Grace and peace to you from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Amen.
This young fella from the deep south, got a job at Macy’s in New York
decorating their windows at Christmas. He got Joseph, Mary, Jesus, the
angels and the shepherds all right, but into the front window he put three
manikins dressed in FDNY uniforms complete with a fire hose. Aghast, his
supervisor, a rather proper New Yorker said to him “What in the world were
you trying to do here?” He replied. “I couldn’t remember the details about
the guys you called the Magi, so I called up my Mom and she said ‘They were
three men comin’ from a “far.’”
Well, we’ve had our own “far” and we are all adjusting to its power to
destroy and its aftermath. No one ever expects a fire to happen to them, so
I suppose we are all in kind of uncharted emotional waters. Carl I were the
first ones on the scene and I remember feeling this terrible sense of
helplessness and anguish. Some situations, some experiences teach you the
meaning of a word. I think I now know existentially what the word
”horrified” means. Knowing what the church called Holy Communion means to
you too made seeing her smoking and burning such an awful experience. The
church is our “temple” it houses our experience of worship. It brings us
into contact with God and God’s rich and abundant grace. The church
building is an intensely powerful symbol of God’s living reality. The fact
that it could and did burn shocks and surprises us.
But look around.
Repeat after me. “This is the church, this is the steeple, open the doors
and see all the people.”
The body of Christ called “Holy Communion Lutheran in Fallston” is neither
charred, smoked nor burned. This body of Christ which is you and me
together is inflammable. We are together. We are unharmed. Our ministry
of worshipping God, seeking to understand God as much as we are able, our
quest to know God, our talking to God, our praying, and our hearing from
God, the preaching and the reading of scripture goes on. It goes on as I
speak and you listen. We are the inflammable body of Christ. We are not
hurt and this experience of disaster will ultimately only make us stronger
and richer in faith.
There is a children’s song we used to teach the children. It goes
I am the church.
You are the church.
We are the church together.
All who follow Jesus, all around the world,
Yes we’re the church together.
Word of our disaster spread very soon. Pastor Mitch, of Fallston
Presbyterian, came to offer us this house for our body’s worship while the
fire trucks were still there last Sunday night. We had seven such offers of
help because that is the blessing of being one with the body of Christ. You
are never alone. You are always a part of some thing greater than yourself.
St. Paul says it this way in the 8th chapter of Romans “for I am sure that
neither life, nor death, nor things present, nor things to come, neither
angles, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else will be able to separate us
from the love of God in Christ Jesus.”
Today is Trinity Sunday.
The Trinity’s reality is a mystery to us. It declares that God, the divine
reality of the creator of the universe, also includes a human being who is
just like us with feelings, a fleshly body, a mind, emotions and a heart
that shows affection.
In the Eastern Church, they draw pictures of the things they cannot
understand to try and explain them visually. They call these pictures
icons. This icon is from Russia and it depicts the Holy Trinity. It is a
picture of three people, angels, sitting around a table. Oddly enough they
are looking at a chalice of wine and bread…. the elements of Holy Communion.
Modern Theologians describe the Holy Trinity as a communion too – a
community of holy and earthly realities in an on-going conversations about
the affairs of our universe – which is God’s creation. Jesus of course is
in the center because he has the unique capacity to understand both human
and divine things because he has a foot in both worlds.
I am a big Star Trek fan. I used to love it when Spock, the half human,
half alien Vulcan would do his Vulcan mind meld to get into the head of
something or “someone” who couldn’t communicate for itself. Spock would put
his hands on the forehead of the other being and go into a trancelike state
and speak for the other being. In a way, that’s what the Trinity is about.
When God becomes human in Jesus, (he is both human and divine, born of the
Holy Spirit and of Mary) God talks to us like Spock speaks for others. We
get to know the ”mind” of God, the heart of God. God speaks to us, God
“mind melds” with us in Jesus.
Spooky, science fictional, yet in a sense that’s what the Christian faith
understands its Holy Trinity to be about. Jesus has put his hand in our
lives, our experience, our thoughts and feelings – so that we are intimately
known to the God whose mind melds with Him.
That is why today, Trinity Sunday, is filled with Good News. Because we
have this intimate link, this “mind meld” with God, God knows all that we
experience. God knows joy, God knows pain. We recently have had a dose of
pain, yet pain can help you grow. Jesus had to endure pain on the cross to
know all that we humans experience. Pain can help us to be more
compassionate. We have no idea how this fire and the pain it has caused us
is going to bring blessing to us. The people of New Orleans have had their
lives a sundered. It is hard to identify with their suffering from so far.
Yet now, people in the midst of disaster will hold a special place in our
heart because we will feel with them. Our experience of pain will nurture
our compassion.
Isn’t that ultimately what God is drawing us toward? Holy Trinity Sunday
is a vivid reminder that God is with us – in cancer, in snowstorms, in fire
that burns, and in every moment and time of our lives. That’s Good News
today and every day.
In Jesus’ Name,
Amen
Who We Are