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Trinity Sunday, Yr. A, May 18, 2008
Church of the Epiphany, Glenburn
Rev. Craig C. Sweeney
Soli Deo Gloria
Let’s get one thing straight right up front: we may be all
wrong about this Trinity stuff. God is three persons? God is
one God? How can it be that our basic Christian identity is
founded on such a conundrum?
For this is the core doctrine that defines us: God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons, one God. The
other core doctrine is just as confusing - Jesus was fully
human and fully divine. If you can’t confess to believe these
two things, you aren’t really a Christian.
And, for the record, there are lots of people out there
who call themselves Christian and are not, because they don’t
buy one or both of these doctrines - Mormons, United
Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses. And a lot of folks who
think that they really are Christians have slid into
Christomonism - that is, Jesus is the one and only God.
That’s just not correct.
How do I know? Well, the truth is, I don’t. No one really
does. What I do know and do believe, though, is what the
Church with a capital ‘c’ has come to believe over the
centuries. Then I try to figure out why it is so important and
then, much harder, try to explain it.
The first thing to remember is simply this: we cannot
define God in human terms, period. God is beyond us, above
us, other than us to such a huge extent that our minds cannot
grasp, let alone describe or define God. And that is not
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insulting to humankind - we can’t figure out how the brain
works, or what memory is, or what is happening as we dream.
It is no shame to admit that defining the creator of the
universe is beyond us.
And this is part of the problem for us as Christians - the
world of unbelievers expects us to ‘make sense’ of God to
them before they will commit themselves to believing in God.
And, deep down inside, we all wish this logic, this rational
explanation did exist - it would make all of this so much
easier, this faith stuff.
We live in a time when we expect things to make sense to
us, when we need it to be rational before we take it seriously.
But, let’s face it, that is just arrogance masquerading as
logical inquiry. It implies that ‘I’ should be able - and indeed
am able - to understand everything before I take note of it.
Can anyone here explain hunches or intuition? Can anyone
tell me why my favorite color is green and my daughter’s is
purple? Is it rational for me to love Bach while someone else
loves hip hop? And then how about art and our various likes
and dislikes? Can we even define time?
Most importantly of all, can anyone here explain,
rationally explain love? Arguably the most important thing
about our being human, love, and it is, so near as I can tell,
completely irrational.
So when we come down to talking about God, we are
dealing with irrational stuff - love, creation, relations,
participation, life, grace, forgiveness, salvation. How do we
make sense of all of this? How do we explain God?
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At least we have established doctrine and centuries of
brilliant theology to lean on - the Early Church had none of
these. What they had was Scripture and memory. And
memory was fading fast by the 4th century.
That was when the doctrines of the two natures of Jesus
and the Trinitarian God were finally decreed by the Counsel of
Nicea. Even then it wasn’t finally settled until 200 years
later. For that matter, it is safe to say that it still isn’t fully
settled today.
God - Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is a description
of God, not a definition. It is a formula that reminds us that
God is more than just the creator, reminds us that God also
came and lived with us in Jesus, reminds us that God’s Spirit
was sent to be with us still. It is a metaphor for God, it isn’t
the final meaning of God.
And I have to confess that I have never been happy with
that formula - Father, Son and Spirit. Being a child of today,
that immediately implies hierarchy to me - to me a son is by
definition subject to his father, not the same as. Many of us
have had troubled relations with our fathers and look askance
at the very word ‘father.’ To women, it rightly raises the
issue of the patriarchy - there is no feminine in that formula
and somehow there should be. God is not ‘only’ a male.
But I can’t come up with anything better. At times I
drift towards ‘modalism,’ that heresy that speaks of the one
God appearing in three different ways depending on what he is
doing - we skate close to this heresy when we speak of God as
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creator, redeemer, sanctifier. It is very easy for me to box
these aspects of God separately and relate to them that way.
But what that does is to deny the essence of God, so
near as we can tell, which essence is love, that irrational thing,
and unity. God is not three separate gods with different job
descriptions, God is one, a unity, who has revealed himself to
us in three obvious ways.
And so we search Scripture for a way to define, to
explain God. And, of course, we do not find the word ‘Trinity.’
Instead we have story after story of how God has revealed
himself to his children.
