Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Psalm 8; John 1:1-4
Trinity Sunday: May 30, 2010
Today is Trinity Sunday. Just the sound of that probably makes some of you think, “Darn it, I wish I would have stayed home to garden.” You might care as much about the trinity as you do the score of a cricket match between Zimbabwe and Bangladesh. Maybe less. But I’m hoping when you leave here you might care a little bit more about the Trinity.
You probably know me well enough to know that I’m not a big defender of church doctrine. But, the truth is my feelings about doctrine are more complicated than just wanting to throw it all out. I am not a fan of doctrine being used as a test that people have to pass in order to be considered a true Christian. My problem isn’t really the doctrine itself – it’s how it has been used to judge the authenticity of someone’s faith. But, the doctrine is not necessarily inherently bad. In fact, I think some of the long standing Christian doctrines are still around because those folks who originally came up with them might have actually been on to something.
In other words, it’s not always a bad starting place, as long as we remember that a doctrine is always contextual. It was formulated in a particular time and place and that time and place affected how things were said, the language that was used, how it was applied in the world, etc. It’s much like the constitution. The constitution as it was first written – without amendments – is a document most, if not all, of us are unwilling to throw out altogether. We have a relationship to it we would be loathe to sever. But without the amendments over time, most of us would no longer find it helpful. The amendments protect rights we would not be willing to give over to the votes and whims of Congress. They are rooted in the original document, as true to the intention as the original words. This is why the framers wisely allowed the constitution to be amended. Things change – core principles might endure, but they have to continually be reinterpreted in order to be applied to new, originally unimaginable, situations.
So, back to the Trinity. I’m not ready to toss out the original idea. But I do think it needs some rethinking, reinterpreting, reshaping for this time and place. It needs amendments, but the core idea is sound. I think it had great wisdom at its inception – in about 400 AD – and we still need that wisdom in the church today, even if it’s daunting to delve into it.
I want to try and show how this doctrine can reveal some things about God, about ourselves, and about our creation. Then hopefully offer some ways I think all of that is relevant today.
One way to understand the doctrine of the trinity is to ask, “who was where, when and what were they doing?” It sounds a little bit like the board game Clue. It was Mrs. Peacock in the library with the candlestick. Of course, in seeking the answer to those questions when it comes to God, we find out it’s not as simple as Clue. For starters, we have this three people equaling one thing we have to deal with. Coronal Mustard, Professor Plum and Miss Scarlet were three distinct characters, not three aspects of the real murderer.
By answering the questions of who was where when doing what – according to the authors of both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures – we start to uncover some of the wisdom of the Trinity. Now, we can get at the “who” question when we realize that the “where, when, and what” questions lead us to the Creation story in Genesis. Understanding the Trinity – this symbol that we use to talk about the nature of God – means understanding how the bible imagines God creating the universe.
When we think about the creation story, most of us don’t think it is a scientific explanation for the beginning of the universe. But, most of us do think there is truth in the idea that something divine was involved in creation in some way. And the Trinity is an attempt to understand that “divine” entity that created the world around us and continues to participate in the ongoing creation process.
Our passages from Proverbs and John are both attempts to describe that divine essence. And they are clear – whatever the divine being is, it is most definitely multi-dimensional. God is not a sole, solid, unchangeable, thing that wished everything into being, like a magician who makes a quarter appear out of thin air. Creation happened and happens because of the relationship that is part of God’s nature.
Proverbs gives us one dimension of God present at creation along with the God the Hebrew people knew as Yahweh, and John gives us another. Wisdom and the Word. Proverbs has Wisdom, personified as a woman, retelling the creation story, recounting all that was created as described in Genesis. And with each step of creation she says, “I was there.” I was there before the creating of the world began. And the passage from John tells us about the Word: In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. All things came into being through the Word, and without it not one thing came into being.
The key thing here is that Yahweh, Wisdom and the Word were all there. The answer to the question of “just who was where when” is Yahweh, Wisdom and the Word were present when everything was created and according to John, without Wisdom and Word, nothing would have come into being.
They all create together – things come into being because of relationship – because of a God that simply is relationship…that is the nature of God. That is what the Trinity is trying to say. In answering the question who was where when doing what, the Trinity declares that while it was God, and God alone who created…the nature of that God is relationship between different ideas, different qualities, or in the language of those that first articulated the Trinity, different persons. And together they equal God.
