June 11, 2006
Sermon for Trinity Sunday
God above us, God among us, God within us
The Trinity is much more than a blueprint for how God exists.
It sounds like a difficult concept, and it is if we have to try to reconcile the three different persons of the Trinity, or indeed if we even speak in such terms. If we say the three are distinct but still one, we open up even more questions that really can’t be answered. Like.....if Jesus is God and the Spirit is God, but the Spirit is not Jesus, as is often put forth in response to questions about the relationship of the three, then there must be a part of God that is not present in the Spirit and a part of God that is not present in Jesus........it’s enough to give anyone a headache.
The doctrine of the Trinity did just that to the people who worked it out in those first few centuries.
It took many, long, sometimes passionate, sometimes angry conversations to cobble together an understanding of the God who is one and three.
What they came up with is sometimes treated as if it were some sort of periodic table for God.....as if the three natures are the basic, measurable, observable elements of God. Hard science. Certain. If we buy into that concept of the Trinity--that it is a description of God--we do a great disservice to the people whose hearts were wrapped up in those discussions, and we short change ourselves. If the doctrine of the Trinity is something like a diagram of God, then we can roll it up, put it on some shelf, and be done with it. If, on the other hand, we treat the Trinity as a symbolic way of speaking about God, if we can see it as a symbolic way of understanding God that grew out of a great variety of experiences, then maybe it can help us to find our way more deeply into the heart of God.
I speak of the Trinity as a symbol in the same way that Charlie Price once spoke of the Eucharist as a symbol. Charlie was a theologian, a professor at VTS. He referred one day to the eucharist as a symbol, and someone challenged him. “Are you saying the eucharist is only a symbol”? they asked. “I’m saying it’s nothing less than a symbol” was his response. He used the word, understanding that a symbol participates in the deeper reality which it represents. The eucharist isn’t only bread and wine changed into Christ, but it is also involved in a living way in everything that lies behind our understanding of Christ. The eucharist is God with us, Jesus among us, God’s self giving, sacrifice, resurrection---all of that--and Jesus at that ancient table, Jesus at this table. In saying that the eucharist was nothing less than a symbol, Dr. Price argued against any sort of limiting understanding of the sacrament. He was affirming that the eucharist is grounded in a reality so deep we cannot begin to comprehend it.
That same approach is helpful in approaching the Trinity. However simple or complex a theology we propose about the Trinity, we can only scratch the surface of the reality that lies behind these three ways of understanding Go. By speaking of the trinity as symbol, we also, I think, get closer to understanding what led those early Christians to struggle to understand Creator, Christ and Spirit as faces of God.
Listen to the kind of language John uses in the story of Jesus and Nicodemus. Jesus is the teacher who has come from God. No one can do the signs you do, says Nicodemus, apart from the presence of God. God is present with Jesus. Jesus speaks of being born of the Spirit--born from above. The people who knew Jesus, who walked around with him and heard him teaching, seem to have known from the beginning that he participated in a greater reality. You touch the edge of his robe and you’re healed; you try to tell him anything other than the truth and he looks right though you--knows you. He spoke often about his connection with God through and in the Spirit. Jesus, like a living symbol, was himself a doorway into the heart of God for the people who encountered him. By the end of the fourth century the Churches of the world came together and decided that those who had seen Jesus had seen God.
God from God, Light from Light is the kind of language they used. We use it still. Where Jesus is, God is.
People like you and me experienced the power and presence and mystery of God in their encounters with Jesus. That sense of God being near, working among them, filling them with hope and confidence--that experience of God up close didn’t fade after Jesus had gone.
The people of Israel had spoken for centuries about the Spirit of God, the breath of God moving through their history like the wind. The same spirit that brought life to all creation was now working in them and among them, just as Jesus had said it would. God has not left us, they said. God is still with us in this new way.
Creator. Christ. Spirit.
Each of these is the exposed tip of a greater truth, still buried--hidden--yet to be discovered.
Rather than limiting and defining the nature of God, the Trinity can, if approached in its rich symbolic power lead us deeper --further into God.
Take a child to the mountains, give him a shovel and ask him to dig up the rock seen peeking though the forest floor. Before long he will come back and tell you that it can’t be done. He’ll tell you that the rock you pointed out must be the whole mountain.
God is like that. Infinitely grander, more complex, and at the same time, more simple and basic than we can imagine. That is part of what the Church was trying to communicate when it began to say things about Jesus like God from God and Light from Light. That form echoes in the Church’s words about the Spirit, words like proceeds from the Father and the Son.....Lord and Giver of life...
If the concept of a triune God sometimes seems tangled and indecipherable, that’s ok. That’s kind of how it’s meant to be.
The mystics down through the ages, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish....people who scrape away at the edges of their experience of God, soon discover that God is the whole mountain. As that begins to dawn, names and descriptions of the one sought begin to fall away. You and I as Christians have inherited a great treasure, a gift and help in our efforts to uncover the deeper reality of God in our lives. We have been given three places to dig. Three divine faces...three ways of approaching.
Maybe our digging can be fueled by...rewarded by the hope that wherever we encounter the living God, our experience is nothing less than a symbol. Whether we feel God in prayer, hear God in words of kindness or need from another person, hold God in our hands at the eucharist or bath in the waters of God at our baptism.....all of these will enrich our lives if we can remember that these too are symbols, participating in the greater reality we call God........a reality of which we are all a part.
Amen. JMB