The Unshakable Foundation [Trinity Sunday C - Romans 5:1-5]
The Rt. Rev. Jeremiah Williamson
Romans 5:1-5
The Unshakable Foundation
St. Philip’s, Norwood
Dear Church,
I know you are tired…of waking up to a world of uncertainty…of
warily doomscrolling your social media…of turning on and tuning in to a steady cycle
of changes, chances, and crises. I know
you are tired…of the images of pain and suffering, of war and violence, of
despair. In the nation. In the world.
And now very much seared into your soul.
I know you are tired…because you no longer know what to do or say or how
to feel, because the emotions are so mixed these days, mixed to the point of
muddled.
The foundations are being shaken. Those things long taken for granted in our
society are being questioned and undermined and, in some cases, discarded. Trust has eroded as the very technologies we
believed would usher in an information age have proved at least equally adept
at transmitting misinformation. Mass
extinction seems to be imminent – biologically and institutionally. We are living in a season of loss – and much
that will be lost, we will not get back.
In a time of great upheaval, anxiety becomes
atmospheric. The great 20th
century theologian Paul Tillich wrote, “The anxiety which is potentially
present in every individual becomes general if the accustomed structures of
meaning, power, belief, and order disintegrate.” He identifies two conflicting types of
anxiety that co-exist in times like our own.
He writes, “The one type is the anxiety of annihilating narrowness, of
the impossibility of escape and the horror of being trapped. The other is the anxiety of annihilating
openness, of infinite, formless space into which one falls without a place to
fall upon. Social situations like [the
one in which we live] have the character of both trap without exit and of an empty,
dark, and unknown void. Both faces of
the same reality arouse the latent anxiety of every individual who looks at
them. Today most of us do look at them.”[1]
It is the claustrophobia of the present moment that rattles
our peace; and the unnerving unpredictability of the future that threatens our
hope. And what makes these unsteady
times all the more difficult to navigate is that we are trying to do so in a
nation perhaps more divided and fractured than we have been since the Civil
War. And in a global age in which
division is imported and exported, spread like a contagion, with no regard for
borders or boundaries.
It feels like everything is falling apart. It feels like that, but not everything
is. It feels like the foundation is
crumbling out from under us, but, our God, the Ground of our Being, remains a
firm foundation, even in times of trouble.
Tillich reminds us that, “[God] is the foundation on which
all foundations are laid; this foundation cannot be shaken. There is something immovable, unchangeable,
unshakeable, eternal, which becomes manifest in our passing and in the
crumbling of our world. On the
boundaries of the finite the infinite becomes visible; in the light of the
Eternal [Triune God] the transitoriness of the temporal appears.”[2] That is to say, after everything else, God
is. Still there. Still with us.
Our faith does not make this life easy; it does not negate
the terrors that haunt, especially the most vulnerable, people in our nation
and our world; it does not erase all the pain.
But it is our faith in the Triune God that establishes in us a stubborn
hope. Paul proclaims that “suffering
produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces
hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into
our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”
The Trinity is not just a doctrine that is difficult to
explain or an equation that is hard to solve.
The Trinity reveals to us the nature and heart of God. God is the bold and clarion assertion that
distinctions are not contrary to the divine goal of Unity. The Trinity is an icon of the power of love
to hold when everything else is breaking apart.
Our Triune God is the dynamic changelessness upon which all things,
including our hope and our future, is established.
Things are changing.
But the love of God, the force at the heart of the Divine relationship,
does not change. Love is our sure
foundation when the world shakes. Love
keeps us together when it seems like we are falling apart. Love holds us when we feel like we are
falling. Love is our power when we think
we are powerless. In a fractured nation
and a broken world, nothing can separate us from the love of God – our Triune
God whose very nature is love.
I know you are tired, but don’t give in; don’t give up. The love that has been poured into your heart
is the hope this battered world desperately needs. The present might feel small. The future might feel ominous. But in the grand scheme of God, love is the
way, and love is the destiny.
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