Trinity Monday
Today’s assigned readings:
Deuteronomy 11:13-19, 2 Corinthians 5:11-6:2, Luke 17:1-10
So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.
2 Corinthians 5:17-19
Over the last 25 years two very important teachers in my live have pointed, indirectly, at these verses in Paul and I think, today, I’m going to sit down and acknowledge those teachers.
When I first met Minka Sprague in 1983, she was a Fellow at General Seminary in NYC. She was teaching at a regional Episcopal youth conference. I was a freshman in college. Years later she said that she and two priests had conspired to get me out of the closet that weekend (You open the door, you grab both hands and I’ll push from behind…) but I don’t remember being any more or less out at the end of that time. What I *Do* remember is Minka teaching on the New Creation which she said began at the Cross and extended forward. All things had changed.
She drew a line bisected with a cross:
Even as she made the line she underscored that some, by their free choice and/or ignorance could still live in the Old Creation. We see some of the Old Creation right there in the first reading, “If you will only heed his every commandment.” But we know the New Creation has only the command to Love. We debate the common meaning of that over and over - Love. (Well, clearly it means I can judge those who are different from me because I must love them into submission with my verbal or metal sword!)
She did do a list, in the middle of the weekend, drawing the difference between life in the Old Creation and Life in the New Creation. The biggest one, verbatim in my head after 25 years:
In the Old Creation we say no unless there is a good reason to say yes. In the New Creation we say yes unless there is a good reason to say no.
Then in my time at St Gregory’s Church in San Francisco, Donald Schell represented these verse to me as the fullness of the Gospel: “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.”
The world. Not just some of us. Not even just those of us who so chose. The world - reconciled to God, with their trespasses not counted against them. And our job is to be ministers of reconciliation.
How did we get there? Paul says, “we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died.”
And so we - all of us - are to be Ministers of reconciliation…
As I write I’m listening to a recording of a Sufi chant - repeating over and over, there is no God but God… La ilaha illa-llah, repeated over and over (minus the part about “his prophet” which some Muslim mystics view as a later, unneeded and divisive addition). It’s a chant all of us can agree to: there is no god but God. It’s chanted very beautifully, over and over and in growing harmonies woven in and out, filling the musical space with spirit until suddenly about 16 minutes in, WHAM! there is a beat and then a rhythm, and it’s all whirling in joy claiming God’s greatness and our love for God.
In this week of Trinity Sunday, the celebration of the Divine Communion of Love into which we have been reconciled, how do we dance in this New Creation?