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Sermon May 27, 2018
The Rev. Rebecca S. Myers, LSW
The Church of the Nativity and St. Stephen’s
First Sunday After Pentecost – Trinity Sunday
//lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BTrinity_RCL.html
And the Catholic Faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity,
neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance.
For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost.
But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one, the Glory
equal, the Majesty co-eternal.
The Creed of Athanasius p. 864, Book of Common Prayer
Please be seated
I’m sure many of you heard Presiding Bishop Michael Curry’s sermon at the royal wedding. This past week he flooded the airwaves. He was on all of the major network morning shows. Maybe you even saw him do the weather on The Today Show. He was on The View, and TMZ, and Inside Edition. His sermon was the most tweeted part of the royal wedding. He was even parodied on Saturday Night Live. In response to how long the sermon was, during the parody, the actor playing Bishop Curry responded:
Oh, but that’s nonsense. They told me I had five minutes, but the Good Lord multiplied it into a cool sixteen.
The sermon was under 14 minutes, by the way.
One of the things that Bishop Curry said in many of the interviews this past week was that two people fell in love and everyone showed up and for just that moment in time, love united everyone. It is estimated six billion people watched the wedding! Six billion people all around the world were united in their interest in this wedding. For just that couple of hours, we were all together and most of us united and happy with this testimony of love.
In some ways, I believe what we witnessed or participated in, even, is a reflection of the Trinity. As referenced in The Creed of Athanasius, which is on page 864 in the Book of Common Prayer, “we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity.” Some say the Trinity is unity in diversity.
Our baptismal covenant, found on pg. 293 in The Book of Common Prayer, gives us a guide for how to live this Trinitarian life…for how to be united with the God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit and with each other in community.
We continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers. We pray together each time we gather. We pray in our homes and in our places of work. We have great times of fellowship in our meals together, breakfasts and in our Eucharists. We learn new things together.
We support each other in resisting evil. We examine ourselves and repent when we know we have done wrong. Some things are easy to determine; others, we can only see after a time or with more information. Yet, we do know how to repent and in our services, we ask forgiveness, even for those things we cannot specifically name.
By our everyday living, we proclaim the Good News of God in Christ. We live by different rules. For instance, we give generously and in ways that others may find ridiculous. We gather together as a community to pray and worship, often on a Sunday morning like today. That seems more and more countercultural.
And imagine how we see Christ’s face in everyone we meet! Well, maybe not everyone right away, yet we do understand that Christ is in all persons, whether they realize it or not. We serve that Christ. We strive to love our neighbor and to love ourselves.
And we know that the Trinity is about love and love requires justice and peace among all people. We know love requires respect for the dignity of every human being.
When each one of us hears this covenant and renews this covenant, which we do about four times a year, we may understand it in different ways. We may embody it in different ways. Yet, we are united in living it out as best as we can.
We are not all the same when we get down to the details of how we live our lives. We don’t always understand Jesus in the same exact ways. We don’t all hear the Holy Spirit in the same ways. Yet we are united when we gather as The Church of the Nativity and St. Stephen’s.
Amen