I love Genesis, and I never tire of hearing this first
chapter we heard this morning. It sounds rather like a litany
to me, and I can see a troop of Jewish priests proceeding up
the steps to the ancient Temple to the beat of drums as it is
recited.
In this creation story we hear of the God who creates.
We hear that he simply speaks - sends forth his word - and
things become. We hear of the wind rushing over the chaos,
brooding over the waters, pondering. Here we have
Trinitarian thinking - God, the Word of God, and God’s Spirit.
All three are involved in creating, all three are active
participants - yet they do it as one, they do it in unity.
And Paul, who never spoke of the Trinity, closes his
letter to the Corinthians today with a recognition of the three
persons of God: ‘the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love
of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of
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you.’ Three hundred years before Nicea, Paul has recognized
that God is somehow revealed in three primary ways.
That word that is translated ‘communion’ in Paul’s letter
is often translated as ‘fellowship.’ I like that better for to
me that word, fellowship, helps me come to grips with the
concept of our Triune God.
Fellowship bespeaks relationship and - at its deepest and
truest level - love. We have so cheapened that word, ‘love,’
that we need to remember that his is not TV love, not soppy
poetry love, not romantic novel love we are referring to. It is
God love, agape love, love which values the other as much as
we value ourselves.
True fellowship exists when we have this kind of love for
each other. It is one of the oddities of the Church that we
ask people to come and join our fellowship and to love people
that they might not even like very much. But this is a key
thing for Christians, one that, sadly, we aren’t very good at
any more - we love each other in spite of ourselves.
In this way we mirror God, who loves us - very probably in
spite of ourselves! For we all have to admit that we often act
in ways that make us un-loveable. Yet God, who is love, loves
us anyway. God is in fellowship with us endlessly whether we
are paying any attention to God or not.
God is love, for God values us as much as he values
himself. We see this in all of creation itself given freely to
us, we see this is God’s revelations of himself in history, most
of all we see this in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. We
feel this still in the presence of God’s Holy Spirit.
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So this whole Trinity thing is a ham-handed attempt by
us humans to make sense of the one God we believe in. The
Church argued and fought about it but kept returning to it
because it was the best we could come up with. I am
personally convinced the Church came to that insight over the
course of centuries because the Holy Spirit pushed us to it.
I have a hard time imagining God in only one person.
Think of it this way - before creation God is, and he/she is all
alone. Yet, this God creates the universe, our world and us.
To me it takes love to create something - one doesn’t create
out of anger or hatred. But what did this lonely God know of
love? Love takes three things - the lover, the beloved, and
the love itself. If this lonely God was truly all alone, the only
thing he could love was himself and if that was the case, why
bother to create anything else? Let alone create a world full
of creatures that surely cause God pain.
And so I find it easier to think of this God as triune lover, beloved, love itself. This God is capable of, indeed truly
is, love. That God of love would create because love gives,
love creates, love shares, love yearns to be loved back. This
triune God does not love only itself, it is three persons in love
endlessly.
Gregory of Nazianzus, one of the early Church Fathers,
used the Greek word ‘perichoriesis’ to describe the
relationship that exists within the Godhead - which is yet
another theological word that describes the totality of the
three persons of God. Perichoriesis literally means to ‘dance
around.’ I love that image! Father, Son and Spirt; or lover,
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beloved, and love; or creator, word and essence - however it
works best for you - they are all three endlessly engage in an
endless dance of love, joy, creation and sharing.
This God of endless joy and love creates because it
yearns for yet more love, yearns for more beloveds to love,
yearns for the beloveds to love God back. This God of endless
joy and love reveals himself to his beloved children so that
they will understand what love truly is. This God of endless
joy and love comes to live among us as a human being to teach
us what love and joy look like in human form. This God of
endless joy and love sets us free from slavery to the fear of
death and then sends his very essence, his Spirit of love and
joy to be with us still and share the Good News.
What all of this points to is a God who is active, who
participates in life with us, who creates, blesses, forgives,
sanctifies and loves - for a God who is not love could not do all
of those things.
So we speak of the Trinity as we try to describe, not
define, God. We speak of a unity of three persons in one God,
the lover, the beloved and the love, eternally dancing together
and inviting us to dance with them. AMEN