[Note: the following is a lightly edited version of a sermon I gave on Trinity Sunday of this year. I thought it might be of some interest, since advertant members of the Slacktiverse will note allusions and outright steals from several of our commenters: Amaryllis (I had to cut so much of the poetry, alas), Augustine (who now mostly posts at Patheos), cjmr, Deird, Froborr, Will Wildman, and several others who I know I'm forgetting. Thank you all for helping to expand and clarify my thoughts.]
The best sermon on the Trinity of which I'd ever heard tell is one my spouse can still recite word-for-word. His rather posh Episcopalian boarding school managed to land a certain Famous Theologian to preach on Trinity Sunday. The teachers and priests were terribly excited; at last, they told the students, we are going to get the straight scoop on this profound, insoluble Mystery, from someone who has made it his life's work to ponder the secrets of the Divine.
So you can imagine the hush of eager anticipation when the great man stood up to the pulpit. "The doctrine of the Trinity," he began his sermon, "is one of the core teachings of the Christian faith." He paused. "I don't really understand it. NOBODY understands it. So... just believe it." Then he sat down.
And it would probably be wiser of me to follow that example.
Yet there is something so important to Christians about this obviously impossible nonsense, that One can be Three yet still One, that makes us keep circling around it, poking at it, trying to trap it in a box of our words.
We do it because we are compelled to speak what we believe. To "commend the faith that is in us", what our Scripture and tradition and reason and experience have convinced us with unshakeable subjective certainty. And so we MUST bear witness that God is One. Our elder siblings in Judaism hold this as the core of faith: "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One." Our younger brothers and sisters in Islam proclaim the same: "There is no God but God." Any number of mystics and sages through time and around the world keep coming back to this conclusion. Not that everybody's God is the same; but if there is Divinity, it is Whole, Complete , at Unity with Itself -- One.
And yet.
As Christians, we MUST bear witness to something else as well. Our scripture and tradition and experience point to this guy -- Jesus of Nazareth -- and teach us that to really know this historical figure, this wandering rabbi and convicted criminal, is in a very meaningful way the same thing as knowing God, the God this same Jesus called "Father". More, in the life and teachings of this Jesus we know something in particular about God -- God revealed as "Logos", as Word, as Plan, as Message -- that predates this one human life all the way back to eternity, and is so powerful that it overcomes death itself.
And yet.
Our Christian spiritual life tells us something even more. Through testimony and our own experience we MUST bear witness that God, the ultimate source and ground and life of all that is; God, the Divine Plan made flesh in one particular human life; very God of very God; is also right here among us. In the room where I sit. In this online community. Wherever people are being fruitful and wise and compassionate.
So we take what we know, and we toss all of that to the theologians and say, "We've got a contradiction here. Fix it."
And the theologians say, "Okay." And after tinkering for several hundred years they come up with this: "The Trinity consists of Three distinct and co-equal Hypostases or Persons, mutually indwelling without confusion or co-mingling in one undivided Divine Essence or Being. How's that?"
Mm. No.
So we turn to our liturgy, and come up with titles. Labels. You've heard them: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. Source, Word, and Inspiration. Rock, Savior, and Friend.
We come up with metaphors and analogies. Google "Trinity + metaphor" and you get over three million hits. (Even after excluding references to the
Matrix movies, there's still a good two million). Try it some time. The Trinity is like a shamrock! The Trinity is like a cube! The Trinity is like a sunbeam through a window pane! The Trinity is like a river with three currents! The Trinity is like a wheel of cheese!
Or there's my personal favorite metaphor: God is a Storyteller, the great Storyteller, and creation is the story that God tells. The Word is the narrative, the plot, and the theme. And the Spirit is the breath that carries the Word far and wide, for any ears that care to hear, including God's own.
But as so often happens when talking about the Trinity, I came awful close to skirting heresy as soon as I began spouting these analogies. That's because they might be beautiful, and they might be helpful, they might be inspiring, but ultimately they all miss the mark.
God isn't a cloverleaf, or a light, or a fountain. God isn't any sort of noun. God is a verb; an
active verb. A
transitive verb.
God, the theologians tell us, is "that Being whose Essence is identical with Existence." In real people talk, what makes God, well,
God, is God is always Godding. Doing the God thing. Begetting, sustaining, speaking. Descending, suffering, liberating. Proceeding, inspiring, binding. Creating, redeeming, sanctifying. Loving.
As much as we Peeping Tom theologians like to think that with the doctrine of the Trinity we've managed to peer into the interior life of the Divine, we've only succeeded in embarrassing ourselves.
