Laying Bare Our Stories as Earth-Makers, Pain-Bearers and Life-Givers

Trinity Sunday, preached at St. John's Glenbrook, Nevada, June 3, 2012

I cannot think of too many places more wonderful than St. John’s Glenbrook to celebrate Trinity Sunday. As I look out your beautiful window overlooking Lake Tahoe I am reminded of the beauty of God’s creation and our role in it. The New Zealand Prayer book’s expression of the trinity as expressed in their contemporary version of the prayer, the Our Father forms the basis of my sermon.

Earth-Maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver, 

source of all that is and that shall be, 

Father and Mother of us all. 

Loving God, in whom is heaven. 

The hallowing of your name 

echoes through the universe.

Here in this place we have the privilege to experience every Sunday the beauty of God’s creation, fed by Word and sacrament to go out into the world to be earth-makers, pain-bearers and life-givers as we enact and embody our Trinitarian faith.  

Storm Swain, an Episcopal priest who teaches in Philadelphia comes to The Episcopal Church from New Zealand.  Storm wrote a wonderful book called Trauma and Transformation at Ground Zero.  In her book Storm uses the New Zealand Trinitarian lens to help us to see the trinity as a means to understanding the way God manifested God’s self at ground zero.  Her book is a collection of stories about the men and women who served as chaplains at ground zero as bodies were recovered, blessed and returned to families for a proper burial. 

Storm’s book is an amazing collection of the stories of chaplains who worked in the recovery process over a period of nine months.  I found myself skipping over Storm’s theological arguments to read the next chaplain’s account. 

Storm suggests that the ground zero chaplains function in the shadows of the creator as earth-maker holding the other and their story in eternity. Pain-bearer is the chaplain’s willingness to take on the pain and suffering of the other.  Life-giver transforms the suffering through affirmation of the mortuary and emergency service workers.  

Storm’s stories of chaplains at ground zero give us a firsthand ability to touch the garment of Jesus’ healing ministry and to participate in the collective power of the trinity overcoming even the horror of 9/11. I want to read a few excerpts to you verbatim:

In the following excerpt we have a glimpse of the everlasting power of the earth-maker as experienced by one chaplain:

“I saw that within every part, whether it be a body part or a whole body, you really have the fullness of God’s creation in any one part.  The cell structure and the wonder of the wholeness and to remind the people there that our wholeness will, on this earth, will only be kept in the mind of God. Because eventually we will all be dust or parts or particles. And so I think theological awareness always made me stand with a sense of awe and mystery and wonder of God’s creativity and God’s promise and capacity for restoration.”

In the following excerpt we have a glimpse of the compassion of the pain-bearer as experienced by another chaplain:

“The best I can do with this is to allow things to be what they are. Everything has trade-offs. There are no more, there are no less, they are.  You deal with them the way they are and fully and completely present.  Insofar as you’ll repress the moment, you’ll pick that up later. So that is when on a couple of occasions when I’ve gone to Big Sur on retreat, there would be times I lay on the floor and have people touch me and sob. Not crying over a particular thing but just being able to, in a moment of safety, be entirely vulnerable without having to explain. Now, that’s much better in Big Sur than in the pit of ground zero. And it is not that one is real and the other isn’t. Both are real. Both are authentic.”

In the final excerpt we have a glimpse of the transforming presence of life-giver as experienced by one chaplain.

“I think the first time we saw a recovery of somebody that was pretty much intact, almost complete, there was just a moment of realization.  A moment of connection with that person, with God, and with all the other people around, how we had in that small place, in that small moment, this full circle of life and death and living and dying and finishing something and moving on. And that was very powerful.”

How do we each invite the earth-maker, pain-bearer and life-giver to be channeled through our lives? 

What stories might the people of this congregation tell about earth-maker, pain-bearer and life-giver? 

Earth-maker and life-giver is easy and often visible to see in our lives particularly as we look out grand windows like these on to God’s beautiful creation.  Our painful stories are typically more hidden and invisible behind a veil we only remove to our closest friends, the ones we trust.  At ground zero there was no privileged veil as all was exposed, the good, the bad, the blessing, the horror of evil, all was laid bare.

Yet even when our stories are veiled we need to remember that through the Trinitarian lens creation, suffering and transformation always coexist in our Christian lives.  Our entire Christian tradition is seen through this Trinitarian lens of the creation of the world in the OT, the pain-bearing of the public ministry and passion of Christ and the life-giver of the resurrection and Pentecost.  The doctrine of the trinity brings all of these salvific actions together. 

We enact the trinity through our lives of awe in God’s creation, holding painful stories for each other and sharing hope in eternal life.  There is no Easter Sunday without Good Friday.  There is no Pentecost without Easter Sunday.  The trinity brings all of these liturgical seasons together in a mystical dance to which we are all invited and none are left out.  This mystical dance is not the high school dances some of us recall! In the Trinitarian dance all are invited.  None are excluded.  Each of us as part of God’s creation and we are all necessary in telling the story of God’s love.

You will soon discover that one of the distinctive characteristics of my preaching is my willingness to appropriately share my story as we companion with each other to discover Christ in the Gospels. Storm offers a means to see blessing through vulnerability in the extraordinary circumstances of ground zero. We have our lives.  To share our stories involves trust and some risk.  No degree of trust is possible without increasing degrees of risk in which we are willing to go with each other beyond the normal pleasantries of our every day life.

It is my custom when I preach and preside for the first time in a parish to acknowledge the tremor you will likely see in my hands as I raise the bread and chalice or distribute Holy Communion to you.  I have had this tremor since my birth.  At its worst the tremor was a source of embarrassment when I was younger.  In more recent years, the tremor is a blessing.  My tremor helps me see with awe the diversity of God’s creation.  My tremor has taught me to bear the pain of differences of others.  My tremor helps me experience the power of healing transformation that some have experienced through my trembling hands that participate in another’s suffering making them feel less isolated and less abandoned by their humanity.  I have made sense of my tremor through the gift of the trinity in a similar but different way that the ground zero chaplains reflected and made sense of their experiences. 

How do you as a congregation or persons in this congregation experience your life through the gift of the trinity?

Carol Gallagher, an Episcopal bishop has written, “No one can guess what the story of your church community is, and if they guess, they will probably guess wrong. It takes a whole group of people sharing their experiences for the full story to come to light, with depth, color, and the vibrancy of a living tradition – your tradition, your story.  The power of story can be seen as the light of the Gospel story permeating and saturating the living mission of your congregation.” 

What stories might you tell each other about St. John’s Glenbrook? 

The good news today is that the trinity is a gift that invites us to join an eternal dance with God as we express awe with the earth-maker, share in pain-bearing responsibilities and offer life-giving transformation to those in need of the Spirit’s sacred balm.  It is through our story and the stories of others that we find our strength and courage to stay in the Trinitarian dance.

As St. John’s looks for its next priest and continues with its life as a congregation, now would be a good time for you to recall your stories of participation in the Trinitarian ministries of the earth-maker, pain-bearer and life-giver. 

Whatever human story, the transforming power of the trinity for all of us is that it lays bear our vulnerabilities that we otherwise keep veiled, masked and invisible beyond public reach and surely out of reach of one and another’s touch. 

God bless us in our bold and courageous efforts that lay bare our individual and congregational stories as earth-makers, pain-bearers and life-givers that we may lay bare God’s love for all.