But is the Holy Trinity really the God we worship? Do we worship the perfect community of love that we know through our Lord Jesus Christ, or do we really serve somebody else?
In polytheism, the gods are distinct persons, like the three persons of our Trinity. But those gods aren't knit together in perfect love. They want different things. They sometimes fight with each other. People can do things to please one god in a polytheistic system and make other gods upset. That's not the case with our God. The Holy Trinity has one divine will. One divine ethics. What the Father loves, the Son loves, and the Holy Spirit loves. Our God is not a single person, but the Holy Trinity shares a single sense of joy, and a single yearning for the good.
Our first lesson is one of my favorite in the Bible. It's not the creation story; it's a creation story, one of perhaps twenty times our holy scripture tells us about God creating the heavens and the earth. But this creation story is an act of resistance. This creation story was written down in Babylon, during the exile, to try to preserve the religious identity of God's people in the face of Babylonian assimilation. And so this creation story takes all the "facts" from the Babylonian creation story – the order in which things were created, the timing, and so on, and subverts the Babylonian creation story to assert the most important parts. The Babylonians taught that the gods were at war in a watery chaos that predated the heavens and the earth, and that over the course of seven key phases, as side effects of the gods fighting with each other, light was divided from darkness, sea from sky, land from water. Each of these realms were populated as a result of the war of the gods, and then finally one god triumphed over the others and there was rest. The god who won the war was, naturally, the god of the city of Babylon, Marduk, but the other gods, with their competing desires, could rise up at any time, and so there was a divine mandate to keep Babylon strong to triumph over anyone who might rise up against it.
The people of Judah in exile in Babylon came along and said, "if we're stuck here, and our children keep hearing this story, we have to teach them how to resist." They picked the most important parts and changed them, to subvert the story. They didn't fight with the supposition of a pre-creation watery chaos, although that doesn't appear in any of the other creation stories in the Bible. They didn't fight with the order in which creation happened, although that contradicts other scriptural accounts. What they said was important, the most important, the thing they had to resist, was the idea that creation happened because warring gods with clashing desires fought, and creation was the byproduct. No. There is one God, who willed that creation exist, and spoke, and it happened, and God saw that it was very good. Creation is not an accident. Creation is not a byproduct. Creation is not the result of conflict between divine forces, mandating perpetual war so that the right gods might win. The love of God overflowed, and the world came to be, and it was very, very good. This is our faith, the exiles of Judah told their children. This is what we believe. You are surrounded by people who worship different gods, but we worship the Lord. We do what we do because we are who we are because we serve the Lord God, the maker of heaven and earth. So said the exiles of Judah, and they taught their children to resist the narratives that surrounded them, to avoid assimilation into a toxic polytheism of conflict and oppression, and wrote their story down: in the beginning: Genesis.
We are like the exiles in Babylon. We, too, live in a culture that actively worships false gods of conflict, exploitation, and oppression. We, too, need to tell our stories of resistance to hold firm to our faith in the God who is a community of perfect love, in the face of a culture that would assimilate us to the worship of their false gods. The terrifying thing is that so many people identify as followers of the Holy Trinity, but in fact actually look for salvation to the false gods of our civic religion. Far too often I find myself in that trap too. Just like the exiles in Babylon, we have to ask ourselves again and again whom we serve: do we serve the Lord, or do we serve the false gods that surround us? You’re going to have to serve somebody. Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re going to have to serve somebody,
I believe we have three distinct false gods that we actively worship in the United States, and by false gods, I mean stories and sources of ultimate power to whom people honestly turn for salvation, and those three false gods are Tribalism, which includes white supremacy, Mammon or Wealth, and Empire.
Tribe, wealth, and empire are three gods that have seduced us into looking to them for our ultimate salvation. We say we worship God, but whenever you take the Gospel seriously, someone will take you aside and say, "but let's be practical," and appeal to one of these three idols.
