Trinity Sunday (A)
Trinity Sunday (A)
May 26, 2002
by Joe Parrish

The Gospel: Matthew 28:16-20

Lord, remake us into your image, and help us to spread your love to the world so that others might also believe in you. Amen.

This Thursday at 10:29 AM the final beam of the World Trade Center buildings will be removed from the Ground Zero site in a closing ceremony. This specific time of day, 10:29 AM. was chosen to coincide with the time the North Building, the second tall building, collapsed on September 11. It will be an emotional time for us who have struggled down at Ground Zero nearly every week since the tragedy nearly nine months ago. Attending the ceremony will be many of the close relatives of those who perished on that fateful day. We will all line West Way as a flatbed truck carries the ceremonial beam away up that once litter-strewn street that has already been reopened for public traffic. The beam has been topped with an American flag for several weeks now, so we knew the end day was coming. We Chaplains are required to attend an orientation session two days before the ceremony to prepare for various and sundry eventualities. So far only about a thousand of the victims have been positively identified, so some eighteen hundred sets of relatives have so far had only ceremonial urns of dust from the site to use in their symbolic burials. The finality of all of this will suddenly become very weighty for them, as it will be for all of us. I for one will never be able to view St. John’s University at the corner of Chambers and the West Way without remembering our stays there at the Red Cross Respite Center as we briefly escaped the difficulties of the “Pile” and later the “Pit” to get some refreshment, rest our tired legs, and chat for a while with others there who could not get outside for security reasons, but who very kindly served as our official or unofficial debriefers. And similar memories from the surrounding streets and buildings will not quickly fade--the three story fire escape filled to its handrails with papers, plaster, and other items from the building collapses two blocks away; the muddy streets that never seemed to get clean from the dust that was spread everywhere; the looks on the determined firefighters and police faces who patiently raked through every inch of every one of those sixteen acres twenty-four hours every day seven days a week searching for some sign of the life that once was there. I was down there only after three weeks into the recovery effort since I had been occupied with ministering to those at Trauma One, St. Vincent’s Hospital, who had been injured yet survived the ordeal. Many of them were the ones whose lives were saved by the brave heroes, some of whose bodies will never be identified. I followed up with one of my patients just this past week as she told me of going for yet another surgery to try to repair her wrist that was smashed when the second plane careened into the 78th Floor lobby of Building Two where she and others of her office were trying to evacuate following the first hit of Building One.

In the midst of all that, we will find ways to somehow express that God was and is and evermore shall indeed be with us, though many will look on in disbelief of this very fact that we proclaim this Trinity Sunday. God created all we see as the Father; God came to us on earth as the Son; and as God stays with us as the Holy Spirit.

I have had the inauspicious duty of blessing every body part that is found during my eight-hour shift each week. I have learned human anatomy in ways that one would rarely if ever be expected to see. Every configuration of human limbs and body structures that possibly exist I think I have seen. Every gory sight that one might imagine I have had the opportunity to view along with the Medical Examiners, the EMTs, the Crime Scene officers, and others. Every story of heroes I have heard.

And still the answer is that God is and was and will be with us, in spite of the questioning glances and bitter tears I have seen. We determinedly pray together the Lord’s Prayer over each body and body part as perhaps no one I had heard before had prayed. “Our Father…”, “thy kingdom come on earth” because it surely has not yet come as we witness what we see together on those examining tables at the temporary mortuary.

The words of the Trinity with which we are baptized, the cup and the bread that we eat at Holy Communion, these are the outward and visible signs of the Trinitarian God who has never and will never leave us bereft. It is a time when God either appears very far away or very near at hand, but rarely does God seem just a bit distant when one is witnessing the boundaries of life and death within a breath away.

The one thing I think is so difficult to portray is how there is no plant life anywhere around Ground Zero. Every green thing was obliterated. I do recall a small tree one worker had found perhaps in an office that was placed on the outside third floor corner of Building Five for a while. It was a tree of hope it seemed to me. Its leaves were dusty and bedraggled, but it had somehow survived the ordeal. But of course in time the remaining skeleton of Building Five was removed, and just before that the lone tree disappeared. I have seen a recovery worker carefully clutch a piece of cooled molten glass from one of the Trade Towers and then hand it up to one of the big machine operators perhaps for a souvenir. I picked up a partially melted black telephone receiver in one of the interior streets at the site one day and briefly thought of saving it, but then said to myself, “Do I really want to see such a graphic reminder a year from now?” To which I answered to myself a firm, “No.”

But the Holy Spirit we surely do feel present there in the midst of all the struggle and heartache. We have the ability to recover from incredible devastation, work day by day, piece by piece, truckload by truckload, until the job is finally completed, I suspect some two to three months ahead of schedule. July was an optimistic ending date set some months ago, and here we are still in the month of May. I myself figured August would be a reasonable target date, and could envision even November or later at one point. Two billion tons of rubble, two billion tons of rubble, have been removed in less than nine months, possibly some sort of record, I don’t know. And the removal has been worked at meticulously, painstakingly, gently. Last Monday I watched the operator of one of those enormous digging machines on the site carefully drip out ounce by ounce the dust from perhaps a ton of one of the few remaining pockets of unexcavated rubble to try to spot any sign of human evidence. How they do that delicate operation using such an enormous piece of equipment is beyond me, but they did that over and over again, day in and day out, trying to get some preliminary ideas for the firefighters who will follow up everything with their rakes and hoes and screens. Some of this may be seen tonight on HBO cable television at 9 PM Eastern Daylight Time in a special broadcast that is said to be very realistic and comprehensive, 9 PM tonight on HBO.

