Trinity, the fire triangle of creative love

Today, with our church family we celebrate Trinity Sunday, invoking images of the three as one - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  This doctrinal concept might conjure all sorts of intellectual quandaries for you, as it has for faithful thinkers for many, many generations.  And, in our secular lives this is also Father’s Day – “father” a symbol that invokes a variety of emotional reactions, depending on our relationship that masculine idea/ideal and how it has been manifested in our own families.

DISCLAIMER:  Full disclosure, I’m ambivalent about gender attributions to God – I yearn for a divine parent, and also hope that God is well beyond my limited projections of engendered expectations.  Yet, masculine imagery of authority is unavoidable today given the secular observance of Father’s Day and the language used in our most familiar doxology (E.g., “praise to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”).  Indeed, from our scripture and tradition, we’ve inherited the language and imagery of God as Father.  And, with reason, we could occupy a whole homily expounding on the challenges of experiencing God as exclusively masculine authority, problems with patriarchy, options from feminist theology, etc..; that’s not my intention today.  When we hear the variety of language used to imagine God (mother, father, creator, etc.), we’re invited to be aware of our responses to the words and images used – masculine, feminine, and gender neutral.  In all cases, consider what our responses reveal about assumptions and models we follow, and how expanding these might be healthy and helpful.  And, with whatever language we employ to describe God, let’s be aware of how considering God through intimately personal and familiar terminology keeps us in touch with incarnational reality of divine relationships.  

Now, let’s turn the doctrine of the Trinity, our readings from scripture, and tie these together with our lives and relationships today.

TRINITY

We’ve just come through major seasons (Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, and Easter) in which we’ve focused on the divine Word made flesh.  And, we’ve just celebrated the birth of the church with the coming of the Holy Spirit (Pentecost).  After today’s special observance, we’ll begin a long stretch of our church year, considered ‘ordinary time’, in which the liturgical color returns to green and we’ll be focusing on creation, growth, and discipleship, which includes focusing on how we nurture relationship with God and each other.

We’re launched into this stretch of ‘ordinary time’ by this Trinity Sunday, a major feast dedicated to a church doctrine, not a biblical story or event.  

Not long after the earthly church was born, thinking believers in the 2^nd Century struggled to make sense of a God in multiple forms (divinity of Christ and existence of the Spirit) that was also singular (the Yahweh of Jewish monotheism).   Debate of explanations, rationalizations, and understandings of the Trinity have continued ever since – in legal, economic, and metaphysical terms - beginning with much debate over the parent-child relationship (Christology) and later brining the Spirit into this dance.

In the second century, Tertullian, a legal mind who was not content with classical Greek theology, articulated the “three persons in one substance” Trinitarian description of God that endured through the expressions of later ecumenical councils in 4^th Century (which beget what we now recite as the Nicene Creed).  Athanasius (Bishop of Alexandria in the 4^th Century) wrote, “It is a wholly creative and energizing reality, self-consistent and undivided in its active power, for the Father makes all things through the Word and in the Holy Spirit, and in this way the unity of the holy Trinity is preserved” (from his letter to Serapion).

In the 9^th Century, debates between Western/Latin and Eastern/Greek terminology (‘same’ vs. ‘similar’, essence/substance, beings/persons, characters/mask/roles, threeness vs. oneness) and interpretations of the particulars of the role of “the Son” in the relationship with “the Spirit” would lead to schism between West and East when the West/Latin finally decided to amend the Nicene Creed to include their particular viewpoint about the placement of the Son in a particular order of procession.

In more recently history within the last few centuries there has been again debate about the rationale and relevance of the Doctrine of the Trinity.  For a time, it seemed that discussion of the Trinity was dimming in significance.  Then, theologians like Karl Barth and Karl Rahner brought it back into passionate consideration (in Barth’s Church Dogmatics as “modes of being”; in Rahner’s The Trinity as “distinct modes of subsisting”). 

SCRIPTURE

Why does a notion of God as Trinity endure?  Although the word “trinity” is not found explicitly in our scriptures, three main experiences of the divine are certainly implicit - speaking of parental God (as Father), God’s Word (as Son), and breath of God (as Spirit).  The scriptures are all about the triangle of God’s relationship with us, our relationship with God, and relationships among all of us in creation.

In this morning’s reading from Genesis, we’re reminded that from the beginning was the creator’s Word (logos), and that it is the creator’s breath (ruach, a feminine term in Hebrew; also rendered as pnuema of Spirit) that brought everything, including all of us into being.  Also, you’ll notice that God speaks of God’s self in the plural – “our image” – revealing a relational plurality in God’s being.  We were created in that image as well – as an ‘us’ / a ‘we’ – relational creatures… and God deems this ‘good.’

