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Sermon - June 7th, 2009
The Shack's Trinity
Rev. Gwen Drake
Scripture: Psalm 29 John 3:18
If you are a lover of great fiction or non-fiction, you probably won’t like William Paul Young’s unexpected, self-published novel titled The Shack. It was published in 2007 and within a year it skyrocketed to the #1 ranking on the New York Times Trade Fiction Best Seller List. I didn’t hear about it until Trinity Sunday last year when Judy Cross asked me, after hearing my sermon on the Trinity, “Have you read The Shack?” “ The what? I asked. She gave me a quick book review and someone loaned me the book which I still have, by the way.
Some readers of The Shack have called it “life-changing” and “faith-restoring,” “the best book they have ever read.” Others charge it with being “unbiblical, blasphemous, and theologically dangerous.” The Shack clearly is a publishing sensation and a cultural phenomenon, and, who knows, someday they might make it into a movie.
It is a compelling story. The main character, Mack, is an unremarkable man in his 50’s. His youngest daughter is kidnapped and presumed murdered due to some evidence found at a shack in the wilderness. (By the way, Young is from Oregon, so you will recognize the names and places he mentions.) Mack and his family are devastated. His daughter’s body has not been found and four pain-filled years later he finds a note in his mailbox, typewritten, saying, “Mackenzie, It’s been awhile. I’ve missed you. I’ll be at the shack next weekend if you want to get together.” Signed, “Papa.” It was mentioning of the shack and the name “papa” that haunted Mack. Papa was what he called God when they were on better terms. But lately Mack had had it with God and God’s religion. Sunday’s prayers and hymns weren’t cutting it for him. The only thing he did seem to know and know intimately was something he called The Great Sadness.
Mack follows the instructions of the note secretly and reluctantly with skepticism. At the shack, Mack encounters a quirky Divine Threesome. God, the Father is a large, gentle, friendly, motherly, home-maker-type, black woman named Elousia. Now you need to know that El is short for “Elohim,” one of the Hebrew names for God. And ousia is Greek for “Being” with a capital “B.” However, Mack calls Elousia, “Papa.” She reminds me of my Grandma Emma, my Dad’s Mom whose favorite activity was cooking heaps of food and coaxing everyone to eat it in great volumes.
Mack encounters God, the Son as an unremarkable, un-inspiring, sometimes clumsy, obviously Middle-Eastern “Hebrew” male handyman wearing saw-dusty jeans whose name is Jesus.
The third person of this rather goofy trio is the Holy Spirit. But not the fiery, power-filled Spirit we experienced last Sunday. Rather, she is a small Asian woman, a fleeting, almost ghost-like woman named Sarayu, a Sanskrit noun that means “wind.” Or, someone described her as a larger, but out-of-focus Tinkerbell.
When Mack asks them, “Which one of you is God?” They all responded in unison, “I am.”
Mack talks on and on with this terrific Trio who exudes nothing except grace, love, forgiveness and salvation for all. After a weekend of confusing conversations and miraculous experiences with this unlikely Trio, his burden of deep sadness, that he has carried his whole life, especially after the loss of his daughter is lifted. He returns home with his faith in God and love and forgiveness restored.
The Shack’s Trinity is described through conversation and story as an all-loving and forgiving Mama God and her two peers. All three are distinct but unified in a loving partnership, a circular, power-free relationship, two-thirds female and multi-racial.
What I find remarkable is that this book has been very successful in capturing the imagination and attention of so many people and not all of them people of the Christian faith. It is a quick, pleasant read. It is a conversation starter. It has stimulated, once again, conversation about religion and God. And it has alarmed the more traditional, doctrinal Christians. It has attempted to explain something that is unexplainable—the Holy Trinity.
The Trinity is a doctrine that was born out of controversy, the controversy of the relationship of Jesus to God, the divinity of Jesus, and the Jesus relationship to God and humanity. The Trinity is a way that defines how we experience God. It was clear from the beginning of the Church that there was only one God. Only, how did Jesus fit into this one God belief. Several theologies came forth out of this controversy that culminated in the great Trinitarian controversy of the fourth century. Was Jesus simply a mediator between people and God? Was he another God alongside of God, the Father? Was he a man who was adopted into divinity when he was resurrected? Was he God, the Father who was born and suffered in union with the human being named Jesus? Is Jesus just another way that God manages God’s relationship with the world? Was Jesus created by God for the carrying out of God’s will? I’m sure these are all questions that you discuss at the dinner table or lose sleep over regularly, right?
