Trinity Sunday
Romans 5:1-5
Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
Sticky Rice
I think most of you know by now that I created a huge mosaic as part of my degree program at San Francisco Theological Seminary. It’s quite large, it’s about 4 feet tall, and over 30 feet long, and for reasons that we don’t really need to get into right now, I have a life-size replica of it in my office. Anyone who wants to see it is welcome to come by anytime that I’m there to have a look. I would love to show it to you.
However, I have been told that various members of the congregation have been trying to figure out how to hang it up in the Fireside room, and that they hope to be doing this soon. So, it will be much easier for everyone to see, hopefully in the not so distant future. The reason I mention this is because today is Trinity Sunday, and the Trinity was pretty much the catalyst for how the mosaic came to be in the first place.
The Trinity as a theological concept has always fascinated me. I know it’s tricky for some people, and there are others that really don’t like the idea of the Trinity, but even when I was still developing my own understanding of it, it was never about accepting it or wrestling with it, it was always about trying to make sense of it. Because, for whatever reason, I just always believed it to be true, and so I started with that as the foundation of my thinking, and I went from there.
The Trinity is one of the great mysteries of the church, and it’s okay if we don’t completely understand it, because anyone that tells you they completely understand it is lying to you. But, it is a theological concept that most Christian denominations profess to believe.
There are a lot of reasons why I like the idea of God as a Trinity. God, as a being, is so far removed from our understanding of what a being is, that having three individual persons embody the makeup of that being just somehow makes sense to me. God should be complicated. God should be outside of our understanding. We simply don’t have the capacity to fully comprehend the glory and majesty of the all-powerful, creator of all, and that’s fine. We don’t have to know everything. God doesn’t expect us to know everything, and that’s fine.
Another thing that I like about the concept of the Trinity is that God’s very existence shows us how to live in harmony with each other. God exists in harmony with Godself: 3 persons, no hierarchy, in perfect trust, mutuality, and care. Our epistle reading today describes how the Creator, Christ, and Spirit flow in and out and through each other. My favorite description of the Trinity is from C.S. Lewis, the author of the Chronicles of Narnia. He also wrote several books about theology, and the way that he described the Trinity is that the Christ emanates from the Creator, and the Holy Spirit is the embodiment of their relationship. The Creator and the Christ are so otherworldly, so amazing and powerful that their relationship to one another actually manifests as another person, the Holy Spirit, third person of the Trinity.
And, we, as human beings, were created in the image of the Trinity. So not only do we reflect the grandeur and majesty of God, when we’re in relationship with each other, we form the image God in relationship with Godself. You, the other person, and then you have your relationship which is itself a reflection of the Holy Spirit. We were created to live in relationship with each other.
When I was first conceptualizing the mosaic, I specifically wanted to depict the baptism of Christ, because it’s one of the few places in the Bible where all three persons of the Trinity are present, Jesus is getting baptized, the voice of God is coming down from the heavens, and the Holy Spirit is alighting on Jesus like a dove. I love this scene in the Bible, and I wanted to recreated it in tile and glass. The only place on campus where it made sense to create something like that was the back wall of the student-run coffee shop, and I figured if I was going to put a mosaic there, I might as well cover the whole wall. Which is how I ended up doing a 3-year project, instead of a 6-month one, which is what I was supposed to do.
Finishing the mosaic wasn’t easy, and I definitely didn’t do it alone. The SFTS community rallied around me to work on it and to help me finish it. The ongoing joke between me and the dean was that I wasn’t allowed to graduate until it was done. Of course, I didn’t finish it until 2 weeks after I graduated, but I figured that was close enough. As I was working on the final section, two of my friends came to look at my work. They were two women from South Korea, and as they pointed at the different tiles and asked me questions about the mosaic, I realized that I hadn’t included anything Korean in the mosaic. This was important because about a quarter of the student body at the time were Korean nationals, so it felt like a glaring oversight on my part. I had hidden a peace sign, a walking bear, the words Faith, Hope, and Love, even a Mickey Mouse in the mosaic, but nothing to represent the Korean community.
So, I asked Min-Hee and EunJoo, what Korean word should I include in the mosaic? After a very brief discussion, maybe only 20 seconds long, they told me I should include the Korean word “jong.” They said that it didn’t really have an English translation but it describes the incredible closeness and affection that’s possible between two people. They told me to imagine 2 pieces of sticky rice that are stuck together. You can’t tell where one rice ends and the other begins. That’s “jong.” And I thought, it’s perfect. That is absolutely the perfect word to include in the mosaic. And so, “jong” was one of the last things to go up on the wall. The mosaic started with the Trinity, and ended with “jong”. It started with community and togetherness, and it ended with community and togetherness. And, if you think about how a mosaic is made, it’s a bunch of disparate pieces all coming together to make the whole. The whole thing was about community and togetherness.
Several of you will be participating in a Fishing Tips book group soon, and one of the main themes of the book is about how we need to focus on community in order to do God’s work in the world. We need to expand our definition of community, and expand our ideas of how to be church. Community is the reason we exist, and community is what keeps us going. We were made for this. God made us for this. We have no choice but to exist in community, because we were created in the image of the Triune God, in the image of community.
So, as we move forward, and talk about our hopes and dreams for this church, remember why we’re here, and why we do what we do. Opening your arms wide in radical welcome so that every child of God will feel at home here. This work is so important. In a world that’s forgotten what community is, we need to remind them. We need to show them. Be God’s community. Amen.
~ Rev. Charles Wei
