We Belong Together

In the name of the triune God in whose image we are made:

God our Father, Jesus our Brother, the Holy Spirit our Mother.  Amen.

Today is Trinity Sunday.  Let’s be honest.  What relevance or interest could that possibly hold for us? Pentecost was last week and it was fiery, beautiful, incredible; the wind of the Holy Spirit moving through a group of people and enabling people to speak about God’s great reconciling work in other languages. Pentecost seems like the fitting peak of the liturgical year: God empowering the bunch of cowering disciples, setting them on fire with love and the capacity to transform the world.  But Pentecost ISN’T the peak of the liturgical year: Trinity Sunday is.  Why? Many of us want to yawn and turn on Netflix when we hear the word “trinity.” It conjures old theological mathematical equations like three in one or one in three, three persons, one nature, that sort of stuff that didn’t make sense to us when we were kids and still doesn’t have any meaning for us. 

But the truth is that Trinity Sunday has the capacity to transform our notion of reality itself—to rip away veils of illusion and allow us to see God, ourselves, and one another the way we really are.  To get us to that point I want to invite you to do a short exercise. Close your eyes.  Now imagine yourself at some public place you go to at least sort of regularly.  It might be the grocery store, or the gas station, or the bus stop, the mall, or even church—wherever.   In your imagination, look around at all the various people around you.  Imagine them in detail.  Who are they? How old are they? What do you notice about them? 

Now do something else.  Ask yourself this: do I consider myself to be one of them, or different from them? Are we kin? Are we members of the same tribe? Are there some people I feel connected to, and other people I feel alienated from?  Go even deeper and ask yourself: do we belong together?

This might seem like an odd exercise, but I’m having us do it together because I want to point out that even without us realizing it, our culture has conditioned us to think of ourselves as isolated individuals among other isolated individuals.  We are often moving away from and against other people—people we see as intrinsically “other”—not part of us—not part of who we are.

The meaning of Trinity Sunday is to point out that God is triune – God is communal – and that since we are made in the image of the communal God, and we are made to be part of one another. We belong together.  God does not exist as a monad, an isolated individual up in the sky somewhere, but an endlessly dancing and interacting community of persons, so the DNA of reality is communal and interactive.  God is constantly dancing and moving toward and with Godself and toward us.  This is an identity issue.  Just as God is constantly moving toward and with us, we are made in God’s image – made to move toward and with other people, not away from and against other people.  A way to put this is to say that we belong together. To say that we belong together is the truest thing we can possibly say about ourselves, no matter who we are, because we are made in the image of the triune God. 

SO what if we literally could stop thinking of ourselves as self-contained individuals, separated from others by competition for scarce resources, but creatures made for God and for one another, made to be together, to do life together, to belong together?  We belong together.  How do you feel when I say that? Does that statement elicit joy in you? Fear? How do you react to the notion that we belong together? What might God be inviting in us by considering that we belong together?

All of us will have different ways of living out this reality.  But let me tell you a story of one way this has been made manifest in my own life as I have sincerely tried to practice this paradigm shift represented by the word “trinity.”  Many of you know that for more than a year now, I have gone at least once a week to spend time with young adults experiencing homelessness in Minneapolis, at a day service center called Youthlink.  At first when I started going to Youthlink, honestly I felt like an idiot. There I was, a middle aged, middle class white woman, trying to get young adults with their jeans around their thighs to open up and talk to me.

Early on I noticed a young man named London.  He always sat by himself, and he usually looked like he was about to fall asleep.  He seemed more than usually shut down—it was especially hard for me to connect with him.  So I started trying to figure out strategies for getting to know him. You know when you are really trying too hard? That’s what I was doing.  Anyway one day I asked him for music recommendations—songs I could run to.  He just looked back at me and paused. Then he said, “Ma’am, can I have a dollar?”

What? I was totally floored that this was his response to me. There we were in the middle of Youthlink, which has every conceivable service and good—so I started stuttering to London about what did he need? If he needed food there it was in the kitchen. If he needed laundry I could get him some laundry soap and open the laundry room for him. If he needed clothes I could take him downstairs to the clothing closet. If he needed a bus token I could take him to the front desk. All of which he already knew, of course.

After I reflected on that situation what I came to understand is that both London and I were stuck seeing each other in terms of our stereotypes of each other: I saw him as a young homeless black man who needed my help, and he saw me as a bleeding heart liberal white woman who was likely to give him a dollar.  So really London’s response to me cut to the chase. And it stung.

But London gave me an incredible gift. He gave me the gift of showing me how stuck I was in the way I was looking at him.  I realized that as long as I was focusing on the labels of identity that were divisive – like white woman, middle aged, etc. –that I would never be able to connect with London or any of the other youths at youthlink simply as human beings.

So I started practicing a Trinitarian model of reality.  I started walking through the door at youthlink and reminding myself what I’m trying to show all of you today: we belong together.  It is a reality. It is the truth.  And things started shifting for me at Youthlink.

Today London and I have a great relationship.  Instead of being stuck in our labels with each other we actually know each other.  We have been learning to dance toward and with each other, instead of away from and against one another.  We just know each other as human beings.  We haven’t become each other—we stay ourselves—we haven’t lost all boundaries and merged—but we have encountered one another authentically, and been transformed as a result. We belong together—with all the messy, complicated, sometimes very difficult, but ultimately life-giving and generative reality that implies.

We belong together.  How do you react to that?  What about the people who have hurt you? What about people who are genuinely offensive? What about people who want nothing to do with you?  Belonging together is not easy. It doesn’t mean we lose our boundaries and merge into each other and the ocean of consciousness. It does mean we can sustain long-term encounters with one another that are based, not on fear, but on trust in the love and transforming power of God.  The reason Trinity Sunday follows everything else in the liturgical year—advent, epiphany, lent, easter, Pentecost – is that we need the whole reality of God’s movement toward and with us to sustain the possibility of moving toward and with each other.  When we were baptized in the name of the triune God—father, Son and Holy Spirit—we metaphorically died with Christ to the old way, the old way of being curved in on ourselves, and we were born for freedom—the freedom of being able to have kinship with everything that exists, even people who are very, very different from us.  This is possible, not even because we were made for this, but because the grace of God liberates us to love.

When in the last month have you felt you really belonged with people?  When have you been able to move toward and with others, instead of away from and against them?  When have you felt knit together with the fabric of creation?  This is sometimes so far from our normal reality that we need to take baby steps in this direction.  So I want to invite all of you to a simple practice.  I invite you to walk around your world, repeating to yourself, “We belong together” with every single person that you see.  Then notice all the feelings and thoughts that come up in you as a result. You might experience joy sometimes; you might also experience resistance, or even disgust, or anger, or shame, or any number of other responses. That’s OK; you are learning about all the barriers to reconciliation that exist within you and because of the broken ways we have treated ourselves and other people. Then invite God to heal those barriers within you—open yourself to the power of God to transform you, so that you become truly able to love.

If you keep practicing this—grounded in the experience of the Triune and communal God most fully revealed to us in Jesus—you will notice that God begins to shift the way you operate in your life.  In fact you will notice that God begins to invite you to make some changes in the way that you think, in the way that you behave.  That’s OK too.  Following the way of Jesus is a life-long and ultimately radical commitment: it does call us to change—to be freed from being curved in on ourselves, so that we can truly love God, ourselves and our neighbors.  Amen.