Threeness: the condition of existing as
three persons or things
Today
is Trinity Sunday. A medieval innovation of the English Church,
Trinity Sunday since the 14th century, has been a feast day
in honor
of the Holy Trinity.
The doctrine
of the Trinity is the theological assertion that God is three is one:
Creator,
Christ and Spirit. Objectively speaking it is a difficult, if not
inexplicable
concept.
Having
studied and read theology for many years, I some time ago arrived at
the
conclusion that the Trinity is one of those mysteries that is best left
as just
that: a mystery.
Nevertheless,
I could not help but follow a tantalizing claim I happened upon
yesterday deep
inside my computer. I happened upon a link that announced: The
Trinity Explained! It went on to boast of A Detailed
Explanation of the Holy Trinity in Easy Terms.
Relieved
to have discovered A Detailed Explanation
of the Holy Trinity in Easy Terms I clicked my mouse and learned
that the
Trinity can be explained by understanding H2O.
Water, ice and steam, it said, are all H2O. As water, ice
and steam
are one, and yet different, so are Father, Son and Spirit one, and yet
different – three different forms of the
same entity or being.
Well, as satisfying as that
explanation is, I think I may have happened upon an even better one …
also by
way of science and of analogy.
We
know from science that there are some things you cannot get at directly
… things
we cannot observe with our own eyes or instruments. And yet we know
about them,
we believe they exist, because we can observe the effects they create,
the
traces they leave, the impact they impose upon the world around them.
I
believe that the mystery of the Trinity is like that. It cannot be
observed
directly. But we can observe the difference it has made, the passions
it
inspires, the traces it leaves in its wake.
The
Mt. Vernon Congregational Church, whose anniversary we celebrate today,
was
formed in 1842 to provide a voice – a pulpit – for a passionately
Trinitarian
preacher in the midst of the Unitarian Controversy. Dr. Kirk inspired
his
congregants to acts of service and sacrifice, the effects of which have
been
felt around the world.
Members
and leaders of Mt. Vernon were instrumental in founding
numerous
educational and mission institutions, including: Mt.
Holyoke, Wellesley,
Wheaton, Northfield Mt. Hermon, MIT,
Pinkerton Academy,
Doshisha University
in Kyoto, the American
Church in Paris,
the Mt. Vernon
Church in Africa, and
Plymouth
Congregational Church in Lawrence,
Kansas.
If
you want to understand the Trinity, ponder the powerful, passionate and
tender
ministries developed and nurtured by the members of Mt. Vernon.
When
Mt. Vernon
fell on hard times in the late 1960’s –
a result of changing demographics in the Back Bay – our own Tom Boates,
then an
Associate Minister of Old South, helped facilitate the merger of Mt. Vernon
and Old South … a relationship we maintain today.
Today Mt.
Vernon
remains an independent congregation.
Quinn and I serve as its ministers. We have officers, deacons,
committees, a powerful
legacy and a two million dollar endowment, the interest of which we
distribute
to causes, organizations and ministries in keeping with the historic
interests
of Mt. Vernon.
I’d
like to ask the Mt. Vernon Church
moderator, Ken Campbell, and all the members of Mt. Vernon
to rise.
Also, Dorothy Turkington to rise. Dorothy is
one of
the last two surviving members of the 1970 Mt. Vernon
Church.
I am delighted that we have with us this
morning, the
grandson of the Reverend A. Sidney Lovett, the 5th Minister
of Mt.
Vernon. Uncle Sid, as he was called, was a beloved and highly respected
minister in the Boston
area. He served Mt. Vernon for thirteen years until his was
stolen from Mt. Vernon
to serve as the chaplain to Yale University
… which he did
with distinction for many years.
Uncle Sid’s grandson, the Reverend Sidney
Charles
Campbell Lovett, comes from a long-line of distinguished Congregational
leaders. Campbell serves today as the
Senior
Minister of the Newman Congregational Church, UCC in East Providence, Rhode Island.
Campbell and I go back a long way as we were in the same class at Yale Divinity School.
Representing the Lovett family, and possessed
of the
very DNA of the 5th minister of Mt. Vernon,
please give a warm welcome to Campbell Lovett.
Words
on Behalf of the Sidney Lovett Family
On
the Occasion of the 165th Anniversary of Mt. Vernon
Congregational Church
June
3, 2007 ~ Old South
Church, Boston
Good Morning. I
bring you greetings
on behalf of the Sidney Lovett family, and I thank you for this
opportunity to
share with you remembrances about my grandfather and his tenure as the
fifth
pastor at Mt. Vernon Congregational Church.