Well, it was Tertullion who lived from 155 – 220 B.C.E. and one of his disciples from whom we have an important treatise, On the Trinity, who made a good attempt to reconcile these differences. But the issue wasn’t settled before the debates, explorations, and decisions of the fourth-century church. Historically this was after a very difficult third century for the Roman world that involved economic, social and constitutional crises. It was unstable times, and the Christian movement was reacting to this time, growing like wildfire, both east and west of Jerusalem and looking for a system of leadership and clarity in its diversity of thought and belief. The Christian movement was becoming church. With church came systems and organizations, hierarchy, creeds, doctrines, bishops, elders, deacons and as we know controversy and splits and unions and more splits and revivals and declines and wars and persecution and execution and I could go on. One can really understand, if you even glance at our church history, why a young person or anyone would say, I don’t care for religion and don’t want to get involved in a church. We are a mess and part of the reason we are a mess is because we are human. We human beings mess up—both individually and collectively. Welcome to our world.
But religion, all religion, begins with experience. In the beginnings of a religion it began with experience; and now, it begins with experience, a personal encounter with something beyond our understanding. These experience are invisible; so they give rise to symbols as we try to think about invisible things. Symbols are ambiguous; so we try to resolve the ambiguity by putting the experience and symbols into a system. The Nicene Creed and the Apostles Creed are the earliest attempts to understand systematically the events that changed the lives of the early Christians. The Trinity is a systematic way of holding together the way we Christians experience God. Christianity came out of Judaism, so we believe in God, without question as the creator of the universe. We believe Jesus was the messiah and see Jesus as God’s extension into the world. And then came Pentecost and the Holy Spirit, our counselor, and advocate, promised by Jesus. But the early Christians also projected their understanding of God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, God in three Persons back to the beginning of time. Our Christian reading of the Hebrew Bible sees evidence of all three, beginning with the first few verses of Genesis.
And then we believe that love is the essence of the Trinity. God is love. God loved the world so much God gave us Jesus. Jesus commanded us to love. The Holy Spirit inspires us to love. Love is the Trinity. The Trinity is Love. Sound simple? Well, it is not. One of our forefathers said that we could lose our minds trying to explain the Trinity. And judging by the reaction to The Shack by different Christians, I know that there is nothing simple about the Trinity.
I listened to Mark Driscoll, pastor of a mega-church in Seattle called Mars Hill say that the ideas about God in The Shack were heretical. It made God into a graven image. It was “goddess worship” because God, the Father was portrayed as a woman. And he told everyone in his church and beyond, because he was quoted in the New York Times, “don’t read The Shack.” Now, personally, I hope that statement inspires you to go read the book. Yet seriously, I wonder, what is so threatening in The Shack to some? Is it because of its popularity? Is it because Christians are finding it liberating? Or because someone said it left them “craving for the presence of God?”
I say, Praise God! Any book that gets people talking and questioning and wondering about God is good news to me. It might not be great literature; but it is a book that has caught the imagination of millions of people—both Christian and non-Christian. And I believe that’s a good thing.
The doctrine of the Trinity came out of the stories, the stories of God’s covenant work with Israel and then the stories of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and then the story of the experience of Pentecost. The early Christian fathers, figured out the doctrine of the Trinity to make sense of those stories, but the stories came first. It still happens like that, in that order. I have never heard of anyone having a religious experience reading about the doctrine of the Trinity although I should never doubt the grace of God working in the most unusual places. What I’m saying is the stories, our stories, our experiences come first! We experience something and that leads us to find a way to explain what we experienced. Psalm 29 is full of some much imagery of God the Creator, that I cannot doubt that someone filled with the magnificence and mystery of creation wrote that Psalm.
And each one of us has a story inside of us, a story that involves interacting with the physical world and the spiritual world. That story is who you are. Each of your stories have come together, here this morning in this sanctuary sharing an experience together. So together our stories also make a story. That story is the Hillsboro UMC’s story. One story, many persons. We have a story as church, a story as individuals, a story as whatever family we are part of. You can start to see why it was so important that the early church defined God as the Trinity. Because this thing called life is so mysterious and then we have this Creator Being, Force, whatever you want to call it, that is even more mysterious. But we humans need something tangible, explainable, we need words, ideas, symbols so we can begin to grasp the mystery, the divine and what is means to us. It scratches the surface of the great mystery of the divine. It is your story, your life that illuminates the doctrine of the Trinity. Not the other way around. And church is one place we can go to begin to understand and believe and accept this great mysterious and then try to live out what it teaches us. Amen.