Sermon for Sunday, June 15th 2025

Trinity Sunday
June 15, 2025

In the liturgy of the Word for this Trinity Sunday, we first hear the call of holy wisdom, The book of Proverbs poetically figuring Sophia, Holy Wisdom, a Christ figure present as God’s delight from before the beginnings of the created world, who delights in humankind. We hear the Psalmist wonder at God’s acts in creating us, we odd, fragile, foolish, beautiful, capable of so much, we human beings, made for God’s delight. We hear St. Paul speaking of what potential we can rise to through the trials of this life, when we receive God’s love poured into our hearts; and we hear Jesus announce the coming Spirit of truth who will guide us into all truth.

Together, these readings tell us, among many other things, that we are created for God, and that God’s love is the supreme force, the ultimate power, the most profound influence and fuel that can shape our lives. That in fact this God-produced fire is what is shaping in us, here in our midst, now, a new creation that is God-shaped. What does it mean that what is given to us and is coming to be in our midst is God-shaped? What does a God-shaped tomorrow look like? What does a future, called into being by the community of Holy Trinity, look like?

I had some travels last month. In the first leg of it all, I presented at a conference in Assisi, Italy, yes, the home of St. Francis of Assisi. And I was there during the official Period of Mourning for Pope Francis and the beginnings of the Conclave, so that lent an extra special air to the context. The conference was aimed at garnering ecumenical consensus towards the churches of the West adopting what has been for many centuries a tradition in the East of honouring God as Creator with a special Feast Day. My job there was to present the readings that are being proposed by an ecumenical body in Canada and the United States for this Feast. For us, the Feast needs to be decidedly Trinitarian: the Scriptures as we hear them today on Trinity Sunday remind us that all Persons of the Holy Trinity have a role in God’s loving creative ways of being. More than this, though. Some present at the conference were fixed on needing the celebration to be about what God has done in the past in setting up this beautiful creation and ourselves within it. For those of us who have been working deeply with the Bible in considering the Feast, it has become important for us to look at God’s loving and creative actions not just in terms of our linear, human chronos-bound understandings of creation as a past event, but to imagine God’s creativity extending from the God’s new creation in a future present tense that God is already creating in and with us here and now, God’s Kairos, God’s inbreaking reign or kingdom, extending through time in ways that mess with our linear, progressive notions of time. To ponder these things is to imagine a view of time in which God’s reign of creative, loving justice-making and righteousness making shape the values we are called to live daily. To ponder these things is to imagine our own daily lives caught up in the very life of the holy community that is the Holy Trinity, caught up in response to the Person of Holy Wisdom who calls out to us to follow her; caught up in the Spirit of Truth who is leading us into all truth.

Next, I was in Dubai with the Anglican Communion Safe Church Commission. On our one break from work, we had an excursion to the Museum of the Future. One of the most astounding architectural monuments I’ve ever encountered that words cannot describe – a ‘torus’ shaped, spherical, donut-like building. Upon entering we were asked to leave aside our daily lives and its worries, and especially, it seemed, any fears we might have about the future and what worries may come, and to voyage to 2071, when all of these cares will have been taken care of. The eighteen or so of us went along with it all at the start. We had some fun in the simulated space craft voyage (which was actually an elevator taking us up to the 7^th floor, and we marvelled for a time at the images of the earth viewed from our imaginary space station). And then we moved from dark room to dark room in which we were meant to be further dazzled by holographic images of plant and animal species whose DNA may be stored on such an imaginary space station; and amazed by AI generated and screen-projected images of future ways of medical treatments and food sources.

Several things happened in me and in my friends as we wandered through the museum. First, several of us started to feel a bit of vertigo – you know, the sort of thing that happens when you’re in an artificial environment surrounded by large screens with nearly-real images messing with one’s sense of balance, physically and in other ways, too. But we weathered the discomfort and continued.

It was when I was in a room dedicated to showing us what wellness practices will look like that I admit I lost it. Undulating foam ‘dunes’ invited us to relax and to sunbathe under computer generated rays on a plastic beach with no pesky sand to get into our crevices or UV rays to burn us. I couldn’t help it. I turned to my friend from the Solomon Islands and said, “now, Sr. Veronica, I want to know how all of this is going to help your islands from being overtaken by the rising Pacific Ocean.” Yves, from Burundi, was nearby. “How will all this AI help you with the refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo now that the USAID grants have been cut and you have no food with which to feed them?” Together with Marcel, who works with Indigenous people in Brazil, Wadie who is trying to keep young Palestinian Christian kids safe in his youth program running out of St. George’s Cathedral Jerusalem, we wondered how this museum experience was intended to make us feel. We came to the conclusion that it was a brilliant exercise in emotional manipulation. Leave your troubles aside, and come in here where you can be assured that the future will be not only fine, it will be glorious! Just trust us, we who are experts in AI! Another word for that is propaganda.

Now, I’m far from being a luddite, but what I object to is the colonizing of the future by wealthy technology companies. The architecturally beautiful museum building is emblazoned with Arabic script. Notably not verses from the Koran, but a poem by the Sheik ruler of Dubai. It reads in part: “The future will be for those who will be able to imagine, design, and built it. The future does not wait; the future can be designed and built today.”

Truth, in part; but like many such things it is the ‘in part’ that is trouble. Saint Paul might have said that affliction produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope and left it at that, and might sound very much like the poem on the Museum of the Future. But Paul is not expounding on the capacities of human beings to invent our own futures by growing endurance out of suffering under our own steam, or by innovating our way out of the doldrums of endurance.

It is only by the love of God poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that affliction can lead to endurance rather than bitterness and resentment; only through God’s creative love that endurance can lead to a hope-filled character rather than arrogance, and only with God’s injection of a new imagination for the new creation that any of this, God’s-eyed-view future can come to be.

A God’s-eyed-future is like actually hearing Wisdom calling to us from the depths of human reality: of sinking islands, of hungry refugees, of displaced Indigenous peoples and their own wisdom. Wisdom calls us from the depths of these realities into the light of the life of the Holy Trinity, and points us to the ways in which that community of the Trinity would have us shape a future in God’s ways. This is far from being a future that we are confidently making with our own hands, through more and more innovation, or by moving fast and breaking things; this is far from a future dominated by more and more stunning and entertaining technological advances that mesmerize us with their abilities to entertain and to give us a hope that AI will save us. This is a future into which we are drawn and actually, truly, live, in the now, that is the shape of the very love of that Trinitarian communion that is God, a shape that is cruciform: it looks very much like the self-giving love of the cross that seeks to address injustice and to offer real help and healing, food and hope where there is need, now. Wisdom is calling: do we hear her calling us into deeper and deeper communion with the Trinity of Love which is the heart of creation? Because that is where our own hearts can be found.