The question is still, how do we know God is with us? The Trinity is our best answer. God is not a distant deity, but God came to earth as Jesus Christ, who lived among us, suffered insult and death, yet defeated death to ascend to God’s right side in heaven, sending the Holy Spirit in his place to remain with us who are left behind for a while. A distant deity would look on and perhaps cry a little or a lot. A distant deity would muse, 'How they suffer!' A distant God would be removed from the nitty and the gritty of human life and human death. But our God is never so removed or distant. Our God has seen how we live because he once lived here, too. Our God knows the tragedy of the death of a loved one, as his own close friend Lazarus died before he could reach his friend’s side. Our God knows how the final moments of life can be excruciatingly painful, as he suffered on the cross. Yet too, our God knows the joy of resurrection, as he was raised by his Father from the grave on the third day. And now he sits in heaven interceding for us who still have time to spend on this planet. This very involved, intimately involved God, knows our every feeling, emotion, pain, suffering, laughter, joy, exhilaration, and even ecstasy. And still he never leaves us bereft or alone with no hope of redemption or recovery.

I spent some time this past week with the construction worker who discovered the huge iron cross in the basement of one of the side buildings at Ground Zero. That enormous cross now is on the top of a makeshift pedestal near the intersection of Church and Liberty Streets, and just west a few feet from the temporary mortuary. I told him that this is probably the first time a cross has been on that site for decades, if ever before. I wished him well in his endeavor to keep that cross located somewhere on the site as it is rebuilt and after various buildings stand there again. The cross weighs some eighteen tons, so it will not be easy to move or hide. I hope the cross of Christ will be a sign of hope to others as they go about their daily life once again down there a few years from now.

The City of New York has suffered greatly these past months. Last Sunday, the New York Times showed over 106,000 jobs have been lost in the City since last April, and I have heard that as many as eighty percent of them were from the World Trade Center collapses. Think of how many towns and cities do not even have populations of 106,000, much less so many jobs. So we have a long way to go to begin to actually recover from September 11. But I believe if the faith of the people can be bolstered, it will happen. Still we who live in the city have this unease that a bridge or tunnel or another building or a crowed intersection will be blown up at any moment. I told someone last Wednesday that the bravest thing I had done that day was to drive beneath the Brooklyn Bridge on the way to a meeting in Elizabeth; they nodded knowingly. I drive under that bridge nearly every day, just as I drove past Building One every day on my commute here to St. John’s. I could not imagine what would happen one day to Building One. So I surely hope some recurrence will not happen to the Brooklyn Bridge. But who knows. We can only keep going about our business, have our thoughts together about reacting to another emergency should it happen--we are all well trained by now I think. And keeping our faith in the One God Who Saves is surely a big part of having the courage to think of complete recovery. Things are starting to come back together already. The ceremony this Thursday at Ground Zero will mark both an end and a new beginning. Hope is running high.

How God is God is truly a mystery. We can state the theory of the Trinity. We can give analogies to the Trinity--the three leafed clover; ice, water, steam; husband, father, son; sound, instrument, player; and so on. But the actual fact of the Trinity in the final analysis escapes us all. It surely sets Christians apart from any other of the world’s religions. Some Jews believe in the resurrection, but none believes in the Son as God. Some Muslims believe in the virgin birth of Christ, but none believe that Jesus is God in human form; nor do any Buddhists, Confucians, or Hindus. The Trinity separates us Christians from all other faiths. The Trinity was first formulated and named as such by the church father Tertullian around 300 AD. Tertullian reasoned, (quote) “The union of the Father in the Son, and the Son in the [Spirit] implies Three conjoined, which Three are one Thing, not one Person.” The one “Thing” Tertullian spoke of later became in the words of the Nicene Creed, “homousios”, “homo” meaning “same” and “ousia” meaning “substance”. The three persons of the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) are of the same substance, of the same divine essence, or as we say when we recite the Nicene Creed, “of one ‘Being’”. The Nicene Creed in 325 AD formalized what the orthodox, right teaching, church believed about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They were three “hypostases”, or "individuations", or "Persons" of the one and the same God. The Athanasian Creed, which is also in our red Prayer Books in each pew on Pages 864 and 865, speaks eloquently about the necessity of Christ not being only a human creature since salvation was of God, yet salvation comes from belief in Jesus the Christ. Christ is of the same substance that God is. Christ was both human and divine, as we hear in the Chalcedon formula that appears in the Prayer Book just above the Athanasian Creed on Page 864. It is Christ’s divinity that is of the same “substance” or “Being” with God the Father. We all are baptized in the Trinitarian formula, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is the grounding of our faith. Yet the Trinity is always a mystery. As one person has said, only God can truly understand God. John Wesley said, “Bring me a worm that can comprehend a human being, and I will show you a human being that can comprehend the Triune God,” the three in one unity of God.

A Chinese proverb says, “Bird does not sing because bird has an answer, bird sings because bird has a song.” Let us sing too because we too have a song, a song of faith, a song of comfort, a song of love. For by God’s love we are saved. And by God’s grace we are empowered to take that love to the whole world. By our love the world can also know the saving power of God expressed through God’s Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. He has sent all of us out to spread this good news to our neighbors. Let us be obedient disciples and tell others the gospel of the God who wants to bring the entire world into God’s bosom of eternal comfort. Amen.

(Comments to Joe at joe.parrish@ecunet.org.)
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