Leader:
As one, let us affirm the faith that ties us together
while lifting up the wisdom of some of our fellow witnesses.
All:
We believe in the Triune God
whose very existence is relationship.
Although this Trinity is the one Being
who could be fully self-sufficient
They chose instead to let Their love flow out
into the formless void
and explode emptiness into life.
The dance of planets around stars,
stars around galaxies,
each body’s gravity tying it to
the bodies spiraling all around,
exemplifies the truth of all created things:
that we are bound to one another.
It is as God proclaimed
after fashioning the first human from the earth:
“It is not good for the human to be alone.”
Leader:
And that is why, trans Jewish Bible scholar Liam Hooper says, God took the lonely first human and split them into two humans who would depend upon each other:
“This earthling now is two. … So everything is exploded, and re-formed, and re-shaped, and re-imagined for the sole purpose of relationship. …God is telling us that self-sufficiency, and self-reliance, and self-care alone isn’t enough — ….that we need to be in full authentic relationship with each other in order to be in full relationship with God.”
All:
We believe that this Creator God
so loved and desired relationship with the world They’d made
that They squeezed their infinity into finite flesh
to live among us, share our joy and grief, pleasure and pain.
This miracle relied upon the yes
of one poor Jewish teenager in Rome-occupied Palestine.
Ever respectful of our free will,
The Sustainer of the Universe asked Mary
if she would sustain Them with her own body,
conceiving and birthing and nursing her own Creator.
Mary’s daring yes was not the only yes in this story!
She would rely on her bonds with others —
Elizabeth and Joseph, Simeon and Anna,
Mary Magdalene and the Beloved Disciple —
to live into God’s call.
We believe that these are the kinds of bonds
that tie all of us together,
and that the Body of Christ is not whole
until all voices are honored, all gifts celebrated.
Leader:
As Christian writer Rachel Held Evans once wrote,
“My theology is only as rich as the diversity of the people who have contributed to it, and it is a poor theology indeed that considers only the perspectives of those who look, think, and live just like me.”
All:
We believe that God’s gift to us through Jesus
is the restoration of all relationships.
We strive towards that restoration
here and now wherever possible,
and look forward to enjoying it in full
in the world to come.
I wrote this liturgy for a Trinity Sunday service that focused on Mary’s visitation to Elizabeth, connecting our relationships with one another to our relationship to God and God’s own self-relationship in the Trinity.
The quotation from Liam Hooper comes from an episode of his Bible Bash podcast.
The quotation from Rachel Held Evans comes from a Facebook post she wrote in 2014.
Binary-Breaking Worship 