Trinity Sunday

Who or what is God? How can we talk about that which is beyond language? Such is the challenge of preaching on Trinity Sunday.

Trinity 2013

Transcribed from a sermon given by

The Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Today is Trinity Sunday. For those of you who have been Episcopalian for quite some time you are probably used to on Trinity Sunday having a guest preacher, or that your rector is out of town, or that there is a student preaching. That is because there is a certain amount of resistance to having to preach on the Trinity. The problem I have today is that Jeremy, our retired priest, is out of town and I don’t have a student. So I’m here and what I am going to do is ask for your help. And I am going to ask for Jason’s help as well as my assistant up here.

What I want to ask is if you will think of a word or a phrase that describes God to you. How do you know God? Not what you have heard about God. Not what you have been taught about God. But how you experience and know God. So who is going to be brave and go first?

“A shamrock.”

Alright we have a shamrock. What else?

“Love”

She said love. What else? How else would you describe God?

Anybody from the choir?

“A guide.”

We have “a presence.”

And we have “everywhere.”

Anybody here?

“All knowing.”

What else do we have to say about God? Anybody down here?

“God is peace”

We have some enthusiastic people.

“Protection” – I heard.

Any others?

“Love”

Anybody down on this side

“Strength”

And we have somebody way in the back.

“Always there.” That’s a good one.

“Companion.”

“Answers your needs.”

“Everlasting spirit.”

You’ve got to write fast Jason.

Anybody else?

“Peace.”

“Relationship.”

Did you have something you wanted to say Janis

“Majestic”

“Best parent”

We had a lot of different images for God. And I don’t think anybody would disagree with any of those. Now I would like you to imagine that you are now put together in a conference and you have a week where you can’t leave until you’ve come up with a description of God that satisfies all of you. Okay.

Now imagine that it is not just you but there is over a hundred of you and you are all theologians. Church people. Bishops. And you have to sit down together and you have to describe God.

Well that is basically what happened at the early councils, the early gatherings of the church. It had been around 300 years or so since Jesus had died. The church had been going along as an outlawed church, meeting in homes, sometimes being persecuted. Each city had a bishop and each city developed its own sense of how to understand who God was and what Christ was. There were various things being written about him that were being sent around but there wasn’t complete agreement on which ones were authentic and which ones weren’t. Then the emperor became Christian. Now I think in order to be an emperor you’ve got to be a bit of a control freak. Right? I think it goes with the job. The emperor didn’t like being part of a religion that was messy. The Roman empire if anything was not messy. And the Christian church at the time was messy. Different groups believed different things and said different things and had different understandings of just exactly who Jesus was and how to relate to him.

So they had these great councils where they wanted to come together with a description of God that they could all agree to. Now people had different ideas. Some people focused on some of the things that are here – all knowing, everywhere, everlasting. This transcendent aspect of God, this sense of God that is beyond everything, before everything. For others, their primary experience of God was with Christ, Christ in his incarnation as Jesus. They experienced God as friend and companion. Then there were others who experienced God through what we call the Holy Spirit. They felt the love, they felt the protection, they felt the energy, they felt the work of God in the world. And there were probably other things as well.

Now if you have a group of people who have different experiences of God, who have come to know God in different ways, one thing you can do is say, and this would be consistent for the Greeks and Romans of the time, that there are lots of gods. You experience god on the ocean, so we can have an ocean god. You experience god in the love between people, so we can have a goddess of love. You experience god as a companion, well we can have a god who walks with you. You could have a bunch of different gods for each of the different ways we experience the divine.

But of course those who came from a Jewish tradition couldn’t have many gods. They knew there was only one God. That there could be only one God. There had to be something beyond which there was nothing more. Something that was totally transcendent. So how do you put these together these different experiences of God? With a lot of prayer and arguments, and prayer and discussion, and prayer and fighting, they finally came up with, or were inspired with, this concept of the Trinity. The concept of God being both absolutely one, totally one and yet having three, as we translate it, persons. Three personalities or aspects. It was an interesting way to solve that dilemma.