We get hung up on what we call these “persons”; we get hung up on language, and we certainly get hung up when we try to assign once and for all a name for God. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That’s it. We can never use other names. If we do, we are not talking about God. That doesn’t make any sense to me. John doesn’t use those words at the beginning of his gospel. Proverbs doesn’t use those words when describing how Wisdom was present at the beginning.
It’s true, Father is used to describe God, Son is used to describe Jesus and Spirit is used to define an ongoing presence of God that guides us. But so is Yahweh used to describe God, and Word is used to describe Jesus, and Wisdom is used to describe the nature of the holy spirit. And I feel pretty confident that the authors of our scriptures, who freely use other words to describe God, did not mean to give God permanent names. Their concern was that they and us understand that God is multiple within God’s self. God is relational. God is movement and mutual love and union with others. That’s the “who” God is.
And why is it so important to tie this all to Creation? Why do the where and when matter? Because relationship causes creation. It takes more than one to create. We know this in a literal sense – procreation, making babies. But we’re talking about far more than procreation. God in relationship created something out of nothing! And that something included humans, but it also included mountains and streams, animals and oceans, flora and fauna, atoms and quarks. In other words, the relationship within God’s self creates new worlds, new possibilities and new life.
Remember that Genesis is not scientific explanation, this is a myth that describes how creation happens, how new worlds come into being, how new possibilities are born. And as a myth it can continue to help us understand the creative process today. The truth of the myth is that creation – creativity – only happens through relationship. New things are only possible through relationship. And we want to continue to create new things and new worlds and new possibilities, lest the world be forever stuck exactly as it is now.
The relevance to us is found in the creation story as well. We learn that we are a part of the Trinity. We are created in the image of God, who is relationship. In Genesis when it describes how human kind was created it says, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness. “Us” and “our”. The Trinitarian God…that is the likeness we bear. And because we bear the likeness, we are part of the very act of creation itself. The language the bible uses is that when humans are created in the image of the relational God, they are given dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.
We’re not mere bystanders to the work of the Trinitarian God. We’re smack dab in the middle of it. This is what Genesis says, and that is what the Psalmist reminds us of: “You, Yahweh, have given human beings dominion over the works of your hands.” The Psalmist is trying to say something about who we are in relationship to God – the God who creates.
But dominion is another one of those words that gets in the way. It’s not power over something, just as none of the members of the Trinity have power over the others. Dominion is the ability to continue creation, to participate in what God started. It’s an invitation to relationship with God and with one another so that creation will continue and so that there will always be new possibilities for us and for our world. In fact, when we think dominion is some kind of power over nature and creation, we do the opposite of create. When we think dominion gives us the ability and permission to manipulate creation for our own purposes, we find that we actually destroy parts of creation, we diminish the creative power in the world. Think oil spill in the gulf.
We are made in the image of the Trinitarian God and so when we are in relationships that reflect God’s nature, we create! We do have an effect on what Yahweh-Wisdom-Word-God created together. We are invited into the ongoing project of creation.
There is a 15th century of the Trinity by Andrei Rublev that is based on Genesis 18 – the story of when three strangers come to tell Abraham and Sarah that they are going to have a son. Without knowing who the strangers were, Abraham called on Sarah, and together they showed the visitors extraordinary hospitality. While the visitors hung out under a tree, Sarah baked bread and Abraham prepared the meal. In the process of sharing the resources of their household, the identity of the visitors was revealed to be Yahweh. Three visitors, yet Abraham calls them by one name, Yahweh. And when Yahweh as three makes Abraham and Sarah the mother and father of all the nations for generations to come, they become agents in the process of creation.
The position of the three figures in the painting is suggestive. They are gathered around a communion table, and although they are arranged in a circle, the circle is not closed. You get the idea that you are not only invited into this communion but that you are already a part of it. The Trinity is portrayed as God in communion inviting us to commune as well.
God is not far from us, but lives among us in a communion of persons. The Christian community is supposed to be a reflection of God’s triune life. When we are – when we join the communion feast and choose relationships of love and self-sacrifice – then creation happens. New worlds and new possibilities are born. This is why the trinity is important. It serves to remind us of who was where when doing what. And so, it reminds us of who we are, how we are to be and what kinds of things are possible in this world when we choose to reflect the divine three persons. Amen.
