May 15, 2008
Stigma
(Warning: Early on when I thought I knew the answers and was only searching for the questions, a sage mentor advised me that no self-respecting Anglican cleric ever preaches on Trinity Sunday, but schedules Sunday School graduation instead. No longer having a Sunday School handy to graduate, here’s some evidence to support his counsel. — LD)
Trinity Sunday
“It takes a mighty big stigma to beat a dogma.”
Dorothy Sayers said it. She was British. She was also a theologian, a mystery novelist, a poet, and a Dante scholar. So she knew, it’s safe to say, what she was talking about, whether I do or not.
She could have been talking about Trinity Sunday, the only time in the entire liturgical keeping of time that a dogma assumes front stage center and elbows all those majestic events like Christmas and Easter and Pentecost to the wings.
Preaching on Trinity Sunday makes me feel like the heart attack victim that called for a priest who, on arriving, moved the gathering crowd aside, knelt beside her, and asked, “Do you believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost?” With great effort, the stricken woman addressed those surrounding her, “Here I lay dying, and the Father is asking me riddles.”
Dogma, that’s doctrine with legs, seems always to be faith’s more or less futile attempt to make sense out of nonsense and come up with religion. Whereas faith, not unlike love (and they’re not all that different), is about as exposed a position as a person can take and with very little reason to support it. It’s like getting caught with your hand in life’s cookie jar. It makes you feel like you need some kind of excuse. Dogma, on the other hand, gets you out of hock and with an alibi.
I suppose it is not without purpose, then, that on this Sunday dedicated to a major piece of Christianity’s hard drive, there is appointed in the propers that grand and eloquent story from Genesis to wrap a security blanket around the whole idea (Gen 1.1-2.3). It reminds us that we are put here to mind God’s creation, and as Frederick Buechner has eloquently said, to give the universe something to talk with, to give God someone to talk to, and to give us somebody to talk about.
And further, Genesis says that whatever we do about it, even to the making of enigmatic riddles, God thinks that it is good and makes us unconditionally in God’s image. Which is to say that we and all the rest of us — and them and it — are gently and lovingly shaped and brought forth with cause out of the unfathomable depths of God’s ingeniously fecund imagination.
And not as mere clones. But as beloved sharecroppers in whatever may be our capacity in all this exercise in fertility. And that, beloved, is very scary stuff. So scary, and yet, so enticing, that right off, we blew it out of the garden and have needed the safety belts and air bags of doctrine and dogma ever since.
Doctrine, dogma, whatever, serves us well. We want everybody to buckle up. But never at the expense of our imagination and worship. Such insight is perhaps no more obvious than in the turn of phrase at the heart of the collect for Trinity Sunday. Thus, we pray, “Almighty and everlasting God, you have given to us your servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of your divine Majesty to worship the Unity… ” (BCP p 228) We acknowledge doctrine. We worship God. For it is thus as we imagine that we are most godlike, most as God creates us to be, incarnating our spirit into human being and leading us forth to walk the talk.
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