“Mysterious Pivot Point”
“Mysterious Pivot Point”
Year C Trinity Sunday June 12, 2022
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 Romans 5:1-5 John 16:12-15
Pastor Andy Kennaly, First Presbyterian Church, Sandpoint, Idaho
Last week I started to visit a Physical Therapist. The combination of my body getting older and carrying injuries from an active lifestyle, such as downhill skiing, is causing a chain reaction. Sore shoulders translate into bad habits when it comes to posture, and this increases some muscles while minimizing others. Sore shoulders can radiate into a sore neck, which may lead to headaches and back pain. Everything’s connected and to treat ailments effectively, the help of a skilled Physical Therapist can raise awareness of what the issues are, they can prescribe exercises and suggest daily disciplines to retrain the mind and body to build important muscles, to take on new habits that are beneficial rather than destructive. How one responds, what someone does to integrate these best practices into their lives determines the outcome. Much of the time, it’s not a quick fix. Unlearning bad habits is a long-term process of retraining, of re-learning to experience the fullness of well-being.
It’s amazing how one minute you’re skiing a nice powder line and then all of a sudden something happens and there’s a crash. In a moment an injury takes place, in my case, a separation of the AC joint, where my collar bone hooks into my shoulder area. This affects the skeletal structure, which affects the muscle tissue and the nerves. Not only does it cause pain in the crash, or for the days and weeks that follow the crash, but it’s a lifelong injury that will never go back to the way it was. My body has learned to compensate for the injury, and it doesn’t slow me down, but some of the things my body has learned are not helpful anymore. I need to be diligent in re-training my body on what is helpful and what is not. Pain now reminds me that it’s time pay attention.
I’m not telling you about my shoulders for fun. This is an intentional analogy. This physical therapy situation is like the Church as the Body of Christ in the world. Much like my ski crashes can be traced historically to two different days, my left shoulder in Oregon, my right shoulder in Idaho, so too, Western Christianity has historical pivot points that impact the Body of Christ in unhealthy ways, only we’ve grown so accustomed to them, that we think they’re normal. But Christianity has developed negative patterns that perpetuate illness rather than healing, that cause division rather than reconciliation, and develop doctrines to codify beliefs that are based on culturally influenced human restrictions rather than divine possibility. Tracing the source of this injury is complicated.
Many Christians have grown used to the way things are and assume this is meant to be, even retreating to fundamentalist expressions that affirm what is assumed as truth. Others leave the Church, knowing something is wrong but not knowing how to fix it. They become “spiritual but not religious” as they reject the institution but pay attention to their intuition.
We could pick on many things, such as the fourth century shift from a dynamic and diverse early church to an Empire religion. Variety was lost to maintain a standardization that could be accepted by the narrow, restrictive geopolitics of the Roman Empire. Even the Bible became a closed canon and other excluded manuscripts were either destroyed or hidden. We could also point out the change in practice as Christians of that early church did not serve in the military and rejected violence, but then the Empire changed this, even to the point where the Pope had armies and led repeated Crusades of violent oppression, all in the name of God.
We could mention the Doctrine of Discovery, promoted by the Church since the 15th century to give dominant Christian powers divine license to capture, kill, and destroy indigenous resources and nations, and how this continues to shape international law on property in ways that help multi-national corporations extract resources from indigenous territories around the world. (https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/what-is-the-doctrine-of-discovery/)
There are other historic developments to point at, sources of pain that fester misunderstanding and shape participation and assumptions as the Body of Christ. Some of these are rather established in the majority Church, such as the Doctrine of Penal Substitutionary Atonement, that transactional thread of worm theology that condemns groveling humanity to judgment, and especially when this is merged into an individualistic culture that pushes individual salvation rather than cosmic transformation, where God is judge rather than healer, and even Christ is commodified into something had by some but not by all and Jesus becomes the dealer of a futurized glory that one hopes to invest in before it’s too late. This doctrine rejects our Essence.
So does the Doctrine of Original Sin, started as an encouragement but rapidly twisted as a method of control under the threat of punishment. The list of ailments goes on and on. Christianity is like a little kid running wild, getting sprains and broken bones and scratches as it explores the world. Some of these wounds are infected. To grow up well, we need more than Band-Aids, but internal and systemic treatments.
Trinity Sunday invites us deeper than all these doctrines and dogmas and religious practices, into the heart of divine mystery. How we live as Christians, what we believe and focus on, and what expressions we perpetuate have little hope if we don’t look to the core issue in a way that Trinity Sunday is uniquely poised to do.
There is a mysterious pivot point that affects everything else. It is mysterious because it is a matter of faith, deep trust that is more intuition than mental knowledge, experiential and lived, internalized in ways that cannot be externally codified. This mysterious pivot point originates, is held, and always shall be sustained in Divine Love. This gracious Love invites us to our deepest and Truest Self, hidden in God through Christ.
Thomas Keating helps express that mysterious pivot point as he quotes the 16th century Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross, who says, “the center of our soul is God and so as we leave behind the perplexities and the suffering and the turmoil, we turn towards our inmost center. And we move from psychological awareness to the spiritual level of our being, a level of intuition and our capacity for God….” (quoted in Thin Places, a publication of Westminster Presbyterian Church, Minneapolis, MN, page four, https://www.westminstermpls.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/ThinPlaces_111.pdf).
The center of our soul is God. This is the core of that mysterious pivot point on which everything else finds expression. The habits we form, the beliefs we assume, either accept, reject, lift, or ignore this nugget of Perennial Wisdom. The center of our soul is God. Love is our Essence. No illusions of separation. The gift of peace beyond understanding that celebrate unity, just as Trinity celebrates, and our relational spirit is grounded in our ever-Present origin. Aware, awake, we join the dance, Divine Mystery in holy flow. Our Essence, our soul, our Truest Self, even latent, down deep we know, the center of our soul is God.
The way Paul puts it as he shares with Christians in Rome is this: “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand.”
Like Paul the mystic trusts faith and claims the gift of peace in unity with Christ, spiritual disciplines help us silence other voices, even our own thoughts are held loosely. Centering helps us unlearn painful habits, critique their source, and build spiritual muscle in new ways that broaden love’s peace and welcome. This not only changes individual lives, but lifts the collective consciousness as life in the fullness of Christ in all things helps brighten the flame of Love. Trinity Sunday is expansive because we, as the fourth member of the Trinity, join the dance of mystery and love that lives at the center of our soul and shapes everything else.
Thanks be to God for the fullness of Christ, the unending mystery of Love, and the Spirit’s goodness that continues to unfold creative life. Amen.