In order to write the Nicene Creed they had to come up with new Greek words to describe it. That which we translate as three persons is a compound Greek word they created to try and get the subtly of the meaning of the relationship, to somehow get this concept that there is only one God, but we know God as three entities. So we have the Trinity. We have what has been called the Father, because that is the word that Jesus used to describe God. When he spoke to God, he prayed to God as Father or Papa. And so we have the Father. The Father is that which is totally absolutely and completely transcendent. The father is before time and after time. It is beyond the extent of the universe and the universe is all contained within it. There is a complete and total transcendence of this aspect of God.

But there also is way to experience God in human form. Someone said that sometimes people need God with flesh on. Sometimes its hard to identify with and be in relationship with something that is so magnificently and totally transcendent. How do we relate to that? And so we have Christ who came in human incarnation as Jesus. That is the one who can be our companion. That is the one that we can help us have a sense that this God that we worship, this transcendent God, also is with us right now and knows what it means to be a human being. That this one cares about each human being. When we focus on that transcendent God it is hard to believe that we individually could matter. Many people had the experience even three hundred years later, even two thousand years later, of Christ’s presence with them in an amazing and personal way.

Finally, we have the Spirit. One of the things that they were trying to grapple with is some of the language that was used, especially in John’s Gospel, of the Father and of the son being one and sharing everything while also pointing to this third thing. Like the Gospel today it is described as the spirit who will guide and teach you everything. Who will have everything that is mine just as I have everything that is the Father’s. That odd language in John’s gospel that talks about the Father and Christ and the Holy Spirit being one and yet separate. The kind of language that when you read it gets you a little bit dizzy and you may find it hard to focus because it is so… But it is profound and beautiful and there is clearly a truth in it. So there is this Holy Spirit, this Paraclete, that we talked about last week. This action of God in the world right now. That power and presence of God. That compassion. That love. That all knowing. That wisdom like we heard described in the first reading as Sophia. That wisdom, that Holy Spirit. So we have this sense of God, this description of God, as Trinity. Three person but one being.

In one of my theology classes the professor said, “I want you to understand that everything that is ever said about God is heresy. Because the word heresy means it is not the complete truth. And there is nothing that you can say about God that would be the total and complete truth about God.” We need to remember this as we wrestle with understanding the trinity. We can move toward God. We can move toward understanding God, but we are human beings and our brains and our languages are limited. So anything that we say about that which is beyond and before has to be incomplete. The best we’ve come up with is this idea of the Trinity of these three aspects of God that are in relationship with one another and in relationship with the world.

One of the disadvantages of having the Trinity be the description of God is that it is intellectually uncomfortable in some ways. So when we try to talk to people who are not Christian it is a hard concept to understand. One of the things that missionaries talking to cultures that come from an Islamic tradition struggle with is that Islam is radically monotheistic. There is only one God that is the source of everything, so this idea of a trinity and of the divinity of a human being is incomprehensible and almost insulting to them in their sense of God. So it is a struggle to try and explain that yes we agree there is only one God but there are three persons. It is confusing.

The gift that we have, however, with the trinity, is the very fact that it is hard to comprehend. That we are always in the process of wrestling with it. The wonderful gift that we can relate to God in different ways. That we can see the transcendence of the universe when we are out by the ocean, and we can see the stars and we can think of God as transcendent. Or when we are studying physics and the amazing complexity of the universe we can think of God as transcendent. Yet when we are hurting and lonely and afraid we can think of God as walking with us and being our partner. When we are struggling and need energy and support we can feel the Holy Spirit working through us. That is a gift. It is also a gift that we are always in a process with it. We are always struggling with the Trinity. It is a sense of God where we can’t be complacent, we can’t say “Okay, I know what God is now I can go on and think about something else.” It is always an ongoing process of discovery and challenge to try to understand and relate to this one God known in three persons. That is the gift we have, and the challenge we have, and part of the joy and wonderful mystery of being a Christian.