Trinity Sunday Year B June 11, 2006
Exodus 3:1-6 Psalm 93 Romans 8:12-17 John 3:1-16

Important, yes. Confounding, definitely. There’s a standing ecclesiastical joke that Trinity Sunday is the day the priest in charge of a congregation invites the Bishop to preach, or the seminarian, or anybody else, for that matter. You will note that Jonathan planned his sabbatical so as to be out of the pulpit today.

Talking about the Trinity is an exercise in trying to “eff” the ineffable. Preachers everywhere are casting about today for images and metaphors to express the impossible reality that we Christians are staunchly monotheistic; worshipping one God, who just happens to show up in three separate varieties. What I just said is probably some form of Trinitarian heresy. I’ll get to those in a minute.

I remember listening to one preacher who valiantly tried to present the Trinity as being sort of like a pie cut into three pieces. It’s one pie, see, but each piece has a different filling – apple, cherry, rhubarb. I believe the sermon progressed beyond that point, but I didn’t. I stayed right there with the pie, trying to figure out how to keep the different fillings from leaking into each other.

I, myself, have been known to try to communicate the Trinity in terms of liquid water, ice, and water vapor – all very different and separate, but all H20, just the same. The problem with that analogy is that one is tempted to assign a form of water to each of the persons of the Trinity. Spirit would be vapor, of course, and water as liquid makes a nice baptismal connection with Christ. But that leaves ice for God the holy parent – not exactly an appealing concept.

The Trinity is, according to those who decide such things, an official mystery. That is, to quote the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, “it can neither be known by unaided human reason apart from revelation, nor cogently demonstrated by reason after it has been revealed. It is above reason but not contrary to it.” Got that?

My question is: if this God-in-three-Persons concept is a mystery, why don’t we just stick to the kind of approaches that work when dealing with mystery – story, poetry, metaphor, imagery? Why has the Church labored so to intellectually package the nature of God, to pin it down, to own it, as if anything so indefinable could be…well…defined?

I suppose that term “own” has something to do with it. The Church has, after all, a divided nature. It is both self-perpetuating institution and living evolving mystical Body. It’s both doctrine and revelation. Doctrine at its best anchors us. At its worst, it becomes a tool for defining and defending ecclesiastical territory.

Revelation is by nature unpredictable. It tends to make us nervous. But, it’s also what gives us life. It’s an interesting expression of the sort of schizoid nature of the Church that we get, in back to back Sundays, Pentecost which is all about revelation, and Trinity Sunday, which tends to be all about doctrine.

Well, I’d like to make this Trinity Sunday more about revelation than doctrine. I suppose that’s because I’m just more comfortable in the realm of mystery than I am in the presence of rational philosophizing.

But first, a nod to the institution. The Doctrine of the Trinity goes like this: The One God exists in three persons and One Substance. This concept developed slowly during the first three centuries after Christ’s earthly ministry, as what began as a revelatory movement gradually became an established self-perpetuating organization.

The movement had its roots, of course, in Judaism – the first monotheistic religion -- which was and continues to be a faith much at home with story and poetry. But the early Church was coming of age in a thought world that was dominated by the Greek culture’s emphasis on rational analysis and philosophy.

Just look at the Jewish scriptures in today’s readings. The Exodus passage – Moses encounters God in the burning bush – the nature of God presented in a fascinating story full or potent images. Our psalm – God is a king clothed in splendid apparel – God is mightier than the sound of many waters – the nature of God expressed through metaphor, poetry. Then look at the Epistle passage, written by Paul – a Jew who was trained to think like a Greek. Our relationship with God defined via rational argument.

The early Church fashioned its understanding of God out of a desire to remain faithful to the monotheism of its Jewish antecedents while at the same time finding a way to embrace the divinity of Christ, a concept that became increasingly important to the Church as it became more separate from the Judaism from which it sprang. How do you maintain the existence of one God while accepting the teaching that God somehow took on human form? One Substance – different Persons.

It’s helpful to remember that this period in the Church was a time of tremendous flux and fluidity. There were all sorts of ways of understanding the nature of God being tried out, all of which involved some interpretation or other of the nature of Christ. The Spirit’s part in all this didn’t seem to generate near as much interest.

