God's Open Invitation

The Church of St. Paul and Incarnation, Jersey City NJ

June 7, 2020

Year A: The First Sunday after Pentecost – Trinity Sunday

Genesis 1:1-2; 4a

Psalm 8

2 Corinthians 13:11-13

Matthew 28:16-20

God’s Open Invitation

            Well, it’s been quite a week, hasn’t it?

            I don’t know about you, but I feel both exhausted and energized, kind of like when you drink too much coffee to make up for a lack of sleep.

            It’s hard to know where to begin so, if you don’t mind, I’d like to back up to last Sunday.

            It was Pentecost, of course, one of the biggest days of the church year and always a special day for us here, with Dee Dee waving the butterfly at the head of the procession, with a church full of people looking so sharp in their red outfits.

            And, let’s not forget all the great Holy Spirit music led by Gail and the choir.

            We often have a baptism or two – and one time we even had a wedding on Pentecost afternoon!

            And, of course, we always top off the day with our parish picnic. Even when it rains, we always manage to have a good time.

            This year, as you know, was very different.

            Sue and I did our best here but we were really feeling your absence, even more than usual.

            In the afternoon we tried to make up for not having the picnic by getting together on Zoom. While it was good to see your faces, many we haven’t seen in months, and we certainly had a wonderful conversation, it just wasn’t the same – and not just because there were no cheeseburgers!

            In my Pentecost sermon, I talked about how the Holy Spirit wakes us up – pawing art us like a persistent cat ready to start the day – the Holy Spirit calls us to open our eyes - and to keep them open.

            And, while for us it might not have been the best Pentecost ever, the truth is the Holy Spirit has been working overtime this past week – waking us up – especially waking up us white people – waking us up and calling on us to keep our eyes open - and to really see.

            As I wrote to you earlier this week, my eyes were opened on Pentecost afternoon when someone posted on our Instagram some angry and ugly accusations against me and our church, accusing us of being covert racists and declaring that we are the biggest problem in Jersey City.

            It was hard to take and, honestly, my first instinct was to write a defensive reply or to just delete the comment and block him from posting on our page ever again. But over the course of the day it really was like my eyes were opened as I began to see the profound hurt behind those angry words and, while I don’t think everything he wrote is fair or accurate, the pain needs to be acknowledged and respected.

            And on Tuesday morning I was on a call with leaders from around Jersey City and it was heartrending to hear some of our black leaders speak so openly about their pain and frustration – that even after all of these decades of effort, even after all the marches and protests and so much work with elected officials and law enforcement, after all that, a white police officer still seemed to think nothing of forcing his knee on George Floyd's neck, suffocating him, taking his life in just under nine minutes – just the latest example of police brutality.

            And what about everything that is not caught on video?

            Over the course of the week there have been protests here in Jersey City, all very powerful but also entirely peaceful. Thankfully, all of those boarded up store windows seem to have been unnecessary.

I arrived at the protest at City Hall on Tuesday afternoon, frankly a little bit concerned about Covid-19 and the threat of violence. But, those fears quickly faded as I listened to the speakers and as I looked around at the diverse and mostly masked and social distancing crowd, people who were hurting and angry, but also determined that this time – this time - is going to be different.

            Yes, the Holy Spirit has been working overtime this week, getting us to see – to really see.

            And, beyond Jersey City, there have been protests and rallies all across the country and even overseas.

            Most have been peaceful though, yes, there has been some looting, looting done by some of the frustrated and enraged protesters, and also looting done by troublemakers eager to add even more fuel to the fire, always looking for ways discredit the movement and reinforce the worst stereotypes.

            In some cases we have seen members of law enforcement offer cooperation with the protesters and publicly resolving to do better in the future.

            And in other cases, we’ve seen even more brutality – some cops don’t seem to understand or care that being brutal in response to a march against police brutality doesn’t really help to make their case.

            One example that I’m sure many of you saw happened in Buffalo when a member of the elite SWAT team pushed a 75 year-old peaceful protester to the ground, as he was apparently trying to give them back one of their helmets. The officers stepped around him as blood gushed from his wound and pooled around his head. The man’s name is Martin Gugino and he’s a longtime activist with the Catholic Worker. At first the police claimed that Mr. Gugino had tripped but, fortunately, we can see the video with our own eyes – and, even if he had tripped, wouldn’t “public safety officers” or, for that matter, any decent human being, stop and try to help?

            This week the Holy Spirit has been working overtime opening our eyes, waking us up – helping to see our leaders. Some try to bring us together. And, other leaders seem unable or unwilling to put into practice the words found inside the Bible: God’s call to justice and reconciliation and peace – and, most of all, the command to love one another.

            The Holy Spirit has been working overtime this week, opening our eyes to see, showing us that life doesn’t have to be like this, that there is a better way.

The Holy Spirit has been working overtime reminding us of God’s open invitation.

            God’s open invitation.

            Today, on the First Sunday after Pentecost, we are invited to acknowledge and reflect on the Trinity - on God’s inner life:

God is Father, Son, and Holy Sprit – God is Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier – God is somehow one and also three.

            The Trinity is a bottomless mystery and it is a fool’s errand to try to explain it, though that hasn’t stopped lots of people from trying.

            The best we can do is come up with different images and metaphors, like the shamrock, the three-leafed clover that tradition says St. Patrick used to explain the Trinity to the Irish.

            But, trying to explain the Trinity won’t get us very far, so it’s better just to celebrate the mind-blowing and so very beautiful truth that God is community.

 Community is not just a characteristic of God – but God is community.

            And “God is Community” could have spent all of eternity alone – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a community of love spinning forever and ever, perfectly content, in need of nothing and no one.

            But, that’s not what happened.

            Instead, God chose to create – to create all that we can see and the nearly infinite reality that we’ll never be able to see – to create a reality that turns out to be even more amazing the more we learn about it.

            But, that’s not all!

Maybe even more mind-blowing and even harder to explain than the Trinity is that, instead of going it alone forever, God reveals God’s Self to us and invites us to be part of the Holy Community, too.

            Now, considering our rather poor track record, if I were God I’m not sure I would have done that – we sure seem like a lot of trouble – but God offers an open invitation to us – live in the garden with me – let’s live in the community of love together, forever.

            And, when things in the garden didn’t work out, God still didn’t give up on us, kept on inviting us, until offering the best invitation of all: Jesus.

            And, Jesus sends out his disciples to the ends of the earth to share the Good News - to forward the invitation – the invitation to not hate but to love, to recognize that we are brothers and sisters, to practice justice and mercy and to finally lay down our weapons and live in a world where, as the Psalmist writes, the Lord is our governor.

            It’s an open invitation.

            And, it’s an invitation we have rejected so often, more than anybody but God can count.

            And yet, fortunately for us, despite all of that rejection, God has not canceled the invitation.

            God keeps sending the Holy Spirit to open our eyes to see that we are invited to a very different way of life.

            So, yes, it’s been quite a week.

We are now in a moment of pain and danger and fear – a moment of truth-telling and reconciliation and increasing unity – it’s both exhausting and energizing.

            We are in a moment when we really see things as they are – and we see things as they can be – as they were always meant to be.

            So, it’s a good time for us to finally accept God’s open invitation, to finally say yes to the Trinity – to say yes to the God who is Community.

Amen.