Trinity Sunday June 6, 2004

Today is Trinity Sunday. It is the only Sunday that is dedicated to a theological doctrine. And, as I think I’ve said before, I have thought a lot about that doctrine sine I grew up at Trinity Church in Iowa City, was ordained priest at Trinity cathedral in Davenport, Iowa, was rector of my first parish at Trinity Church, Muscatine, Iowa, and am married to a Unitarian.

Saint Augustine, in the early 5^th century, described the doctrine of the Trinity, which had been adopted by the Council of Nicea 100 years earlier, as a way of talking about that which cannot be spoken. So the doctrine of the Trinity that God is three-in-one, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit , one ‘substance’ expressed in ‘three persons’, is not meant to define or describe God. We simply can’t do that. It is a pointer, or a guide.

The doctrine, to begin with was developed to counter what we have seen as miss-understandings of God. Alternate visions, alternate descriptions that in the mind of the early Church distorted the experience of God to the detriment of true communion with God.

So, in a sense, the doctrine of the Trinity has more to do with us than it does with God. It gives an outline of how the early leaders of the Christian faith experienced and how we continue to experience the manifestation of God in our life. And that is what I want to focus on this morning. Not what God is when we say God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but who we are.

First or all when God is Father we are children and we are not alone. The second verse of one of my favorite hymns, "Alleluia, Sing to Jesus" says: "Alleluia, not as orphans are we left in sorrow now." My father died 15 years ago, and my mother’s health is such that when I visit her near Chicago in a couple of weeks it may be the last time I see her. And I have talked with people who say that loosing your parents even at my age changes things, carries a feeling of orphan hood. But with God as Father such loneliness is never complete.

Having God as Father also means we are not ‘in charge’. Now I know that the association of fatherhood with authority runs the risk of patriarchal domination which is seen, at least by some, as the root cause of many of the world’s current problems. (Not to mention the problems of the wider church and, more particularly, our Diocese.) But I think that the solution for the problems of patriarchy lie not in a blanket denial of a divine authority that derives from the concept of father hood, but in stopping the prideful appropriation of that authority by we who are incapable of wielding it. In his essence the assertion of the Fatherhood, or the Motherhood, of God is a statement that we do not hold authority or generative power within ourselves. The first sentence of Genesis, in Hebrew, says, "Bereshit bara Elohim…", meaning "in the beginning god created…" The word "bara" used there means "created", and it’s a word that’s used only of God. God is the only one in the Bible who "creates" anything. People form things and put them together, but we don’t "create" in the way that God does. In the end, we must submit to the way things really are. We are stewards, not owners, of our lives. And we are not ultimately responsible. I go again with Saint Augustine here in his argument against the English monk Pelagius, who advocated free will to such an extent that it put human beings in charge of their own salvation or damnation. I am reminded of a Peanuts cartoon I saw recently where Snoopy asks Charlie Brown what his definition of security was. And Charlie Brown said it was when he was riding in the car with his father driving and he was lying down in the back seat – before mandatory seat belts, of course. I remember that – secure, safe, not in charge, not responsible. I also remember times when I’d try to be in charge and whine and fuss on those long family car trips, and other times when sitting up and looking out the window I’d play the alphabet game with everyone in the car. But always from the back seat. With God as Father we are always in the back seat, while we sleep, or whine or participate together. And we are always loved.

Of course, maybe when we move to God the Son we move up from the back to the front passenger side, maybe we get asked to read the map. With the Trinitarian assertion of God as Son, the expressed Word, not just the source of creation, but a part of the very structure of creation, and in the life of Jesus, a part of history or a part of our history, we may not be more responsible, but we many become accountable. "He shall come again," it says, "to judge the living and the dead."

(I am assuming here an understanding of the Trinity that sees the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus not as a "transaction" between God and Himself, an atonement for human sins that ‘mere’ human beings were incapable of making, but as a reaching out of divinity into the human arena, a vital connection between eternity and time, heaven and earth, the life of God and our life.

I think I’ve talked before about my reinterpretation of Carl Jung’s reinterpretation of the Book of Job. Jung’s book about this was entitled: "Answer to Job." Jung focuses on the development of moral dualism out of Job’s experiences of undeserved suffering, but I choose to see it another way. In the Book of Job, after Job has suffered undeservedly, the voice of God comes out of the whirlwind and answers Job’s complaints by saying, "Who are you to question this? You can’t possibly understand." The way I see it, with Jesus on the cross, suffering, as Job (and most of us), undeservedly, God says, "Oh, now I understand."

When we say Jesus is "God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, one being with the father, who came down from heaven", and was incarnate and made human, we are not just saying something about Jesus, but about ourselves. We’re saying that life for Christians reveals the connection, the connection that calls us from mere submission to the divine to share in its creative work. To speak our Word into the chaos, and so help to bring on the future. Maybe ""bara" is happening through our lives, with each of our lives a part of the sacred story. That too is part of what we mean when we speak of the Trinity.

I spoke last week on Pentecost about God as Holy Spirit. I talked about Spirit as the energy of God, and as another dimension to reality. About the manifestation of the Spirit in life, in language, and beyond language, in history and in a sense of wholeness. But what about us? How does saying God is Holy Spirit us change our sense of who we are?

A number of years ago I went to a presentation by the storyteller Jay O’Callahan that was put on at the Monterey Conference Center by the Library Association. He told the story of a kayak journey along the Canadian Atlantic coast tracing the migration pattern of the now extinct great awk. But I had never heard a story told that way. I had always been used to hearing stories either read or told as if they were read. A plot, a cast, a beginning, middle and an end. But O’Callahan’s story was different. He pulled you into another world. And I thought afterwards, "This is what it must have been like for early people around the camp fire." This is what myth and epic are all about.

Probably since Plato, at least since Descartes, we have been looking at the world as if through a window from inside our heads. We stand back and observe, we analyze the plot and identify the characters. We look to find the beginning, and middle, and wait for the end. We lose a sense of the Spirit that way. We lose a sense of Spiritual life. To feel the Holy Spirit, to react to the Holy Spirit, to live with the Holy Spirit we have to let ourselves get pulled in – pulled in so far we lose yourselves, we stand outside ourselves (which is the literal meaning of the word "ecstasy").

Now, having lost that sense of Spirit, our cultural sicknesses take on semi-spiritual forms. Alcohol and drug abuse, the Nuremberg rallies and other fanatic nationalisms and religionisms, mid-life crises, action movies and Friday night Texas high school football. We try so hard. We want it so. We know it’s there.

The Trinity reflects eternal truth…truth about God and truth about us. As long as we only think about the Trinity as some kind of theological doctrine we will only have half of it, and maybe not even that. The focus on doctrine may in fact keep us away from the living three-in-one God. I think that the fact that there have been so many wars fought over it, and such hate expressed around it, that we must be missing something. I think that maybe the way out of all that is through the way in. To find in ourselves the echoes of the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – and take our path from there.