A Trinitarian reflection on my first 3 sermons…

The first time I was asked to give a sermon, it was for the 3rd week of Advent, centered on “joy” as the theme🩷. This seemed to me both ironic and appropriate, given that I fixate at Enneagram type 7 — the positive & enthusiastic type! So “joy” is kinda my thing… but it’s my think in a compulsive, toxically positive way 😅. I was warry of giving a sermon that trended towards the trite rhetoric of “be happy,” and felt that it would be more helpful to talk about… suffering. So I ended up pulling a classic Christian “both-and” move, and talked about BOTH joy and suffering. I talked about my favorite saint, Therese, and how she considered it “pure joy” to suffer in small ways for her friends and to offer up “little sacrifices” of kindness and generosity to others. Joy points us to Love, and Love is willing to suffer for its beloved. Joy and suffering are perfectly united under Love within the person of Christ — epitomized in Christ crucified. To accept suffering, for the purpose of great love, is a great joy.

The second time I was asked to speak was during my favorite time in the liturgical calendar — Lent💜 — the season of lament, penitence, prayer, and fasting. Our sermon series was based on the 5 chapters of Lamentations, for the 5 Sundays of Lent. What a fitting follow-up to my Joy sermon! I could talk more in-depth about what I wanted to before… about how important it is to lean into expression of our pain, and embodiment of our sorrow — to dignify our sadness with a practice of lament! So, we did this — we practiced and embodied lament (something we so rarely do in the United States). After a short discussion about lament, everyone in the congregation wrote down their own laments on cards, taped them up front so that the whole congregation could bear collective witness, and then lit a candle to release their lament(s) to God in hope.🕯️

My 3rd sermon came in a 3rd liturgical season with a 3rd color: Pentecost❤️! At first I was a little uncertain what I would discuss, but then, as I poured over the passage, finding the themes of ruach-wind, and fire, and languages, I realized I could walk through the Acts 2 passage and bring out connections with the Hebrew Bible and with out lives today. It was an opportunity to read the Bible in a fun, symbolic, and exploratory way, and introduce fresh readings of the Tower of Babel text that I’d discovered. The overall theme was the Spirit — the spirit of wind and of fire🔥 — of mystery, power, and glory — but most of all, as the Spirit of unity, which unites across language and nation — across Jew and Gentile — that infuses the Body of Christ and binds-together all those who love God, despite our differences and flaws. Christians are each living stones, bound together by the mortar of the Spirit, being built up into a holy house unto the Lord!

Upon reflection of these first three sermons of mine, I am struck by how symbolically they align with the Persons of the Trinity. The 3rd sermon was all about the third person of the Trinity (at Pentecost and in the church), the 2nd sermon reflected human suffering and included an embodied activity (incarnation), and the 1st sermon, while touching upon all three Persons, could be seen as having a theme (Joy) which, of the three, is most fitting the heavenly Good of God the Father to which we all aspire.