This is Trinity Sunday. Throughout the worship service we will explore different names for the Triune God. We may think that naming God leads us to understanding. This may be true. But as our relationship and experience of God change, we realize that we are called to more than understanding. Our faith is meant to be lived through our words and actions. When we free the Trinity from being a doctrine and begin to live the Truth of this Holy Relationship, we let God out of a three-cornered box and begin the work of the Kingdom.
Our new understanding of racism or white supremacy are not the ones I grew up with, but when we hear the terms today we are called to understand they are much more nuanced and founded on a spectrum of experience that is broader and deeper than ours alone.
When we reject these definitions because they don’t apply to us personally or fit our prior understanding, we participate in and perpetuate racism. One step in setting down a tiny bit of our privilege and becoming an agent of change is to accept these definitions – born out of the experience of people of color — rather than arguing about the semantics of them. By correlation, the problem this last week is not looting — it’s the murder of a Black man by a white police officer while three other officers looked on. And that this was not the first time.
Listen to the difference between these two statements:
“It’s horrible that an innocent black man was killed, but destroying property has to stop.”
“It’s horrible that property is being destroyed, but killing innocent black men has to stop.”
Which statement do we believe the God who heard the cries of the Israelites, flipped the tables of merchants in the temple, and broke down the walls of those imprisoned for the Gospel would prefer?
