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Trinity Sunday, Year A: May 18, 2008
What’s in a name? Does it really matter what we call God, or how we refer to Him (or Her)?
The assertion through the ages for Christians is that it is important: not because we are simply trying to churn away at a complicated theological question, or superficially distinguish ourselves from other faith traditions, but because we assert that this name is actually descriptive of something. We assert that what we call God, in an important way, actually describes God’s nature.
And so, since we are but human beings with a practical and human perspective, we describe God in terms of God’s life among us, in terms of how we experience God. And so we say God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in Trinity of Persons and in Unity of Being.
I came across a couple of interesting essays this week offering different points of view about the Trinity: one from an Islamic scholar who complained that three persons were too many. He argued that because God is “All-Sufficient” (a very important term in the Koran) God needs nothing, let alone companion “persons”.
The other perspective was from a Jewish scholar who suggested that three persons are too few: that if you were going to assign persons to represent various attributes of God,
you should multiple them. He thought ten persons would be a good round (and vaguely Biblical) number.
In our own modern Church history, we have seen the growth of Unitarianism (from the 18th century on in this country), both, officially among Unitarian Universalists and, I would say, unofficially in the mainline churches. In our own denomination we often see folks acting like functional Unitarians gravitating to one or another of the persons. So the Trinity is less a formula and more of a series of choices: Father, Son, or Holy Spirit. Take your choice and pay lip service to the others, and, in process, lose the exquisite beauty and profound wisdom of the whole formula.
The Trinity becomes infinitely less complex if we avoid the trap of thinking that the Trinity is merely a static description of God’s personality (and a split personality indeed)
where we immediately start working up job descriptions: chopping up God into neatly divisible packets of separate personalities.
But, rather, to think of the Trinity more comprehensively. To begin to think of the Trinity as a description of how God lives, and moves, and has his being. To begin to see that what we are dealing with, or rather, Who is dealing with us, is less an inventory of attributes and more of a symphony of movements: the complexity and harmony of a life, which is not static and distant but is constantly in the process of reaching out.
A kind of life, which can be, biblically (Old and New Testament) and practically described in three movements, (and as actually described, I might add, by Rowan Williams in a wonderful lecture he gave in Cairo in 2004 to a group of imams)
The First Movement, where we understand that every life must have a source. The Second Movement , where we understand that every life must also have an expression. The Third Movement where we begin to acknowledge that life, to be a full life, must be shared. (see John McQuarrie’s Principles of Christian Theology on the Trinity for a similar approach)
A primary source which we describe as Father, just as Jesus does in his intimate way (“Abba”- daddy), simply to indicate that God is the ultimate source of all being, on the one hand, and the single generating force of all life, on the other.
And second, this life made know, and expressed. Made known in many ways, (in creation, in peoples lives, in scripture) but most particularly in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
And thirdly, this life is also shared and brought to bear in and among us in such a way that other lives are transformed: other lives are changed and made more perfectly into the image of the expression of that original, essential, perfecting life.
All of this is God. Not God as a distant sovereign, not God as an image on a wall, nor an idea, however vague, in our minds. But God as authentic life itself, penetrating our lives, reminding us of that larger life of which we are a part.
For example, let us suppose for a moment that I love my wife Eleanor.
And yet: I say not a word about it, I keep it carefully to myself. It, of course, makes me feel perfectly wonderful. It delights me as I contemplate it. But you might wonder (we all might wonder) what good would such a love do? Or even, what kind of love is it really? Is it love at all?
But what if I did express it, if I spoke it and articulated it. If I made it known again and again to Eleanor: if I advertised it to the world. Wouldn’t that change things?
Would that change the people most affected? Perhaps.
But, again what if that was also where I stopped. That I decided to only, merely publish my love to Eleanor, speak it and express it to others, to the world: and showed no indication of love other than my words: Would not my words, alone, fall flat?
Isn’t it not only necessary that the love I have within me not only be expressed: must it not also be shared, if it is to be love at all?
Or another example would be that of an artist, sitting up in his attic studio with a wonderful idea in his head, perhaps perfectly content with that idea floating around in his mind.
But it is not art until he images it forth, and images it not only for a select friends he might invite up to his exclusive little haunt: it is art when the complete stranger sees it
and says in his own heart, “I know that this is, somehow, about me: I know little or nothing about the source of this art, only that I experience that source through its expression.”
It is art in that moment of sharing and inspiration: the inspiration of the artist becomes
the inspiration of the art appreciator.
In both these situations there has been an intimate kind of reaching out, which has, in a sense, been caught, apprehended, internalized in such a way that there has been a change, of mind, of heart.
The Holy Trinity speaks of a God who is not content to sit in his own Cosmic Attic, but must reach out and create. The Holy Trinity describes an active God who must speak out his creative Word and, through that Word, breathe out his creative and inspiring Spirit.
God is self-sufficient, God indeed needs no one, but nevertheless God reaches out. God does what God has to do because that it in in his very nature to be a certain way. In a word: God loves, indeed God is Love (cf. the much quoted 1 John).
And how might we speak of this love: love which seeks the good of others, beyond our own good. Love which accepts others, beyond our own expectations. Love which is radically intimate, radically mutual. Love which changes things.
Love which constantly reaching out, through prophets and sages, but most particularly through Jesus Christ: through whom we can both see the message and catch the
message, the transforming inspiration of the source, and become more like that image
of the one, true original life.
We reenact this Trinitarian life in our own liturgy.
In the readings and the preaching, in these very words I am speaking to you, we seek the reaching out of God in the “now” of this moment (in the Liturgy of the Word).
And we likewise respond to this reaching out by reaching out ourselves, by becoming part of this divine movement, by reaching out to others in our prayers and in the Peace.
And, finally, turning to the altar together and symbolizing a new kind of community
in our Holy Communion with God which is indivisible from our communion with each other.
All of which is merely prelude to the reaching out to the world, to the offering of the larger communion of healing and hope to the world, with our hearts and with our hands.
There is an old story about the stranger who drives up to the Quaker meeting house
And asks: “When does the service begin?” And the Quaker replies, “Right after the worship.”
To speak of God in Trinity is to speak of a God whose self, whose being, cannot be separated from his reaching out, anymore than a lover can be separated from his loving.
The God we worship here is about life the only life worthy of the Name: the One who we are bold to call Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Holy and Indivisible.
Amen.
-The Rev. James B. Stutler, rector
St. Clement’s Episcopal Church
Canton, Georgia
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