Trinity Sunday

May 30, 2010

Today is Trinity Sunday. It’s the one day in the church year when our focus is not on the ministry or teaching of Jesus Christ. Instead, our attention is drawn to one of the central doctrines of our faith—the belief that God is Three: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is that doctrine which separates us most clearly from our fellow monotheists, Jews and Muslims. The Trinity deserves at least one sermon a year, because of its importance and its complexity.

The doctrine of the Trinity points to another essential characteristic of our Christian faith. For all that we claim about the authority of scripture, the authority of Jesus Christ’s teaching and incarnation, the Trinity reminds us that our faith is built not only on the words of texts that were written 2500 or 2000 or 1800 years ago. Our faith is not dependent only on scripture. Our faith is also dependent on the ongoing life of the community called together by Christ, witnessing to the reality of his resurrection, and seeking to live out their faith in the world. For the Trinity, my brothers and sisters, is not a biblical notion whatsoever.

No, the Trinity is the result of four centuries of controversy within Christianity as early Christians tried to nail down what exactly the relationship of God the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit is. The New Testament in a number of places makes clear that these three entities exist. What none of the New Testament writers do is define for themselves or for us, how precisely that relationship works.

For most of us, the trinity is at best an abstract concept that we understand poorly. For most of us, to even think of our experience of God in terms of the Trinity seems slightly strange. Oh, we may have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, we may experience God in nature or in beauty, and we may feel the spirit. But to think of all those as aspects of one Godhead is mindboggling.

While there’s an old, and stale joke, that no one wants to preach on Trinity Sunday, the fact of the matter is, I relish the opportunity. In part it’s because reflecting on the Trinity gives me the opportunity to reflect on my own spiritual and theological development over my life. In a way, my personal interest in the Trinity coincides precisely with my discerning of a call to the priesthood. That may simply be coincidental, but I think it’s more than that. I think my reflection of and experience of the Trinity has deepened my sense of God and my sense of who I am.

Today’s gospel is another portion from Jesus’ farewell discourses in the Gospel of John. We’ve been spending the last few weeks there. These chapters, chapters 14-17, are very interesting but they are also confusing, repetitive, and complex. But in today’s reading we hear what is one of the texts I love most in the gospel of John: “I still have many things to say to you but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.”

“When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” There is in Christianity, indeed in most religions, and in most areas of life, a very powerful notion that there was a time when everything made sense, when everything was perfect, a kind of golden age. In Christianity, that’s usually placed in the earliest decades of the faith, if not in the very ministry and words of Jesus himself. We tend to assume that things were perfect, were true at the very beginning, and that somehow, in the intervening centuries, things got screwed up.

That’s not the perspective of the Gospel of John. I’ve told you this before, but it bears repeating, because I doubt whether any or many of you have actually done it. Go home some time, and read through the Gospel of Mark. Trust me, it doesn’t take very long. Then, after you’ve read Mark, read John. It is incredibly different. The picture of Jesus that emerges from John, the words John reports Jesus saying; are radically different from what Mark says. How do we make sense of these differences? Well, if we were in a court of law, we might end up discounting both; if we were college students, we might say, “well that’s just their opinion.”

The fact of the matter is that the gospel of John is a radical reinterpretation of who Jesus is, a radical departure from the Jesus of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And the gospel writer knows he’s way out there. So he has Jesus say something like this: “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.”

The Gospel of John knows something very important, something we tend to forget. Historical circumstances change, the world situation changes, the life of the Christian community faces new challenges in these changed circumstances. And the Christian faith needs to adapt to those new circumstances. The gospel of John’s interpretation of who Jesus Christ was, was an attempt to respond to the changed situation of the late first century, and my friends, it’s very likely that if the gospel of John hadn’t been written, Christianity would not have survived, or if it did, it would look very different.

“The Spirit of Truth will guide you into all truth.” Without the ongoing conversation in the early church as it tried to understand who God was, what the relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit were, the doctrine of the Trinity would never have been laid down. It was an attempt to resolve hundreds of years of conflict, years that saw people from all sides being persecuted, hounded, exiled, even killed. It’s a conflict that makes our current troubles in the church look relatively silly and boring in comparison. There were winners and losers, but in the end, the conflict made it possible for the church to figure what it meant by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

I for one, take enormous comfort in that conflict more than 1500 years ago. It reminds me that, no matter how ugly, no matter how deep, conflict is one of the ways we come to know the truth, and very often it is the case that compromises reached are disliked by all involved. Every Sunday, we say the Nicene creed which is based on, though not identical with, the decisions made at the Nicene Council in 325. And guess what, even though all the bishops present signed off on the agreement; as soon as they went home, most of them, said, it was wrong. Sound familiar? Conflict is messy, it’s nasty, and it ought to repel. Unfortunately, we are human, and because we are human, we disagree.

There are other images in today’s readings that may help to provide perspective on the ongoing life of the Church in its Trinitarian faith. The reading from Proverbs is a poem of Wisdom. Wisdom, personified here as female is speaking:

“Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice?

“On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand; beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries out.”

What comes to mind when I describe to you the scene of a woman standing in the middle of town, at the gates of the city, at a crossroads, crying out? A homeless woman? Someone mentally ill? Perhaps talking as much to herself as to you, but in any case an image that probably makes you quite uncomfortable?

But contrast that image with this one from a few verses later: “When he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.”

Here, wisdom describes herself as the master workman, and in the reading we get a strong sense of Wisdom participating in creation in some way, helping plan it or at least observing it. But, wait. That word that’s translated as master worker? It might instead mean nursling, little child. What a different sense we would get from the reading.

“When he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was with him, like a little child, I was his delight, rejoicing before him always, and delighting in the human race.”

One of the ways in which theologians speak of the relationship among the three persons of the Trinity is to use the Greek word, perichoresis. Literally, it means, to dance around. If you read technical descriptions of it, very different words are used, words like “coinherence” for example. But to think of the Trinity as a dance, to think of God, delighting in Wisdom, Wisdom delighting in the created order and in us. Wisdom proclaims her joy in creation; she dances, she delights, she rejoices.

Too often, theology, the Christian faith is depicted as a deadly serious business. We think that, if we don’t get it right, we might go to hell. That perspective certainly seems to be driving much of the conflict in our worldwide church these days.

But how would things look if we took the perspective of today’s readings. In the instance of the gospel, to recognize that the truth does not always lie behind in some perfect past, but it lies ahead of us in the unknown, in uncharted waters, on a journey in which we will be accompanied by God, The Son, God’s Wisdom, and by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth. But also a journey on which we will not merely plod, or to extend the metaphor to bear down continuously on our oars without a break.  Our journey is also one of joy, and play, of delight, and yes, of dance.