There were the Modalists, who took the view that God manifests in many different ways in scripture and that God presented God’s self to us in three different modes or appearances in order to bring about our salvation. In other words, the three-ness is for our benefit, rather than actually being an essential fact of God’s nature. Then there were the Arians, who insisted that Christ is subordinate to and created by God. The Adoptionists said that Jesus is merely human, empowered by God. And let’s not forget the Pneumatomachi – my choice for Heresy with the Best Name -- who believed the Spirit was not on an equal footing – does the Spirit have feet? – with the Father and the Son.

Up until the One Substance/different Persons definition was pinned down at the First Council of Nicea in 325, these other ways of looking at God were just that – different ways of understanding the nature of the Divine. After the council of Nicea, the Church became more solidified as an institution and therefore more territorial, those other ways of thinking became heresies, and life became much more uncomfortable for anyone who held views at variance with the orthodox position of One Substance/ Three Persons.

It’s a good thing that we no longer burn heretics at the stake, or I might be coating myself in barbeque sauce. I often struggle with this whole doctrine and dogma thing, particularly when it comes to pinning down God’s nature in any way. Why Trinity? Why not worship the Holy Dodecahedron? That’s a three-dimensional figure that has twelve five-sided faces. Twelve is a holy number – twelve tribes of Israel, twelve disciples.

Why not Infinity Sunday? There’s scriptural evidence for a multiplicity of persons in God. In the first chapter of Genesis, God says, “Let us make humankind in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule …over all the earth…” ‘Our’ image, ‘our likeness’…God refers to God’s self in the plural and then proceeds to make two people who then get fruitful and multiply. Nowhere there do I see mentioned the number three.

Of course, on the other hand, three does show up in scripture in association with the nature of God. One passage that comes to mind is early in the gospel according to Matthew. “And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’” There you have them, all three persons, in one place at one time, participating in something mysterious and moving.

But my personal favorite is back again in Genesis, where God visits the patriarch Abraham and his barren wife, Sarah, in order to tell them that they will conceive a son in their decrepitude. “The Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. He looked up and saw three men standing near him.” Throughout the rather lengthy interaction of these three men and Abraham, the three sometimes speak as one, and sometimes speak separately.

I love this story. I love the icons of the Eastern Church which portray God as three fellows seated around a table waiting for Abraham to serve him…them…supper. This story, these images, work for me, engage me, in a way the pages and pages of theology and church history I’ve read for this sermon cannot.

Three is an important number in story, in myth, in language structure, in folk wisdom. Three wishes. Three tasks. Three witches. Three good Fairies. The comparative usage in English grammar comes in threes: good, better, best or holy, holier, holiest. Our “holy, holy, holy”, by the way, is the transliteration of the Hebrew version of comparative usage -- saying something is the holiest by calling it three times holy.

Trinities of gods and goddesses show up in Hinduism (the world’s most ancient living religion) and in Norse and Greek and Celtic mythology. Jonathan brought home from Ireland a photo of the ancient Celtic three-person goddess Brigid, who is portrayed as one body having three faces, not unlike the medieval cathedral carvings of the Trinity which represent God with three faces. It was in part their belief in a holy trinity which made the Irish so receptive to Christianity when it arrived on their shores.

And how many times have you said, “Third time’s the charm.”? Or, on a bad day, having had three unpleasant things happen, have you breathed a sigh of relief, because, after all “things come in threes.”?

Thinking in threes seems to be something rooted deep in the human psyche. Perhaps that is because the One who made us exists in a three part way. Or perhaps we understand God to be trinity because thinking in threes is such an elemental part of our psyches. But, then, so is thinking is fours – four seasons, four directions, four humors, four horsemen, and so on.

Since we are in no immediate danger of being arrested and tried for heresy, I would invite us all to spend some time and energy imagining God, looking at the world around us and the world within for any number of signs and symbols that speak to us of the nature of God; that we allow God to be more alive to us, more present to us than perhaps we are accustomed.

And, how about including ourselves in the mix? We are, after all, made in God’s image and the Trinitarian doctrine was made theologically necessary because God chose to become one of us. Can we imagine God in a way that includes us and challenges us to strive to embody the Holy here and now? What if we understood God to be an ongoing conversation of different perspectives, different voices, in which we are invited to participate?

Let’s make use of the Feast of the Holy Trinity as an opportunity to step out of the doctrine box into the ineffable mystery of God, which doctrine seeks, and ultimately fails, to desribe. I pray this in the name of the One who is Source, and Word, and Breath of Life. AMEN.