1st Sunday after Pentecost

The early years of family life for Cynthia and me were spent in a small town in Alabama, where Cynthia had been raised. In many ways, it truly was an exciting and stimulating season of life – so many new things were becoming true for me as I grew into this new version of myself: what it meant to be Eric as husband, father, home-owner, employee, commuter. But at another level, it was a very lonesome season. I had no real friends or community, and I was far removed from my roots, from my family in California where I’d been raised.

And then one summer, my parents organized a family reunion at Lake Tahoe. I remember arriving; I remember the hubbub of it all, the hugs, the laughter, the calling out to one another – and the recovery of this deeply secure, familiar sense of belonging. My new family, with Cynthia and the kids, was real. It was good, but it was something being stepped into for the first time. But my family of origin was known, deep in my bones. Even now, when I close my eyes, and enter into the memory of that reunion, I can still feel the substance of it all – what it meant to be entering into this new season of becoming, but now doing so with the deeper security of my heritage and my ongoing sense of belonging within it.

What’s noteworthy about the memory of that season is how it was – absolutely – a solitary experience. I, alone, was navigating this transition of identity: What does it mean to be Eric?” Nobody else in this world was asking the question as I was. And this remains the case. From birth to death, I will always be the only Eric – the only one who’s managing his way through this particular life, and trying to make meaning of it all.

Just as it is for each of you. There is no other person on this planet living your life, experiencing what you experience, interpreting their place in the world as you are. It is always, necessarily, a solitary existence.

And yet, what was also true of that season, is that my very personal, individual experience was absolutely happening within the context of the broader tiers of community to which I belonged. This “Eric” I was seeking to understand was “Eric, the husband;” “Eric, the father, the employee, the brother, the son.” And, as I broaden this experience beyond the memory of that particular summer, I recognize how this quest of self-knowledge is a life-long journey, and that it is always an absolutely relational reckoning that just keeps enlarging – tiers of relationship without end: Who am I as priest in the church with you? Who am I as a citizen of this country, of this world? Who am I as fellow creature on this planet with the cedars, the water, the air? And the more I watch, the more I relate, the more I believe that “Who I am” is intricately connected with everything.

It’s such a paradox.

This life we live is always a solitary life – unique in the cosmos. And it is always a corporate life, intimately connected in an endless web of relationships and belonging. To put it another way, it is no exaggeration to say that the great mystery of our lives is how to understand ourselves as both singular and plural; to be both “I” and “we.”

Both are true. And neither is more true than the other. Nor can one be true without the other. The paradox itself remains in perpetual relationship.

But (!) we don’t always see it. Or believe it. We believe, principally, in our singular existence, and have learned to doubt or mistrust or minimize the plural part of our identity. And here’s my theory why: because that is what sin does. “Sin” is anything that severs our awareness or experience of the corporate aspect of our existence. “Sin” is that which makes us believe only in our individuality, so that anything which is “other” can only be regarded as something separate – something unreliable, unsafe, unknown. Whether that “other” is a family member who’s hurt us, a neighbor we don’t want anything to do with, someone from another race or nationality or culture, or even a god. The “other” must always remain “other,” forever segregated in a separate sphere from ourselves.

But imagine! Imagine if it were otherwise:

Imagine a world of utter harmony where we believed and understood that our relationships with one another were as true an extension of our own identity – of our own person – as each limb is an extension of our one body.

Imagine a world where neighbors love and bless one another, such that sharing our tools or extra produce from a Costco shopping trip were as natural a thing to do as sharing it with our own family, or even with ourselves, because we saw no difference in caring for the other as caring for the self.

Imagine a world whose elections and political systems were only populated by citizens with a shared sense of duty to function as public servants, willfully giving their time and energy to dream and create societal structures committed to the welfare and flourishing of everyone they’re called to serve, because it would never cross their mind to bend the system to their own advantage.

Imagine a world where we sought to understand our relationship with the rest of creation, not from a posture of exploitation or hoarding, but as part of the circle of life and our mutual participation of being one, enormous, healthy organism.

It’s all a daydream, I know. But it’s a daydream we’re able to dream because, built within us, is the belief that it’s true. It’s utterly recognizable as the preferable way of living, the right way of living, because – clearly – this world is designed to function as one, every creature and system dependent on the health and vitality of the other.

This is the great mystery: that we are singular (I am Eric) and we are plural (I in you, and you in me). Our hearts feel the draw towards this in every relationship we enter. And our hearts feel the anguish of it in every relationship that’s damaged. Because we know, instinctively, that we are meant for union. If only we could. If only we could believe in our own individual worth, and then our larger worth as one with the other. Then would our resistance to Jesus’ most basic teaching disappear: love your neighbor as yourself. Well, of course we would, if we knew and believed our neighbors were part of ourselves. There would be no loss or diminishment in blessing the other, if the other were known as our broader self.

But here’s the great beauty of it all: God, in whose image we are made, is not severed. The sin that divides us, one from the other, has never divided God. So when we imagine a world of harmonious union, these imaginings are exactly what we mean when we speak of God as Trinity.

God is one. And God is plural. God is a perpetual union of being, an eternal community of harmonious relationship in love and purpose.

Which makes sense. After all, the God of our faith is the source and pattern of all that God made. So if we can see that this world is designed to function and exist as a single organism of many distinct parts, of course God – its parent – would exist in this same way.

And here’s the other beauty: we are one with that God.

God is in us, and we are in God. And if God is you and God is in me, and you are in God and I am in God, then I must be in you and you in me. This harmony of our mutual existence is real.

This is the gift of faith.

The God of our origin remains the God of our present, and will certainly be the God of our future. Whatever sin has divided us, that sin is forgiven. And though we may stumble still, more convinced of the sin than that sin’s erasure, the gift of faith is the invitation – today – to live in hope that our union is restored.

I feel it, sometimes, in communion. I hold the wafer in my hand – that small, round disc – hardly significant enough to be called bread. But Jesus, who is one with everything, tells me that he is one with this, too, such that it can become his body. And then that bread, now seen as Christ’s body, becomes every other thing in which God in Christ also resides, so that the bread becomes as the disc – the sphere – of this entire world, this entire cosmos, right there in my hand. And I eat that bread. I ingest God and the whole world, such that it – quite literally – becomes a part of me, my very body.

I in God, and God in me. And you in God and God in you. And you and I and every other thing are one, with the God who is one.

And so that Trinity of being: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, grows and grows, without end. In every generation, in every birth, the God who is continues to be the Great I AM, with us and in us.

And though God is present in God’s union with all that is, the face of God we most recognize and relate to is the God who became flesh, as one of us, Jesus of Nazareth. In him we see the purest expression of what it means it means to be human, as well as what it means to be God.

So what can we do in this life, but to seek to be like Jesus, to live and to love no longer for ourselves alone, but to the flourishing and union of all that is, with whom we share this one life.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.