Since Nancy
has set the
framework within the context of three-ness, I would like to follow suit
with
three sets of threes. Allow me to begin with an introductory set of
three
confluences with Old South – through Nancy Taylor, a long name, and a
shared
history.
I’m
grateful to your Senior Minister, Nancy Taylor, for this invitation to
join you
in this Anniversary Service. Nancy and I were classmates at Yale Divinity School,
and I am glad for
this opportunity to catch up with her right after her 25th
reunion
and just before mine. As we were both child prodigies of theology, we
matriculated at a young age, thus our youthful appearances in spite of
our many
years of experience.
I was startled to
see my full name
in a draft for the order of service having never seen this except on my
birth
certificate. Being the third in a row of Sidney’s,
I always went by “Campbell”
so as not to cause confusion. And, being the first son in a family of
five
children, I was named for both grandfathers: Sidney Lovett and Charles
Campbell
– a privilege in middle age but an albatross in my youth. As a result
of my
being the repository for family names, my younger brother is simply,
Peter
Lovett, who worked as a summer intern here for two summers in 1986 and
1987.
Peter is my second union with Old South.
When I served as a
co-pastor at the
First Church of Christ in New Haven in
the early
1990’s, my colleague and I came to Boston
to
meet with Jim Crawford, Nancy’s
predecessor, regarding our shared history. It seems that the founding
pastor of
First Church,
John Davenport, was called from New Haven
in
1667 to serve as Pastor to the First
Church in Boston.
As he was an unyielding opponent to the Half-Way Covenant – the
theological
dilemma of the day - some wise members of First Church,
also lovingly called the ‘dissenting brethren,’ split off to form Old
South in
1669. My distant predecessor in New Haven apparently was a catalyst
for the creation of
this church.
Well, after
that long introduction, I’d like to share some reflections on the
matter at
hand – a connection I never fully realized: The importance of Mt.
Vernon Congregational
Church in the ongoing mission and ministry of Old South and the role my
grandfather played there in his season of service.
I’ll let my
grandfather explain his
formative experiences leading up to his serving Mt. Vernon.
In his writings is this reflection: “Three personal experiences shaped
my
course at Union Theological Seminary more than its theological
disciplines. The
wife of my youth died in childbirth. This set me hard and long lessons
in the
vocation of bereavement. Field work with Norman Thomas in East Harlem proved decisive in my subsequent
career. A conscientious
objector to World War I on Christian principles, I should have been
sent to Leavenworth save for the
unbeknownst intervention of a
friend with influence in Washington.
This summary reprieve created a dilemma between belief and action I
have never
wholly resolved. I did learn never to tamper with another person’s
conscience.”[i]
While in college,
Sidney Lovett
worked summers with Norman Thomas at the American Parish in East Harlem learning about social work and
working with street gangs.
After college, he attended Union Theological Seminary and continued his
affiliation with Thomas. In September of 1916, his wife of 15 months
died in
childbirth, and he moved into the parsonage with Norman and Violet
Thomas (a
woman he called “Mom” as long as she lived). In these supportive
surroundings
he worked as an assistant until his graduation and fell in “wholly with
Thomas’s
pacifism and absorbed some of his radicalism.”[ii]
Because
of this pacifism he could not be ordained until war’s end. Thus, for
two years
he served the Maverick Church in East Boston
described as “a workingman’s church” not concerned with ecclesiastical
credentials.[iii]
Finally in 1919, he was ordained by the Boston Association of the
Congregational Church, as he had received a formal call to what he
termed “a
student oriented church in Boston’s
Back Bay”[iv]
-
Mt. Vernon.
He served Mt.
Vernon from 1919 to 1932
with a year’s
study leave at Oxford University in England. During his years
at Mt. Vernon,
there were three influences that shaped his emerging ministry: Mt. Vernon’s
strong affiliation with the City Mission Society of Boston, Herrick
House, and
the Beacon Street
neighborhood.
In Mt. Vernon’s
affiliation with the Boston City Mission Society Sidney was a natural
for
working with youth. He helped direct Camp
Andover for Girls founded
in 1920 –
which I’m sure was an easier assignment than the gangs of East Harlem. While directing the camp one
summer, Sid met Esther Parker,
a camp counselor, who in 1922 would become his wife, and, in due
course, my
grandmother. So the family is thankful to Mt. Vernon
and Old South for that rendezvous.
