03 June 2012

“Holy triangulation!”
The Holy Trinity B
Romans 8:12-17 / John 3:1-17
3 June 2012


For those of you who have done any study of relationship systems … whether it’s family systems or office systems or school culture systems or even church systems … the word “triangulation” is probably a dirty word. Or at least, one heavily laden with negative baggage.
Though it shouldn’t be that way.
Because triangles are simply the way we humans operate in relationship with each other.
Here are a few examples of what I mean.

Person A hears that Person C had something good happen in their life … an upcoming birthday, a child being married, a promotion at work … and Person A wants to surprise Person C with a gift. So they go to Person B … a mutual friend, relative, acquaintance … to find out what would be suitable.

Person C likes Person B. A lot. But Person C can’t get up the nerve to let Person B know this … in person … because they’re too shy, uncomfortable, whatever. So Person C goes to Person A … again, a mutual friend, acquaintance, etc … to find out if Person B even knows Person C exists. And what Person C can do to strike up a relationship with Person B.

Yes, I know, that last one sounds like the plot to every episode of the “Partridge Family.”
Those are normal, one might even say, healthy, human triangles.
Ah, but those probably aren’t the ones we think about when we hear that word “triangulation.”
These would be more like it.

The supervisor Jim doesn’t like the job that employee Rex is doing. But instead of going directly to Rex, he sends another employee … Jane … to tell Rex that “I’ve heard the boss is mad at you because he doesn’t like the job you’re doing” … and then Rex says to Jane, “Oh yeah, well you can tell that so-and-so that I don’t think he’s a very good boss either,” etc. etc.

Or … perhaps familiar to those of you who did the “Healthy Congregations” work with Pastor Kate Schlechter here a few years ago …

Pastor Don is approached about starting a contemporary worship service at Christ Church … and so he helps empower a group of people to do just that. However, another group of people isn’t happy with this development … but they don’t go directly to the group of people who started the service to tell them … no, there are a series of behind the scenes phone calls, letters, efforts to undermine Pastor Don and the Congregation Council behind their backs … even involving a retired pastor from the parish … no one speaks their feelings directly to each other, but always, always involves someone else ‘in between.’

That’s the illustration of “triangulation” with which we associate the negative … passive-aggressive behavior, people unable, unwilling to speak the truth in love directly to one another, but always involving someone else to ‘do their dirty work.’ It is unhealthy behavior, unbecoming of the people of God … un-Christian, to be sure … and yet, and yet, we know it happens … in workplaces, in families, in congregations … all the time. The only way this unhealthy triangulation can end is if the system is protected against those people whose behavior is making the system ‘sick’ … those of us who have had some systems training know that these people are called ‘viruses’ … so we ‘innoculate’ the system to make it strong, and healthy … by living strong, healthy, exemplary lives of faith; reading and studying and praying in the Word of Christ; worshipping, confessing our sins, receiving forgiveness, communing together; ‘speaking the truth in love’ to our neighbor; and not falling into these unhealthy, passive-aggressive triangles.
And today … today we are presented with another example of healthy triangulation … “Holy Triangulation” … if you will … this Holy Trinity Sunday … a day, a festival in the Church … not about an act of Jesus … but instead … a theological concept … the three in one, one in three nature of our God, Father, Son, and Spirit.
For those of you who have worshipped in a Christian congregation much of your life … you’ve likely heard about all the approaches to this Holy Trinity Sunday … and the larger theological … word about God … concept behind it … you’ve likely heard all that there is for preachers to offer you on this day.

The Holy Trinity … three in one … it’s like …
An apple. Core, seeds, flesh. Three separate parts. One apple.
An egg. Yolk, white, shell. Three separate parts. One egg.
A Boeing 787. Carbon fibre. Plastic. Titanium. Three separate parts. One beautiful airplane.
Ah, but don’t you think God gets plenty tired of those cute little explanatory statements … as tired as we get, year after year, subjecting you to them.

My favorite quote about the Holy Trinity comes from Martin Luther:

To try to deny the Trinity endangers your salvation, to try to comprehend the Trinity endangers your sanity.

