On Good Friday in 1963, The Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr was arrested for his part in a series of mass meetings, sit-ins, marches and boycotts. The police in Birmingham, Alabama took Dr King into custody. That week, eight white clergymen, including Roman Catholic and Anglican (Episcopalian) bishops, had published a statement saying that nonviolent direct action was not the way to achieve justice, and calling for ‘negotiation’. They appealed to the local black community to work for justice in other ways, observing the principles of law and order and common sense.
While he sat in the cell, Dr King had a copy of the Birmingham News where this statement had been published. Writing in the margins of the newspaper, he made his response.
‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.’
This ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’ is today one of the seminal texts for understanding a Christian, nonviolent response to injustice and inequality. I encourage you to re-read it as tens of thousands of people take to the streets around our country, demanding justice for black deaths in custody and the sickeningly high rate of black incarceration. But while Dr King was a brilliant leader, orator and strategist, one can easily forget that the ‘Dr’ in front of his name was for systematic theology. His quest for racial and economic justice was entirely enmeshed in his quest to understand the nature of God.
For some of us, including me, when we think about God as three persons with one substance (if we think about it at all) we fall very easily into hierarchical thinking. The Father is the boss (of course) because our culture has ingrained in us that fathers are ‘breadwinners’ and ‘head of the household’ and ‘give their daughters away’ in marriage, and all that other patriarchal nonsense. So the son is clearly subordinate, doing the Father’s will and submitting to the Father. The Holy Spirit is a bit vague and esoteric, and is kind of like the weird cousin who drops in occasionally. We talk about Jesus more than we talk about the Spirit, so that probably indicates a third place ranking.
But what Martin Luther King Jr knew and tried to embody, was that God in three persons, blesséd Trinity, is a doctrine of radical equality. The Spirit pours out love towards the Son, and the Father self-empties to the Spirit, and the Son embraces the Father and the Spirit. The Athanasian Creed (which we never say in public worship but which is the third creed which shapes our doctrine) tells us
...in this Trinity none is afore, or after other; none is greater, or less than another; But the whole three Persons are co-eternal together and co-equal.
When Dr King wrote to eight other church leaders and declared that ‘we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality’, he was not only using flowery prose. He was appealing to their understanding of the nature of God who is both dynamic relationship and powerful unity. If the nature of God is three equal persons with one substance, and if we are made in the image of God, then if we claim to worship the Most Holy Blessed Trinity, this has real-life implications for the way that we relate to our fellow human beings.
Tomorrow will be two weeks since police officers in murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The protests which followed in the USA were not solely about one cruel death. They were the response to hundreds of years of subjugation, beginning with slavery, continuing with segregation, and culminating today in ongoing inequality and mistreatment of African-Americans. In the last four years in particular, white supremacist extremists have been emboldened by political rhetoric, and the racial bias present in law enforcement has only increased.
On Monday night here in Perth, and yesterday around the country, tens of thousands of people took the streets, even when (in Sydney) they expected to be defying a court order. There have been 432 Aboriginal deaths in custody since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Aboriginal people in Australia are incarcerated at ten times the rate of the general population. A week ago, here in our own state, Rio Tinto blew up Juukan Gorge, destroying a sacred site which contained evidence of human habitation more than 40,000 years old. There are plenty of reasons to protest, and whitefellas like me need to turn attention to our own ingrained sense of white supremacy. The foundational evil, the sin which grounds these cruel injustices, is a belief that in humans there is hierarchy – some of us are just better than some others. It may be a sense that some are better because of gender of wealth or class or status. But very often it’s a sense of superiority based on race. I am guilty of this sin, and so are most of us.
If we are to ‘worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance’, then we must make our lives an act of worship. With our bodies and our speech we must seek to wipe this heresy of white supremacy from the earth. Just as the persons of God are co-equal, so too are those humans made in God’s image. To say ‘black lives matter’ is to acknowledge the sovereignty of God - Father, Son and Holy Spirit – co-equal and co-eternal who rules with compassion and justice for all.
The Lord be with you