So let's try this: the Trinity may be our way of explaining how we experience God. But it can also serve as a model for how God can experience us.
"What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?”
Designed in the very image of God, we are invited into the story God is forever telling. God has brought us into the heart of the Sacred Paradox. We are Created, and we in turn create. We are Redeemed, to be the hands and feet and mouths and brains of the Body of Christ. We are sanctified, so that through and in and with and by us the whole world is brought into God's eternal Kingdom.
We learn to love God by loving each other. And in the Trinity, God gives us the model of how we are to live in love.
So how do we live a Trinity life?
Be Who We Are
We begin "in the beginning" -- by trying to bring our existence into congruence with our essence. Like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz, when we find our own backyards, where our real selves reside, we will find our hearts as well.
But finding out who I truly am isn't as easy as following the Yellow Brick Road. I have to crack out of the shells of false selves that I layer around myself, out of pride, out of envy, out of fear. Too often I substitute a title -- "Reference Librarian" or "Mom". Too often I resort to a shallow analogy that leads me astray. If I ask myself "who am I?" and the answer comes easily, and doesn't leave me feeling naked and vulnerable, than it's almost certainly incomplete.
But sometimes there comes a moment -- at the altar, or while staring at the stars, or while talking about books, or even while washing dishes -- when suddenly, for a brief fleeting eternity, I am my truest, most authentic self. I am ME, completely, fully, with integrity.
When I am in that time outside of time, Whole, at One with myself, this isn't an occasion for sitting still, contemplating the wonder of Me. Instead, I'm filled with power, an explosion of energy, a Big Bang of joy and love and laughter, that I can feel radiating out of my fingers and toes and the ends of my hair. I have to
do. I need to create, to pour out, to connect, to share.
That's where the Second Person of the Trinity comes in.
Have A Plan
Living in the Trinity calls for more than just a random explosion of ecstasy, leaving splatters of joy all over the walls. I need a Plan. Like the Divine Logos, the surge of grace from finding my essential self must take on a shape, a human nature: MY human nature, incarnate in my personal gifts and opportunities.
With the Spirit of adoption, I can, like Paul, claim with Christ the inheritance that God has saved for
me. In my everyday work. In my social relationships. In every chance to care and share and make a difference. Maybe, like God, I can be a storyteller, with colors or words or song or dance or fabric or pixels on a screen.
After all, the Logos comes as a Word. A Story. The Good News. This isn't a secret; we proclaim it every Sunday: "Have you heard? The Kingdom of Heaven is in the midst of us! Right here! Right now! So let's ACT like it!"
But when Jesus gave us his mission statement -- "I come that you might have life, and have it more abundantly" -- there was no promise there that this life would come more safely, or comfortably, or successfully. The Trinity's great Plan led straight to the Cross.
But it led beyond it, too.
Breathe
It's a staple of sermons that many languages (including the Greek and Hebrew in the Scriptures) use the same word for "Spirit", "Breath", and "Wind." So if we are going to live in the Trinity, we have to remember to breathe. And breathing is a perpetual cycle: we breathe out, we breathe in.
Just as God's Word goes forth, carried on the wings of the Spirit, so I can pour out my own story, to accomplish what I am meant to do. But as that Divine Message was not complete until it returned back to the fullness of God, so must I constantly return to myself, my true self, to be refreshed and strengthened and inspired.
We learn at the Feast of the Ascension that the Word sent out is not quite the same as the Word that returns. The Son brings back to the Father not just the triumph and glory of a Plan accomplished, but also all the accumulated gunk of a life incarnate, all the soil and spit and sweat and sorrow and suffering of our human existence.
So it is to live in the Trinity. The Sacred Wind is going to carry me to places I don't want to go. Among people I don't want to speak to.
Them. And I'm going to have to embrace all that stuff I don't like, because I think it's different from who I am. Even worse, I need to embrace all of my own foolishness and frustration and failure that causes me to make false division. Everything needs to be breathed back in: accepted, incorporated, loved,
sanctified into the very heart of my true self.
I have to trust the Spirit not just to sustain me, not just to inspire me, but to CHANGE me. To blow, to flow, to
let go with faith, with confidence, with openness of heart and mind and body.
That's HARD. That's TERRIFYING. That's enough to send me scurrying back to the safety of my textbooks and doctrines and definitions, where I can pretend that I understand what I'm talking about.
So I'm going to leave you with the words of T. S. Eliot.:
These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
"The Trinity. I don't really understand it. NOBODY understands it. So... just believe it."
And then go out and be it.
What kind of Trinity are
you called to be?
--
hapax


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