GOSPEL: Matthew 28:16-20
16Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. 17When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. 18And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

The high school I attended in Edmonton was one of the biggest senior high schools in Canada, with a diverse population of 2500 students. A 60s building experiment with no windows, it looked like the mixture between a shopping mall and a bunker. In the middle of the school was a large square sunken-in indoor courtyard called the rotunda. On the four sides were the main office, the cafeteria, the doors to the school theatre, and the the wall of trophies. 

With so many students, it was often crowded in the hallways. The rotunda was a place that students naturally congregated during breaks. One particular memory I have is how student separated themselves into groups. In the four corners of the rotunda, groups would gather often according to the colour of their skin. In one corner the black students, another the Asian students, another the students from southeast Asia and the other the Middle-Eastern students.

And in the hustle bustle of breaks and lunch, these groups would throw pennies and mock others students walking by. Yet whenI walked by, these corner groups left me alone. Even as every students walking in front of me had a penny thrown at them, I wouldn’t. I always passed by unbothered.

I always assumed it was because I was a football player, often wearing my jersey or football jacket. I thought was big and tough, too risky to bother. 

It wasn’t until relatively recently that it dawned on that me that this wasn’t the whole story. I was left alone because I was a white kid. A white football player. They knew that if I reacted and fought back they would get in trouble, a phone call home, a detention or a suspension. While I would only get a slap on the wrist. 

When I finally realized this truth year later, I then wondered why these students were harassing people in the first place.

To answer that question, you need to first ask where all white students were. And the answer is everywhere. The white students filled the tables and chairs in the cafeteria, they sat along the walls of the rotunda to each lunch, they were on the steps down, they were in the middle where you could sit on the ground. But the corners, the corners were the worst place to be. They were busy intersections where you couldn’t sit and eat without being tripped over, where you had to stand and hug the wall. 

The white students took up all the good space, and left the scraps to the racialized students. 

This is what white privilege looks like. This is white supremacy. My prominent memory was of the students in the corners, grouped according to their skin colour but not the fact that the white kids took up all the good spaces. For years, I conveniently overlooked the white students taking up all the good space while being annoyed and offended by students of colour occupying leftovers. 

And even though I try to be aware of my biases, this makes me I realize that I need to go back and review the ways in which I am regularly participating in the systems and structures that privilege my white body over the the bodies of people of colour.

As protests in Minneapolis, across the United States, here in Canada and around the whole world continue night after night, the reality of the inequalities and suffering of black people, of indigenous people and people of colour all around us have been brought to our attention.Our blissfully oblivious world as white people has been rocked this week by the cries for justice of our sibblings of colour. We can no longer pretend like we don’t know what is really happening any more. 

And so we recognize that the systems and structures and attitudes that exist in us and around us uphold white supremacy, even as we may try ourselves, as white people, to distance ourselves from it. Even as we try to be good people who don’t hold malice towards or hatred for anyone. We recognize that we benefit from a world that privileges us because of our skin, and that even though we face struggles and hardships in our lives, one of them isn’t the daily obstacles of racism and discrimination. 

So today, we name White Supremacy as sinful. 

But not sinful in the sense that it is something that gets you on Santa’s naughty list… rather something deeper. White Supremacy is a sin in how it separates and divides us, how it is a distortion of our relationship with God, with others, with creation and with ourselves. We recognize and then confess that white supremacy is a sin because it elevates some people above other people for arbitrary reasons. It attempts to claim that some (white people) are more fully human, while others (people of colour) are less human.

Now you might be asking by this point why the pastor is talking about racism, white supremacy, and the protests for Black Lives Matter and George Floyd on Trinity Sunday. What do they have to do with the Trinity?

Well… they are in fact deeply interconnected. 

Trinity Sunday is often filled with cute, yet borderline heretical examples and descriptions of the Trinity such as: God is like an apple pie, or God is like the three states of water.  

Yet, the doctrine of the trinity is ultimately about relationships. The trinity is a doctrine of community. 

The Trinity is a community, three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, one God, one Body, one Community. 

At a time when the divisions and separations, the community splitting realities of racism and white supremacy are being revealed to us daily… the Trinity both models to us  relationships and community as they ought to be. 

Relationships of mutuality and sacrifice, relationships of give and take. In the the Trinity, the 3 persons are co-equal, and yet there are times when on member steps forward while the others step back. It is the Father’s voice that speaks in creation. It is the Son that is the Word of God enfleshed. It is the Holy Spirit’s breath that blows through the disciples and into the world at Pentecost. 

And so this week, as the Pentecost spirit lifts up the voices of Black Indigenous People of Colour, it is our turn as mostly white siblings in faith to listen.  

It is our turn to step back, to make room for voices that have been relegated to the left over corners of the world. To wonder why we have been content to stand by as our brothers, sisters and siblings of colour have pushed to margins to suffer. 

And then it is our turn to follow our siblings of colour into the work of justice.  

And yet…

And yet on this Trinity Sunday, we are also reminded that our world will not be fixed by our own power. And we are reminded that it is our imperfections, our flawed humanity that got us here, and so our flawed humanity will not save us. 

But rather, this Triune God – whom has been revealed to us in the Word passed on from generation to generation – that this Triune God is already at work among us transforming us and the world in ways we could never imagine on our own. 

That on this Trinity Sunday during the middle of a pandemic, 
surrounded by protests for justice and change,
we are reminded that this triune God, 
this community God, 
this God of relationships… 
that THIS God is the One 
who will work in us the new thing 
that will bring the world to right. 

That the God, 
who died as a brown human body on a cross,
is the one who is ushering in a new creation, 
new life revealed in the same brown human body 
that walked out of the tomb 3 days later.

We are reminded today, that God will do and is already doing what we cannot, breaking hearts open for the sake of our brothers, sisters and siblings who are suffering. 

Opening our eyes to truly see our neighbour calling for justice, 
opening our ears to hear the pleas of voices so long silenced by our indifference. 

No, we cannot fix this broken world on our own. 
No we cannot bring justice and peace by our own power. 

Yet, the God who walks with those on the margins, 
the God who makes room for the other 
rather than taking up all the space, 
the God who has suffered with humanity in human flesh…. 

The Trinity will do 
in and through us 
that which we cannot do by our own power. 
The triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 
will extend the loving community 
of the divine three-in-one to all creation, 
and especially to those most forgotten and excluded. 

The Trinitarian God revealed to us again today,
will bring us to new life, 
new resurrected life, 
new resurrected life found in the One Body, 
the One Community, 
the One family of the divine one-in-three. 

And so, on this Trinity Sunday, on this day when our suffering world cries out again and again for justice… we are reminded that God the Trinity is bringing to life in us the very thing we have failed to be…

yet, the thing that the Trinity is preparing us to become – the Kingdom, Community and Body of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  
The Body of Christ.

Amen.