Since 2018, campus ministry at The Belfry has been formally known as Reconciling in Christ, which is a program in the ELCA where congregations and communities go through a series of conversations about welcome, and self-identify as a place where historically marginalized and minoritized people are invited to participate fully and authentically. It began specifically as a way to designate a community as open and affirming of LGBT folks, because for decades in our tradition, the national policy was that queer people could not be full members of the Body of Christ. That policy, that stance, is a sin.
Our present policy in the ELCA is that queer people can be full members of the Body of Christ—how kind of us to allow you—but that communities who do not agree or are not fully on board are free to remain LGBT-free. The term we use to describe such people and communities is an exercise of “bound conscience” meaning that they believe it is a sin to be queer, and cannot support their queer siblings. We’ve decided to “agree to disagree” as a denomination, leaving our queer siblings between a rock and hard place.
Why have we done this? Well, mostly because we lost thousands of members and millions of dollars even allowing for this arrangement, and we can’t comprehend losing even more people if we took a firm theological stand. So we don’t. Queer folks are expected to suss out their own safety in every interaction they have with new congregations, communities, colleagues, neighbors. We apologize for the ways in which we include people and we carry on.
This is bad and wrong. This is not how God calls us to be in relationship. This past Sunday, the scripture for which we transfer to today, was the church’s observance of Trinity Sunday, a day dedicated to our favorite confusing Christian paradox. God the three in one, one in three. We name God the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. We name God the Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer. God the Parent, the Liberator, the Sanctifier. We acknowledge that God is these many things and that God is one thing.
Trinitarian monotheism is a critical component of our Lutheran and Episcopal Christian theological heritage. Councils have been called, creeds have been written, heretics have been burned, and wars have been fought over this and other doctrines of our church. You may be a person who is very concerned with orthodoxy—and you are not alone—and so you are committed to understanding the sticking point of the Son being “begotten, not made, of one being with the father” in the words of our Nicene Creed. Or perhaps you are drawn to the Gospel According to John, in which it is written than “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the word was God” (John 1:1).
The gospel reading for today is a pretty famous exchange from John’s gospel between Jesus and a pharisee named Nicodemus. He comes to see Jesus under cover of night, asking his burning questions. I love Nicodemus for this.
I can just imagine that he has been lying awake at night for days. He has heard that this man, Jesus, is called the Son of God; he has heard him declare forgiveness of sins; he has heard him proclaim freedom from the systems that oppress. Nicodemus has probably tossed and turned, wondering how this could be.
As a Pharisee, it’s his job to know everything there is to know about God and about God’s relationship to the Jewish people, and how they are to be in relationship with one another. Everything that Jesus says throws him for a loop, because it challenges his knowledge and his assumptions. Jesus speaks of new ways of being children of God.
As usual, Jesus does not simply say yes or no, but says, instead, that the truth of the matter is that in order to truly experience the beloved community of God, one has to go through spiritual transformation. Nicodemus doesn’t know what to do with this, either, because he takes Jesus literally, assuming he needs to be re-born, which even in the first century, they understood could not be done. Three times, Nicodemus speaks to Jesus in this encounter, and all three times, he focuses on the logical possibility of explaining what God is doing, and all three times, he gets more confused. And he’s not alone.
You may have hoped that I was going to give you a hard and fast way to fully understand the trinity. I am not. Several years ago, a pastor of mine reminded me that the Holy Trinity is not merely a complex theological concept to be comprehended, but a relational reality to be lived. God-for-us, God-with-us, God-in-us.
It is awesome—and by that I mean the slang of our dear California and the literal inspiring of awe—that God relates to us in these varied ways. God created this universe and everything in it. God came among us, their beloved creation, as one of us. God continues to move through us and inspire us.
We need not be able to explain why or how this is so in order to respond to it.
There’s a famous old diagram of the Trinity that attempts to express how it is possible that God is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but also that the Father is not the Son, and the Son is not the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father. They are all of one being, but they are not the same.
This first one is Latin, which does not make it easier for any of us to understand. But I just wanted to show you the old school creepy three-faced Jesus that somebody thought was a good idea. Here it is in English.
That’s helpful, kind of. But theologian Kee Boem So says that “the Trinity is not an abstract doctrine but a practical reality with implications for Christian life.” Nicodemus came to Jesus hoping to understand who Jesus was, in order to assess those implications. Coming to believe that Jesus was the Son of God would mean radically transforming his life, his community, and his religious practice. The same is true for us! Recognizing the community built into the God who loves us—God the Creator, God the Redeemer, God the Sustainer—should lead us to build a community, too. If God is multi-faceted, and co-creative, we ought to be, too.
All of our church friends observed this on the last Sunday in May, but we are lucky enough to be here on the first Thursday in June, which is, of course, Pride Month. So we have the distinct privilege to call upon our queer ancestors, saints, siblings, and selves to show us the multiplicity of our God. It is queer—as in odd—to be the Body of Christ in the world. If we are truly living into the radical creativity of our triune God, we cannot be complete without the full spectrum of human relationship, connection, and love.
As Christians, our observance of Pride Month and our commitment to being a Reconciling in Christ community is not just a token “tolerance” or “we are all equal” or the backhanded “we are all sinners” and “hate the sin, love the sinner”. That’s not authentic relationship. We have to not only welcome but invite difference, affirm and celebrate queerness, and not demand assimilation but expect our own hearts and minds to be transformed. In whichever ways we find ourselves among the dominant demographic group, the majority, the “normative”, we must be willing to surrender that superiority and be changed by the liberating love of those who have been marginalized and minoritized.
We cannot say “come on in, your difference is cool, change it, though, to be more like us, but also your difference adds flavor to our sameness!” We must say first to ourselves, “I am prepared to change, I am prepared to struggle, I am prepared to learn, I am prepared to be transformed.” And then we can thank our siblings in Christ who trust us with their truth, their struggle, their authentic expression of their identity, and ask them to show us more of who God is.
That’s what authentic diversity provides us. That’s what radical hospitality cultivates. More ways of being human, more ways of meeting God. The trinity shows us that there is more than one way to express divinity, and that we must embrace complexity in order to live abundantly.
Long story long, you are a beloved child of God, as you are and as you are becoming. God has called you to this time and this place, and to whatever is next for you, in order that you might share the goodness of God’s specific creation as it lives in you. And that you might receive something similar from those with whom you are in community—not the same, but similar. Who you are, how you live, what you do, who you love, all of that is a gift from the God who loves you. We are blessed beyond measure when we are among more ways of being and more ways of meeting God.