Today’s Gospel reading contains the only biblical phrase that is most like our Trinitarian doctrine.  It’s found at the end of the Gospel according to Matthew in Jesus’s final instructions to his disciples: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt 28:19).  On this basis, Trinitarian language became part of our very earliest baptismal rites – the ritualistic entry into our church family.

On the subject of family, this morning’s excerpt from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians really brings the familial aspects of Trinity to life.  Paul is very emotional in this letter to a fractured family of believers in Corinth.  In the part of his letter we heard this morning, he appeals to the nature of divine relationship to promote healing among earthly, human relationships.  He proclaims that God is about “love and peace” and that God’s grace is the loving communion shared with Christ through the Holy Spirit.  Through participation with this trinity of love, Paul invites the family of Corinthian  believers to reconcile through sharing in a holy kiss (note: sharing the “kiss of peace” preceded our more modern convention of exchanging the peace through a handshake).

OUR LIVES / RELATIONSHIPS

We can sense that despite its intellectual history the Doctrine of the Trinity is not as much an academic endeavor as it is a very heart-felt attempt to articulate our experience of how God has and does relate with us. 

In the Trinity, we encounter some complex and emotionally provocative concepts.  Some wisdom suggests that if we dwell too long, probe too deeply into the mystery of God as Trinity, we’re bound to slip into heresies.  While it can be tempting, even enjoyable for some of us, to get a little lost in the mental puzzles that the ideas and ideals that this doctrine represents, we’re encouraged to ground ourselves in the simple, sublime truth that this all boils down to divine relationships. 

Along with the traditional “Father, Son, and Spirit”, more contemporary formulations of Trinity also include “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer” and “Source, Wellspring, and Living Water” (coined by David Cunningham, Professor of Theology and Ethics at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary).  These analogies and models can help with a cognitive understanding of the functions/actions of God in our lives (creation, sustenance, order, preservation, and provision), without triggering potentially problematic projections embedded in engendered personal terminology. 

Personally, I’ve found the model of the fire triangle helpful as analogous with our participation with divine love.  The fire triangle model explains that in fire, three things exist – heat, fuel, and oxygen.  In divine love, the heat of creative intention ignites passion and compassion that is enlivened by the very breath (pneuma/wind/Spirit) of God.  Put another way, just as heat, fuel, and oxygen are fully present in fire, the heat of God’s breath is present as fuel between and among our loving relationships with each other. We are invited into the fire of God’s relationship with all persons.  As we work on stoking our relationship with each other, we are cultivating relationship with God.  As we fuel our relationship with God, we increase our capacity for relationships with others. 

Whatever language model we use, the Trinity points us toward the nature of a relational God, as well as the nature of our human/familial relationships.  Trinity can help us perceive and live toward more divine relationship with God and with each other.  Essentially it’s all about mutual attraction, compassion, and creative love.  

I’d like to end with word from a contemporary Anglican clergyman W.H. Vanstone (b.1923, d. 1999) who describes the relationship of theTrinity with humanity through imagery of adopting an orphan into the family.  I like this because is ties in so much of what we’re dealing with today on Trinity Sunday and a day we honor one of our parents:

Trinitarian theology asserts that God’s love for his creation is not the love that is born of ‘emptiness’ … It is the love which overflows from fullness. Its analogue is the love of a family who, united in mutual love, take an orphan into the home. They do so not out of need but in the pure spontaneity of their own triumphant love. Nevertheless, in the weeks that follow, the family, once complete in itself, comes to need the newcomer. Without him the circle is now incomplete; his absence now causes anxiety: his waywardness brings concern; his goodness and happiness are necessary to those who have come to love him; upon his response depends the triumph or the tragedy of the family’s love.  In spontaneous love, the family has surrendered its own fulfillment and placed it, precariously, in the orphan’s hands. Love has surrendered its triumphant self-sufficiency and created its own need. This is the supreme illustration of love’s self-giving or self-emptying – that it should surrender its fullness and create in itself the emptiness of need. Of such a nature is the kenosis [emptying] of God  -- the self-emptying of Him Who is already in every way fulfilled.

William Hubert Vanstone, Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense: The Response of Being to the Love of God (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1977), 69.

All our trinitarian models considered, naming God in very personal terms gets closer to heart of the matter, helping us experience God as encompassing lover, the beloved, and mutual love.  God, in all of God’s fullness, is as intimate with us as an embrace… and a kiss.  And God has told us, time and again, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

AMEN.