It took me a while to realize that these three were all worshipped in our civic religion, because these three deities are fundamentally at odds with each other. Having been taught monotheism in my religion classes through my childhood and adulthood, I was unprepared to recognize that in the United States, the prevailing civic religion seems to be a polytheistic blend of the worship of all three. These three gods are at odds with each other because in the cult of each of these gods, and the ethics that flows from the worship of each of these gods, the source of dignity comes from a fundamentally different verb: to be, to have, to do.
In tribal ethics, dignity comes from being a member of the favored tribe; each one has dignity according to the relative worth of the tribe to which one belongs. White supremacism is deeply rooted here. The lives and deaths of favored ones matter over and above other lives and deaths. Some people have dignity and importance because of who they are; others do not, again because of who they are. For salvation, for protection from all ill, we work to advance the well-being of "our kind" and work to make sure "their kind" is kept down. The worship of the white tribal god leads people to call black demonstrators against police brutality "wild savages" and "barbarians" – less than human because they are not part the only "properly human" tribe. The worship of the false god of tribe insists that black lives don't matter. That only white people bear the proper image of the tribal god.
In the worship of wealth or Mammon, supreme dignity and rights belong to those who have. The owner of property is entitled to rights and control but also admiration. In the worship of Mammon, we seek salvation by amassing as much wealth as we can, knowing that what we can buy, be it food, health care, or whatever, is what will preserve our life and well-being. In the worship of Mammon, the greatest rule of ethics is the sanctity of property rights. The worship of Mammon says, "it's too bad people die because of police brutality, but looting and rioting has got to stop." Death is regrettable, but the destruction of property is the ultimate sin against the god Mammon. The worship of Mammon cherishes things and uses people, a perversion of our creator's intent.
In the worship of empire, stability and calm comes from what the empire does: it dominates all who would rise up against it. Dignity and respect belong to those who wield power in the name of the empire and who dominate others. In the worship of empire, salvation comes from the powerful being able to keep the weak in line. We make sacrifices to the god of empire on the altars called "law" and "order." Our safety, in this system, depends on the rulers being able to keep people obedient and in line. The world will be at peace when the power of the empire extends both deep and wide: wide across the entire earth, so that no one is outside the rule of the empire, and deep, such that the empire can command obedience and proper behavior without question. In this system of worship, peace comes when people comply with the orders of the empire, and if that fails, when the empire can exert its strength, and totally dominate those who resist.
The three gods of tribe, wealth, empire each distribute their favor differently, as gods do in a polytheistic system, but the worship of all three constitutes the American civic religion. So closely bound to our culture is this polytheistic civic religion that when people protest its murderous implications, many wrongly think they are protesting against America itself.
This civic religion is fundamentally at odds with the worship of the holy and undivided Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. When Jesus commands, in our gospel reading today, that we go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Jesus teaches us that, like the exiles of Judah in Babylon, we must resist the false gods of the culture that surrounds us. We ourselves must turn, and call others to turn away from the false gods that dehumanize and exploit and kill God's beloved, and embrace the Holy, Blessed, and undivided Trinity of perfect love.
How do we resist the demonic forces that say that some human lives don't matter and turn to the God who created and loves all people? The Gospel today tells us the answer: Step one is Baptism. Step two is to teach and practice the faith. And step three, when we get discouraged, is to remember that Jesus is with us always, even to the end of the age.
With God’s help, we renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God, the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God, and all sinful desires that draw us from the love of God.
With God’s help, we turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as our Savior, put our whole trust in his grace and love, and promise to follow and obey him as our Lord.
With God’s help, we believe in the Most Holy, Glorious, and Undivided Trinity, One God.
With God’s help, we continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers.
With God’s help, we persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever we fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord.
With God’s help, we proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ.
With God’s help, we seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourself.
With God’s help, we strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.
This is what we promise in baptism. This is our faith. Every human being is created in God's image, and deserves justice and dignity. If the worshippers of false gods claim that only the rich, only the powerful, only the white are important, we who worship the Holy Trinity must object. This is why, as long as anyone’s actions leave any doubt, we must proclaim again and again and again that Black Lives Matter, and work to make it true. Amen.
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