Herrick House,
named after the
second senior minister of Mt.
Vernon was a
great
outreach of the church. Herrick House, from what I can tell, was not
only a
dormitory for students, many of them from foreign countries, but also a
lively
hub of discourse and fellowship. Sid hired Everett Baker, a recent
graduate of Harvard
Divinity School,
to serve as an assistant. Ev lived at Herrick House and helped manage
the
evening service and lecture series always described in a weekly ad in
the MIT
student newspaper. Ev also got to direct Camp
Waldron for Boys in New Hampshire – another of the Mt. Vernon
supported Boston City Mission endeavors. Ev Baker, who would go on to
be the
Dean of Students at MIT, and my grandfather, who became the chaplain at
Yale,
were shaped by Mt Vernon’s work on behalf of an international Christian
student
fellowship.
Mt.
Vernon
was also a community parish for those who lived on and around Beacon Street.
It
was a family church as well for my grandfather whose brother-in-law,
Reeves
Chipman, was the Senior Deacon. During my grandfather’s sabbatical,
Chipman
sent him raucous fictional letters about how the church was falling
apart from
scandal after scandal in his absence.[v]
My
grandfather encouraged Mt.
Vernon to be a
unified
household of faith for a diverse membership of saints and sinners,
writing this
in a church newsletter: “Yet it is fair to remind ourselves on All
Saints Day
that the difference between these great ones and ourselves should be a
difference in degree, not in kind. The power and beauty of life which
is theirs
is a quality to which in varying degrees we may attain. Even now we
should be a
little bit like them, and have a sort of family resemblance, as though
we
belonged to the same household.”[vi]
An international, student-oriented, community church for the city: Mt. Vernon
had many faces in the 1920’s.
My final set
three. Being a multi-faceted
parish, the church and my grandfather were influenced by three issues
of the
day and sought a Christian response to each: The Boston’s Policemen’s
strike of
1919, the Sacco and Vanzetti case 1920 – 1927, and the beginning of the
Great
Depression.
The Boston
Policeman’s strike and
the ensuing dismissal of the striking policemen and replacing them with
returning
World War I veterans changed the social and political landscape not
only of Boston,
but the entire
country. It fostered fears of Bolshevism,
and catapulted Governor Calvin Coolidge to a national stage.
The Sacco and
Vanzetti trial with
its appalling anti-Italian bias, and the subsequent electrocution of
the men,
was spoken out against by my grandfather, and condemned by his older
brother,
Robert Morss Lovett, editor of the New Republic.[vii]
Thus this sentence in another Mt. Vernon
letter from the
Minister: “The way of co-operation is the only point of view tenable
for a
Christian. God has no favorite color, or race, or nation.” [viii]
And, the Great
Depression with the
loss of 33,000 manufacturing jobs from Boston,
as well as financial hardship for many, certainly recalled for my
grandfather
his work in East Harlem many years
earlier and
the need for people and parishes to be of great comfort and support to
one
another.
In some ways not a
lot has changed
since my grandfather’s tenure – perhaps just the names. People’s
patriotism is
still questioned due to their conscientious objections to a war in Iraq;
ethnic
suspicion of our Middle Eastern brothers and sisters runs rampant; and
discrimination against immigrants – now those of Hispanic origin -
makes the message
of the Good News of Jesus more important and the mission the church
more
necessary.
On this day of
remembrance then,
let us resolve to live out in our own lives the tasks of ministry
served so
ably by the people and pastors of Mt.
Vernon; and let us rekindle - for our generation - the values of
forgiveness
and reconciliation that they cherished that that spirit might live on
in our
humble efforts, to the glory of God in three persons, blessed Trinity.
Amen.
S. C.
Campbell Lovett
[i]
From his
Apologia pro Vita Mea – read at his Memorial Service in Battell Chapel
by
William Sloane Coffin, April 6, 1979. Can be found in Uncle Sid of
Yale, Yale
University Press, 1981
[ii]
Cited
in Norman Thomas The Last Idealist by W. A. Swanberg, Charles
Scribner’s
Sons, 1976 p. 45
[iii]
Uncle
Sid of Yale, p. 9
[iv]
Apologia pro Vita Mea
[v]
Reflections of Sidney Lovett, Jr.
[vi]
Uncle
Sid of Yale, p. 31
[vii]
More
complete reflection in All Our Years, The Autobiography of Robert
Morss
Lovett, Viking Press, 1948, pgs. 183 – 190.
[viii]
Uncle
Sid of Yale, p.45