Celebrating Pentecost with a Baptism and memories of this past year in the Spirit

A year ago today (June 12, 2010), in the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, I was ordained a deacon.  Within a week of that blessed moment, I was with Bishop Bruno and others in the Holy Land, where we would walk the paths of our Lord and the early disciples and also renew our baptismal vows in the Jordan River.

Today, a year later (June 12, 2011), in the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas, now having been ordained a priest, I celebrated the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and baptized one of our Kansas State campus ministry 'peer ministers' at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Manhattan, KS.

The summer of 2010 launched me into an international journey of deep vocational discovery that would fuel my discernment about job opportunities upon my return to the U.S. and eventually lead me to relocate to the Diocese of Kansas on Labor Day to accept their call to serve as Campus Missioner.  Life over these past nine months has been full of healthy new beginnings and discoveries about humility, service, worship, formation, faith, and ordained ministry.

This summer of 2011 promises to be an equally wonderful journey.  In less than two weeks, I'll be sharing and learning with colleagues at a campus ministry conference in northern California before traveling with Bishop Wolfe to Kenya to serving alongside a team of college students on a Kansas2Kenya mission trip.  After our mission service in Kenya, I'll separate from our team and begin a long-awaited extended vacation that will include travels alone as well as fellowship with friends and family. This extended sabbath should provide plenty of time and space for reflection, renewal, and rejuvenation before my return to a new academic term of campus ministry in the Diocese of Kansas.

This past year of dancing with the Holy Spirit has been full of fire, water, wind, and new breath - I can't help but offer God heartfelt thanks and joyful praise for all that has been and for all that will be !

Living and loving in Unity with Christ may cause us to suffer for a little while

This is the last Sunday of our Easter season.  Christ has risen.  Christ has reassured us.  Christ has now ascended into heaven.  Next Sunday we will celebrate the arrival of the gift that Christ promised us – the coming to us of the Holy Spirit (our advocate, counselor, helper, and comforter) at Pentecost, remembered in our tradition as the ‘birth of the church.’  

As we prepare to celebrate the arrival of this promised gift and the bursting forth of new life in it, today’s lessons underscore that despite Jesus no longer being visible to us in bodily form, Christ dwells in/with us through this Spirit; and that beyond any apparent set-backs in our temporal existence, we’ve been eternally redeemed through the crucifixion and resurrection.

Today, our lessons both have us looking back at where we’ve been as well as looking forward to what has been promised.  The Spirit calls to be aware that living and loving with Christ can put us at odds with dominant culture around us and lead to our suffering (as it has for our ancestors)… “OUR” – we’re also called to live and love in unity as one beloved body… and body that doesn’t so much need to be re-united by our own efforts, but a blessed collective that needs to wake up to the truth that we’re already inter-connected, inter-dependent by our very created nature.  Ultimately we are ‘one’ just as God, Christ, and the Spirit are one.

LOOKING BACK

The Psalmist (Psalm 68:1-10. 33-36) reminds us that God brought our ancestors out of bondage in Egypt and saved them from their enemies.  We’re told that people who deny or turn-away from God are left in parched places – thirsting, hungry, embittered.  But that people who worship and praise God will be provided: protection, shelter, freedom, provisions and nourishment, refreshment, strength and power.  God intends that we participate in the building of our relationships into a healthy, unified family.

In our reading from the Gospel according to John (John 17:1-11), we travel back to that last supper that Jesus, in earthly form, shared with his closest disciples (on what we now remember as Maundy Thursday).  They were celebrating in that moment all that was happening… but Jesus was already looking ahead to what was to come.  Offering instructions, guidance, and encouragement he says the words we heard today that are sometimes referred to as his “high priestly prayer” or his “prayer of consecration.”

Looking back, he says he has done what he was sent to do and that all of this work and witness points back to God with glory (reputation/brightness/greatness/honor).  He has demonstrated humility and merciful compassion toward them and others, commanding them to continue loving each other as he has loved them (more than merely loving their neighbors as themselves), and he has promised to send them an Advocate (Holy Spirit).

Looking ahead, he knows that they will experience moments of weakness – that despite their praise and conviction in this joyful intimate setting, they will soon scatter and abandon him out of fear.  Despite this, as we heard last week, he assures them that he will never abandon them or leave them orphaned.  Looking ahead, he knows that they will suffer and be persecuted because of their expressed faith in his good news… but he also knows that great joy is in store for them ultimately.  Several verses before what we heard today, Jesus uses the metaphor of labor and birth, “…your pain will turn into joy.  When a woman is in labor, she is in pain, because her hour has come.  But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world” (John 16:20-21).

