Trinity Sunday 2005
The Rev. Melissa M. Skelton
From a poem by D.H. Lawrence:
“What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.
No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.”
“Trouble,” I was always told, “comes in threes.” Stub a toe and you’re sure to hit your head and then follow this up by slamming a door on your finger. Someone close to you dies and two more people need to begin to get their affairs in order. And to give a third example, get a divorce and not only do your finances go belly up, your health begins to fail.
Yes—trouble comes in threes so that our misery may be complete, our dire predictions fulfilled, so that we may know the depth of gloom that only three bad things can bring.
Of course, I’m joking on one level, but on another level, I’m not. For there’s an underlying view of the world in this homespun saying, a kind of bad-to-worse, waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop theology that shapes how we see life and affects what we think is possible.
A bit of this kind of philosophy might have been the backdrop for what is called the “Old Testament” Trinity icon you see on your bulletin for today, for these are the three strangers, the three angels, who arrived at Abraham and Sarah’s door long after they had given up on the promise of a son years ago, the two of them gray and still rattling around in that big tent of theirs all by themselves.
It was these three mysterious and strange angels whom Abraham and Sarah invited to table, strangers who came with the jolting announcement of Sarah’s impending and preposterous pregnancy that became the image that Russian painter Adrei Rublev drew on for his now famous 14th century image of the Trinity.
Today is Trinity Sunday—a day typically avoided by preachers in that the challenge is to describe the mystery of the Christian God, a God who we are told comes to us in threes. Preaching on Trinity Sunday is a daunting task fraught with (of course) thee dangers: the danger of getting lost in church history, the danger of getting lost in abstract concepts of God, and the danger of getting lost in only talking about God and forgetting about what God cares about—us, our lives, this world.
And so let’s resist the temptation to talk much about the Council of Nicea and the heresies of the early church; let’s abandon the abstract symbolism of triangles or intersecting circles; and let’s turn our backs on discussions of homoousia and perichoresis, both arcane terms used to describe the inner life of the Trinity.
For today is Trinity Sunday, a time of celebration before entering the long series of weeks the church calls “Ordinary Time,” a time to celebrate God’s plentitude and persistence--three persons in one God, triumphing over trouble that comes in threes, trumping it all so that our joy may be complete. Three persons in one God knocking at our door like mysterious and strange angels, and outlasting our ability to ignore that knocking, to hide from it or to get away.
And these are some of the places where our Trinitarian God is knocking on our door
In creation itself—beautiful, mysterious, seemingly inexhaustible yet somehow vulnerable, with the power to restore us, to remind us both of our small size and our immense responsibility. When we are in nature and are gripped by a beauty and mystery that we did not create, we cannot own, but we somehow must be a part of preserving, that is the Trinity knocking on our door.
In human community—the web of relationships we live and move in and from which we draw our humanity. People who have loved us and given their lives for us—their time, attention, energy, money. People who need us to give our lives to them. When we are in human community and graciously receive or are asked to pour out our lives for another, that is the Trinity knocking on our door.
And finally, in the experience of a kind of intangible power, unexpected dynamic energy that produces surprising results in community. When we are with others we love and trust and together experience a power to do things that goes beyond the people in the room, when we want to be a part of creating a community where that experience can happen again, that is the Trinity knocking on our door.
God in creation, God in the receiving and giving of sacrificial life in human community, God in unexplainable and dynamic power—all these are the Trinity knocking on our door. And at every moment, we have a choice about whether to admit the God who knocks there or to keep the door closed.
What will you and I do when we hear that knocking? Will we pretend we’re not at home, out of either dread or embarrassment, like when the Jehovah’s Witnesses come to call? Will we refuse to open the door because it’s not convenient? Or will we turn away because we’re not sure we’re worthy to have these three come into our untidy houses and our unfinished lives—where something always seems to be under construction, needing to be fixed or needing to be cleaned up.
I will never forget as long as I live the day my things arrived in Chicago when I moved there to enter business school and as it turned out, ended up finishing seminary as well. I was by myself for the first time in 10 years, and was running away from the church. I was unpacking boxes and crying, and I was wondering what the heck I had been thinking to do such an incredibly stupid thing as to enroll in business school, such an incredibly stupid, scary and expensive thing. It was August, and I was in a small student apartment without air conditioning in a city where I knew almost no one. And a knock came at the door.
I did not want to see anyone, did not feel ready to receive anyone. But after hesitating, after seriously considering pretending I wasn’t home, I did open the door and there standing at the threshold was Sam Portaro, the Episcopal Chaplain at the University of Chicago, someone I had only met briefly on a visit out to the school a month or so before. Sam Portaro, one of the few people I knew in Chicago, with a pirate smile on his face, holding a picnic basket in his hand.
And we did share that meal—red wine, great cheese and Italian salami on good crusty bread, all on a table cloth spread on the bare linoleum floor of a student apartment. But what was even better than the food was the conversation that caught me up in the new life, the new community that Chicago and Hyde Park would be for me.
The three angels, the three strangers, that are knocking on the door of our lives and, I might add, on the door of this parish, do not come, as the poet says, to do us harm or only to bring us trouble. They come to catch us up in the divine life of God, a life of extravagant and persistent love: a Trinitarian life of creativity, humanity and dynamic energy.
And, yes, they always come to us in our un-readiness, to lives that have stalled out or on the run. They come to us in our untidy lives, to lives in need of repair.
“What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.
No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.”
