are to help us remember that, of we are to become one as the Father and the Son are one, we need to remember the rules of the road for building good basic relationships and community.