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 2nd 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 4th Century (which beget what we now recite as the Nicene Creed). Athanasius (Bishop of Alexandria in the 4th 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 9th 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.
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.
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