Looking ahead, Jesus sees in their new birth, fully restored through his resurrection as one family with God.  He then prays (a prayer found only in John) to God on their behalf, and on behalf of all future believers (us), asking that God guard/protect them/us, consecrate/sanctify them/us in the truth of the Word (John 17:17) and restore them/us as one family, in shared purpose and love.

Moving forward in time, we heard excerpts from one of Peter’s reassurances (1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11) to the early church that had been birthed through the coming of the Holy Spirit after Jesus’ ascension.  Peter, the rough-n-ready fisherman formerly known as Simon, is now writing to his fellow believers in Asia Minor (area of Turkey today), many of whom are former pagans and non-Jews, often living as unwelcome exiles / aliens in a socially/politically hostile environment. These early believers were initially stigmatized for having separated from their tribes and families in order to gather themselves as believers in Christ.  For this, they were ridiculed and harassed by former friends and family, suffering mostly social rejection and harsh verbal abuse which later would turn into more physical persecution.  The persecution of these early Christians wasn’t because of what they believed, per se, but because how they lived / what they did that was an affront to the systems of social order of the time. These social outcasts practiced solidarity through mutual-support, shared charity, and acts of liberating the oppressed rather than actively participating in the more popular systems of social hierarchy based on material wealth, status, and control through domination and exploitation. They were out-of-sync, to say the least, with the culture around them.  For living and loving as Christ did, they suffered.

In our context today, this might initially be hard for most of us to relate to, here in a society in which we’re not overtly or physically persecuted for our faith (except perhaps mockery at in some social circles).  However, if you’ve ever opted of our predominant social patterns and gone against societal norms to advocate sharing of wealth, justice for the oppressed, or expressing love for the despised, you begin to experience and know more personally the suffering that Peter is addressing.  And, certainly in some parts of our modern world today, to live and love as a Christian is an even risky affair – E.g., www.persecution.com is a website that claims to track and report on the contemporary persecution of Christians.

Back then, Jesus and Peter foresaw that living and loving each other as God intends – doing what is right, if you will – often will put you at odds with the systems and structures around you that are more self-centered and power-hoarding.  They reassured our ancestors, and continue to reassure us, that when we find ourselves suffering because of our expression of Christian faith through charitable, merciful love for others, we are sharing/participating in communion with Christ’s suffering and are joining with all faithful Christians, as one body that suffers, endures, and is redeemed.  How we respond in our unity as a Christian family to these “fiery ordeals” reveals our collective faith and glorifies God.

To endure the birthing pains of a new creation / a newly unified family in Christ, Peter gives the early believers, and us, these instructions: humble yourself before God (it’s not all about you and you’re not ultimately in control); cast your anxiety upon God (don’t spend your energy worrying – surrender and trust in our Lord); discipline yourself and remain alert (don’t live passively and unaware / inattentive to our interconnectedness); and resist the devil’s temptation of convincing yourself that you’re isolated or alone in your faith, or that the only end in life is your personal happiness. 

LOOKING FORWARD

We are not alone – not alone in our suffering, not having to endure things solely on our own, etc… “you know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering” (1 Peter 5:9)

You are a part of ‘us.’  We have work and witness to do together which might well cause us suffering; but we have been called ultimately to eternal glory in Christ, through which God restores, supports, strengthens, and establishes us.

SUFFERING: What is the work we have to do – the work that might cause us to suffer for a little while?  See what we have promised to do, with God’s help, as related in our Baptismal Covenant (paraphrasing what is found on pp. 304-305 in our Book of Common Prayer):

·         Believing and having faith in God, his son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit;

·         Continuing to teach, fellowship, share meals, and prayer together in Christ’s name;

·         Persevere in resisting evil and whenever we fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord;

·         Proclaim through what we say and do the good news of Christ, essentially loving each other as He loves us;

·         Striving for justice and peace among ALL people, respecting the dignity of every human being as beloved creations of God and members ultimately of God’s one family.

UNITY: We come to know God through our relationship with Christ.  Others come to know God through our relationship with them.  And we all are in relationship through the Spirit.  We are intimately interconnected, us with each other, and us with God, Son, and Spirit – “all mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them…. Protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one” (John 17:10-11) a holy family sharing new creation, eternal sustenance, and perpetual liberation and redemption.

Jesus says, as paraphrased in The Message, “I’ve told you all this so that trusting me, you will be unshakeable and assured, deeply at peace.  In this godless world you will continue to experience difficulties.  But take heart!  I’ve conquered the world.” (John 16:33). 

AMEN