Matthew 28:19-20
2 Corinthians 13:11-14
There was a three
generation household in which James, Sr., was living with his son, James, Jr.
and young grandson, James III. One day
the phone rang and the caller asked to speak to Jim. The response was, “Do you want Jim the
father, Jim the son, or Jim the holy terror?”
Today is Trinity
Sunday. It is a day when our service and
our sermons are supposed to focus on the concept of the trinity. Supposedly the trinity is one of the most
important theological concepts for our faith, but it is also one that most
people find challenging to understand.
So much of our faith we grasp and internalize because it meets with our
experience of God. So much of our faith
is tied in with stories, both from the Bible and from our own lives, stories
that say in ways that theological statements or ideas about our faith often
cannot, what it is we believe, what it means to be children of God, who we are
as a community of faith, and who we are as Christian believers. But the trinity often seems to me to be an
intellectual concept which is up there somewhere; high above our experience of
God, outside the realm of stories, or even of intuition. The trinity is proclaimed to be a great
mystery of our faith. But in the
theological headiness of the concept it can lose what is most important about our
faith, which is that the meaning of our faith comes when we experience it and
live it out. Discussion and debate,
while interesting, ultimately do not make us the people of God, something that
should claim every bit of our lives and everything that we do with those lives.
As I have studied the
trinity, hoping to find something that would make it a more accessible concept,
I found myself more and more convinced of this division between those ideas
that we intuitively understand and which help us to live our lives more fully
as Children of God, and those ideas which belong in theological and biblical
studies, but which do not seem to communicate the Good News to us, which do not
help us as a people to truly give up all we have in pursuit of that one pearl
of priceless value that is God in our lives.
Additionally, the first thing that every theological book, article and
commentary I read had to say about the trinity was that this is not a concept
found in the Bible. The two passages
that we read today are the sole basis for the theology of the trinity: two tiny
verses that use a “trinitarian formula” but which don’t explain it as a
trinity, never mention the idea of three persons in one God-head, never define
those relationships between the “persons” of the trinity, or even define them
as unique persons. The idea of trinity,
or three persons in one God-head first seemed to have arisen at the council of
Nicea in 325 AD. It simply did not exist
before then. And it is one of the great
concepts that separates us from Jewish brothers and sisters who argue that they
in fact REALLY have one God whereas Christians have a 3 God in one God-head
thingy. The first division or complete
split in the Christian church was in fact a division over the nature of the
trinity. And the discussions, arguments,
divisions over this concept which began at that time have never ceased. Indeed, while most the books and commentaries
I have read on the trinity were written by renowned Presbyterian theologians,
no two of them agreed about the trinity meant or how it was to be
understood. For example, one commentary
said that the trinity is like water in its three forms of ice, liquid and
steam: all made of the same substance but in very different forms. Another commentary completely disagreed with
this declaring that this understanding of the trinity is a kind of modalism:
that instead each person of the trinity is water in all of its forms. According to this theologian, if we stick
with the analogy of water, one person of the trinity is the plasma within our
bodies, where as another is sea water: apparently both have just about the same
make up chemically, but they simply exist in different places. One theologian reported that the different
persons of the trinity involve different jobs: there is the creator, the
redeemer and the sustainer. Another said
that this was inaccurate because each person of the trinity was fully creator,
redeemer and sustainer all by themselves.
One theologian said the mystery of the trinity was that there were three
persons within the one God. Another disagreed
saying the mystery of the trinity is that there is one Godhead that encompasses
three distinct persons. Almost all of
the theologians used scientific analogies are a way of describing their
understanding the trinity. The simplest
example was that of the three forms of water I described earlier. The most complex involved quarks, the
smallest known particles of matter, and the interdependence of quarks who
cannot exist, apparently, as single beings, but must exist in community with
one another. And again, it was
interesting intellectual fodder for budding brain cells. But when it came down to how this concept
would help us to live our lives as Christians, how these ideas would bring us
comfort when we are afflicted, or how these concepts would challenge us when we
are falling short in our ability to forgive or to heal or to love God, self and
each other, theologians had very little to say.
The books and discussions on the Trinity were strangely and starkly mute
on what this had to do with our lives as people of faith.
Many years ago, I was
sitting in on a 6th grade Sunday school class in which the kids were
all invited to make collages of their images of God. As I watched the kids work, I noticed that
each child had a very different collage in front of them. David’s collage was made up of magazine
pictures of angels: statues of angels, pictures of angels, in child and adult
form, covered David’s picture. Carlie
sat next to David and her picture was made up entirely of nature scenes. She had drawn rainbows and sunsets, beautiful
flowers and strong animals like lions.
She had cut out a picture of the beach and had glued a feather onto the
top of her collage. George for his part
had put pictures of people and names of people all over his collage. Some of the pictures had no names, some of
the names had no pictures, but his collage was people of all different
kinds. Megan for her part had the
simplest collage. Her picture was hard
to figure out at first, but when I asked her she said that it was a voice; a
voice inside, which she didn’t know how to draw except through wispy lines,
like whispering. My question to Megan,
while simply inquiry began an argument among the children. Carlie looked at Megan’s picture and frowned. “You don’t really think God is a voice inside
of you, do you? God is much bigger than
that! God couldn’t fit inside of
you! Look at the wonderful things God
has created!” And with that she showed Megan her own picture of the nature
scenes of sunsets and beaches and great majestic beasts. David jumped in at that point and said, “You
haven’t created a picture of God, just a picture of what God made a long time
ago. If you want to see God now, you
have to look at the angels. The guardian
angels all around us who look out for us and care for us.” To which George
replied, “I don’t believe in angels. I think
God acts through people around us. There
aren’t really angels, you know.” I was
about to step in and encourage the kids to think about all of these images as
important, when David said, very quietly, under his breath, “I have a guardian
angel.” The other kids all looked up
from their work and David continued, “Not that I’ve seen him. He always stays hidden, but I know he’s
there. Last week, for example, I was
running home from school and was about to cross a street without looking when I
heard someone call my name. I stopped
and turned around and just as I did, a car went careening into the intersection
without stopping. There was no-one
behind me. I know it was my guardian
angel protecting me form that car. Lots
of stuff has happened like that. I know
I have a guardian angel and that is God in my life.”
