Three in One (Trinity Sunday B)

Three in One
3 June 2012 Trinity Sunday (First Sunday after Pentecost) (Year B)

Homily Preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon
8:00 a.m. Spoken Mass; 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Isaiah 6:1-8; Psalm 29 and Canticle 13; Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

This feast day celebrates an abstract and difficult-to-understand doctrine, but that nonetheless is central. Few of us can get our minds, let around our hearts, around it.

Part of the problem is that talking about God in doctrinal terms, in third person terms, is almost antithetical to how we must experience God in faith, in second person, I-thou terms.  The problem has been expressed well by Kilian McDonnell in her poem, “God is Not A Problem”:

God is not a problem
I need to solve, not an
algebraic, polynomial equation
I find complete before me,

with positive and negative numbers
I can add, subtract, multiply.
God is not a fortress
I can lay siege to and reduce.

God is not a confusion
I can place in order by my logic.
God's boundaries cannot be set,
like marking trees to fell.

God is the presence in which
I live, where the line between
what is me and what
before me is real, but only God

can draw it. God is the mystery
I meet on the street, but cannot
lay ahold of from the outside
for God is my situation,

the condition I cannot stand
beyond, cannot view from a distance,
the presence I cannot make an object,
only enter on my knees

Every week we recite the Nicene Creed to express our Trinitarian faith. But many of us still hear such words as “the Father,” “the Son,” “begotten,” “from” (as in “God from God”), and “came down from heaven” literally. So we tend to understand it in a way that places the Father as number one, the Son as number two, and the Spirit as a distant and somewhat ambiguous number three.

This understanding is precisely what the creed was trying to correct when it was promulgated by the Council of Nicea in A.D. 325, and when it was edited by the Council of Constantinople in A.D. 381.

This mis-reading has to overlook key phrases: “eternally begotten of the Father,” “begotten, not made,” and “through whom all things were made.” People who think that “begotten” somehow refers to the birth of Jesus in history miss the point. The creed sees this “begetting” as something that occurred “from before all worlds,” or, more correctly, as a timeless event that occurs apart and outside of the space and time of the created universe. If God created time, then past, present, and future are frames seen from our perspective within creation, not from God’s perspective as creator.

I was raised in a non-Trinitarian tradition. I realized in college that I believed the Nicene Creed. This is what led me ultimately to Anglicanism. So here are a few thoughts about the doctrine of the Trinity from someone who came to the belief honestly.

It is a difficult doctrine. It seeks to describe what is by definition beyond our experience, our language, and our cognitive range.

The first impression you have when reading the creed is that it must have been the product of a committee. Contradictory phrases stand side by side, trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. “There is only one God” vs. “Jesus Christ is God too, and so is the Holy Spirit.” Jewish monotheism seems to have been undermined by a Gentile tendency to deify great historical figures.

The ugly side of story behind the creed doesn’t help—the story of the Arian-Athanasian controversy. Christians killed other Christians in street rioting that exploded intermittently over a 200 year period. Wanting peace, Emperors insisted that there be a single doctrine. They called Church Councils to fix the problem, and then later ordered them to adopt specific solutions. The councils themselves were marred by behavior we don’t like to think of as appropriate for discerning the will of God: opposition bishops were prevented by trickery and by force from attending or voting. On occasion, a minority on both sides used entrapment, blackmail, and character assassination against each other. When the compromise language drawn up by the councils did not resolve the problem, but only encouraged more controversy, Christian princes on either side of the argument actually fought wars with each other. The whole thing makes the current disharmony within the Anglican Communion look like an amicable afternoon tea.

The politics of Church Councils and the promulgation of the Creed did not resolve the controversy. What resolved it was further theological reflection that made many of the specific arguments seem irrelevant. Great scholars and mystics of the Eastern Church—the Cappadocian Fathers Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianus—working on the basis of the creeds, scripture, and deep reflection in a comprehensive program of spiritual direction and prayer, expressed a new phrasing and understanding for what Christians had been praying, living, and reading in their scriptures.