And it’s true … for us to keep trying to break the Trinity down into some scientific formula for God misses the point of this day entirely.
Because the Whole Point about Holy Trinity Sunday … and the one in three, three in one notion of our God which lies behind it … Father, Son, Spirit … why, it’s all about Triangulation … Holy Triangulation!
The Holy Trinity … God, Father, Son, Spirit … what this is all about … and all we need to know about it … is that God wants to live in relationship with us so much, that God sets the pace … the example … lives this out, within God.
And the Holy Trinity … holy triangulation’s difference, to and for us, is that, while we humans so often get relationship messed up … through our own selfishness, oversensitivity, SIN … our human triangulation turns us inward, for what we believe is self-protection, self-preservation … but is really self-centeredness …
God’s Holy Triangulation … Father, Son, and Spirit … is all about relationship turned OUTWARD, to and for the sake of the world … the creation … the people God loves … US.
Through the words of St. Paul in our reading from Romans … we GET that kind of intertwined, outward-focused relationship within God … focused outward, toward US, God’s beloved:

For you did not receive a spirit of slavery … but a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” (literally, daddy!) it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ …

This is relationship language, pure and simple … the relationship of Jesus, the Son, to God the Father, through the love of the Holy Spirit … that centrifugal force of divine love spinning outward touches us, too, bringing us into the family of God, through the will of God.
Bringing us into the family of God, where Christ shares all with us and we share all with Christ … where suffering is not God-forsaken but God-enveloped, Christ-drenched, en-Spirited … where Emmanuel – God-with-us really means God With Us … in all places, in all ways, to our life and God’s glory.
This is relationship language, pure and simple … and words don’t do relationship justice … you can’t comprehend relationship through words … the only way one can comprehend relationship is to be in it.
And in it we are … born into this world God loves, loves so much that he sent his only Son, filled with his living, loving Spirit … drenching us in Christ’s Word of right relationship, with God and each other, right relationship which begins in the waters of Baptism, water created by God the Father and called into being For Us by Jesus the Christ, filled with the Holy Spirit … all of this, all of these, calling us into God’s Holy Triangulation of living and loving to and for all of creation.
The only way one can comprehend relationship is to be in it. That’s the point of those familiar words of Jesus to Nicodemus, the truth-seeker, in John chapter 3. Nicodemus couldn’t fathom being ‘born again’ or ‘born from above’ and indeed, we get that, as so many of our brothers and sisters use that kind of language not as relationship builder but as relationship-ender … well, if you’re not born again, in the way I define that term, then you don’t have a real relationship with Jesus … or me … and many, many of us have been hurt … and relationships ended … and Church broken … over that un-holy triangulation … aimed inward, selfish, self-centered, un-Christian as it is.
It seems that so many of our brothers and sisters … hammering away at John 3.16 as they do … have totally neglected John 3.17:

Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

Nicodemus, for his part, got it. He got the Holy Triangulation, indeed, he was swept up into it, as we read later in John’s Gospel, he defends Jesus to those of his own religion who oppose him … and at Jesus’ death, Nicodemus risks his own death, coming with Joseph of Arimathea to take Jesus’ body and prepare it for burial. Nicodemus … this much-maligned questioner, seeker … he got that what this life of faith and service is about … is relationship … up to, and through, the end.
And friends … it is into this same relationship which we are called today. Called by God the Father, gathered through the Word of God that is in, with and through Jesus … his drenching Word of Baptismal promise … his filling Word of the Meal that feeds us and sends us forth … his enfleshed Word, which, who we see and meet in the faces and embraces of each other here … and others out there … as we are sent forth in this Holy Triangulation … the love-force that is our God … Father, Son, and Spirit … spinning out this Holy Love so that it touches us, and moves us to keep going, keeps us going out, keeps us going on …
Hear that call, friends in the Holy Trinity. Hear that call, feel that call, be washed and fed in that call …
… and then, GO … GO FORTH in that call … that call which flows out from the very heart of God … through our hearts and hands … to and through and for others … and draws them into the Holy Triangulation too … which pleases God … Father, Son, and Spirit … which pleases God NO END …
The unending love relationship, in, with, to and for the world God loves.
Amen.