George jumped in, “A
couple weeks ago my mom got fired from her job.
My dad’s been out of work for a while and has stayed home to take care
of us. So when my mom lost her job it
was really scary. But one of the women
in church heard about it and she offered my mom a temporary job at her work;
the job lasted just long enough for my mom to find a permanent position. I know God was working through that lady in
our church.”
Megan added, “My little
brother has some problems. He’s kind of
slow and a lot of the kids at school pick on him and give him a hard time. One time a bunch of kids had surrounded him
and were yelling names and closing in on him.
I thought they were going to beat him up and I was all ready to jump in
there and defend him. I’m sure we both
would have ended up hurt if I had. But
just as I was about to jump in, I heard a voice inside of me say, “Why don’t
you invite all the kids over to your house and they can see what Kevin can do
at home and how important he is around the house.’ So I did. And they all came
over and my mom ended up telling them a lot about Kevin’s situation. Now they take care of Kevin and make sure
other kids don’t pick on him. I know I
didn’t come up with that idea on my own.
God told me what to do. And I did
it.”
Carlie had been quiet
during all of this. And there was a
moment after the other kids finished that I wasn’t sure if she would speak
up. Carlie lived in a foster home. She had been moved around a lot, and didn’t
have a regular family taking care of her.
She never talked about this with the other kids, so I wasn’t sure she
would say anything that day. But she surprised
me. “I don’t have any parents,” she
said, “but I do know God loves and cares for me. Every time I see a sunset or get to go to the
beach, I know that God made all of this and God made me and that everything is
going to be okay.”
The kids continued to share and talk. But it was no longer an argument over who God
was or how God acted. Instead, they were
learning that people experienced God in different ways. Perhaps more importantly, they were learning
to be open themselves so that they might also experience God in different ways.
For myself, this is where the concept of the trinity
finally meets experience. I believe the
theological concept of the trinity began as a way for people to try to explain
a complex experience of God. And that
experience is that God is not just a distant creator, though God is creator and
has done that. God is not JUST present
to us in the person of Jesus, though God was present to us in Christ and still
comes and lives and walks among us. God
is not JUST present in the stillness of our solitude, in our prayers, in our
community, in our reading of scriptures, though God is very active and present
there as well. God is all these things:
God is above us, God walks among us, and God is within us. The good news of the trinity is the good news
that we celebrate every Sunday. That God
in all of God’s actions and forms, in all of God’s persons loves us beyond life
itself and is present with us in that love to the end of the ages.
I also believe that part of the reason trinity continues
to be so controversial is because it, too, is a human construct that cannot and
does not completely capture God. God
goes beyond all of our human descriptions.
And our experience of God also goes beyond human explanation. For me, trinity is a powerful way of
describing the powerful, amazing, love-filled experience of God who made us,
walks among us, and is within us; all at the same time, always caring for us,
upholding us, and challenging us to be more loving. Trinity does not need to stay a difficult
theological concept. It can become again
what I believe it was meant to be; a way of understanding an experience that
can’t be described adequately by words.
A metaphor for an experience of our God as real and tangible to us in
many ways, in many forms, in many situations.
If we see the trinity as a metaphor for our experience
of God, the image of trinity opens up to us many different layers and gives
many more insights into God and our relationship to God as well. The trinity becomes more complex than just
the understanding of God above, among and within. It also reflects other truths about God, one
of which I find especially wondrous, but perhaps even harder to put into
worlds. What makes us persons is that we
are relational. If we were not in
relationships to other people, we would not be persons, but simply beings
acting out of animal instincts. So, too,
while God is one, God is also relational with God-self. That relationship is what makes God persons,
what makes God desire to be relational with us as well, and what allows God to
be communion in being within God-self.
God, like us, is community which holds diversity within itself. That, to me, is the greatest wonder and
greatest mystery of the trinity. Like
the Bible which is one book and yet a book of distinct and different books
which relate and inform one another, like a church which is one in its mission
statement and yet holds within it a community of persons, God is community
within God’s one-ness. I think that this
mystery too is one which must be understood and worked out through one’s own
experience of God.
Two people went up in a hot air balloon. The balloon went way off course and the
couple ended up totally lost, having no idea where they were until finally the
balloon came down in the middle of an open field. One of the people in the balloon called out
to a man who was standing watching the balloon, “Say, can you tell us where we
are?”
“Sure,” the man answered, “You are in a hot air
balloon.”
The woman who had asked the question turned to her
companion and said, “that man must be a preacher. What he said is completely true and has
absolutely no relevance to our situation.”
I hope that the concept of trinity does not stay for us
an intellectual and irrelevant mystery that is above comprehension. Rather, I hope for all of us today that the
beauty of Trinity, of one God in community with God-self, will inspire you with
its beauty to ponder ever more deeply, and to live ever more faithfully in the
presence of our incredible loving God who is above, among and within.
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