They used the image of the three-in-one and one-in-three character of God, which they expressed with the Greek word trias (three-ness, or trinity). Before the Cappadocians clearly phrased the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, both sides of the controversy would merely quote scriptures at each other that they thought proved their own position. The Fathers showed that these contrary elements of scripture were actually describing varying elements of a greater mystery, something beyond our experience and understanding.

This new fusion of older materials, which the larger Church rapidly recognized as its true faith, included several elements.

Personhood is not the same as being. The fathers taught that God is one being in three persons, and three persons in one being. For us human beings, there is a correspondence between person and being: one person is one being, and that is that. So we assume that they are the same thing. But the Fathers were clear—we are made in God’s image, but God is the original, and we are the pale imitation. In God, there is no correspondence of person and being.

God is more than personal, not less. People today often will say something like, “I believe in God, just not in a personal God.” If you ask them what they mean, they generally say that they don’t think the mystery and wonder and purpose behind life and the universe that they feel at an emotional level can be reduced to the limitations of what we usually think of as a person. But because they have automatically tied the concept of personhood to that limitation, what I think they actually end up believing in is something less than a person. Something more like a gas, or a light, or another non-sentient object. The fathers, through consistently de-linking the concept of personhood with being, described a God truly personal without limitation. Rather than a gas, they described relationship or society.

“How is it even possible to have ‘person’ and ‘being’ distinct?” Remember we are talking about God, about something beyond all that we know. C.S. Lewis compares us talking about God to a flat-lander living in a two-dimensional world talking about a cube. We ask “how can three persons be one being?” The flat-lander asks, “how can six squares be one shape?” The flatlander cannot conceive of a cube, a solid geometric form whose six sides are each a square, each in its own plane.

God is social. God is love. By describing God as an eternal Holy Trinity of Parent, Child, and Sacred Breath, the Fathers described relationship apart from time. The three in unity have always been that way from our perspective within time. The parent-child relationship is a metaphor of desiring and responding, of willing and obeying, of loving and returning love. This unity of persons is so real that it itself is person. When most people say, “God is love,” they actually mean “love is God.” Saying that God is love, and has always been love is nonsensical unless you believe that within God there is a social relation between persons. Some of the fathers described the relationship as a dance that goes on and on.

Often on Trinity Sunday, we recite a statement of Trinitarian faith, anachronistically called the Athanasian Creed, that states this more explicitly. It was probably written in the fifth century after the Church had digested the teachings of the Cappadocian Fathers

So what does this mean for us? I like to think of the Holy Trinity in terms of God as transcendent, as particular, and as immanent.

God as Parent is the aspect we characterize as the transcendent, impassible, all-mighty. It is God acting across the broad sweep of history or in the national saga of a people identified as God’s. What we are not, this aspect of God is. For the average person’s needs, the Almighty is certainly strong enough to rely on in times of trouble. But on occasion he seems perhaps too inaccessible, maybe not really available. Jesus clearly saw this; his response was to call God “Father,” and to teach his disciples to do the same.

God as Child is the aspect we characterize as particular: it has a human face, and that face is Jesus of Nazareth. And it just isn’t a face of God, a mask. Jesus was a real human being with all the limitations, pains, and weakness that implies (save sin). So God as child is personal, historical, submitted, all-passionate, all-bearing As a historical person who lived and taught as a Jew in Roman-occupied Palestine and suffered a cruel and unfair death for political rebellion, he is perhaps too particular and limited; while loving and compassionate, he is perhaps too weak to rely on. But Easter, resurrection, and ascension fill the gap between “Jesus of Nazareth” and “the second person of the Holy Trinity.”

God as the Breath or spirit that makes us more that we are, is the immanent aspect of God. It is personally and communally available, transforming and sanctifying. Because this is experienced in our hearts, it is perhaps too internal and prone to being mistaken or misused. But its action in the Church, its book (the Holy Bible), sacraments, and social service serves as a corrective to solipsistic spirituality.

Let me close by affirming that I believe in one God. This one true God has revealed God’s self as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, unchanged and unchanging in timeless eternity. The way I know this God most particularly and clearly is in Jesus Christ, whom I experience through the Spirit. I am driven by the spirit to face the Father in prayer, with Jesus at my side encouraging me and modeling the way. God is love, and wants us to join in the dance.

In the name of God, Amen.