'Jesus said to the disciples, "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, she will guide you into all the truth; for she will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever she hears, and she will declare to you the things that are to come. She will glorify me, because she will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that she will take what is mine and declare it to you."'
--John 16: 12-15
How do you explain the inexplicable, or comprehend the incomprehensible? Writer Karen Armstrong, in her seminal work A History of God, points out that we use allegory, metaphor, story, and anthropomorphism – that’s granting human qualities to that which is not human – in an attempt to do just that. This is what we have always done with the Divine, long before the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity became the centerpiece of Christian theology. Stories of ancient gods waring with each other, filled with jealousy, lust, and savagery were attempts to show that the divine beings were, in reality, not that dissimilar from their own creations. In the Hebrew Scriptures we have depictions of God walking in the garden in the evening breeze, coming down to smite the tower of Babel, and even speaking through a donkey. Using human language to describe the Divine is as old as humanity itself.
But the Trinity? That feels….different, somehow. The Trinity is to some the lynchpin of all Christian thought, yet to others it is the great, inexplicable thorn in the side of our theology. Maybe you fall into one of these categories; still, to all, it seems, the Trinity is, if nothing else, a mystery, and our modern, western way of thinking and being has simply forgotten how to dwell in the realm of mystery. If something cannot be proven, then it cannot possibly be “real.” For some, this is enough to say the Trinity is downright gobbledygook.. But we mustn’t throw out the baby Jesus with the holy water. What if I told you that the Trinity actually does make sense? That it is the foundation of…everything?
Some will be quick to point out that the word ‘Trinity’ is nowhere in the Bible. The only reference we even get to ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’ - in that order - shows up at the very end of the Gospel of Matthew; you’d think our lectionary would use that Gospel every Trinity Sunday, but it only shows up in Year A when we read Matthew, so you’ll see it next year.
Notice that I didn’t say that the Trinity isn’t in the Bible, because it is. God as Father – or Mother, or Creator – is all over the Bible. God creates the world ex nihilo, from nothing, and creates it out of love, a stark contrast to other creation stories of the ancient world that were rooted in violence. This is the God that Jesus of Nazareth calls Father, or Abba in Aramaic. Jesus is described as the Son of God, making him equal to God in stature, and in the prologue to the Gospel of John he is the Word, the logos in Greek, that existed from before time itself, in the beginning with God. This logos, this Word, this Jesus, is not just the carpenter turned rabbi from Nazareth but is also God made flesh, and in his last lesson to his followers, he promised to send them a Paraclete, an Advocate, also known as Holy Spirit, who, as we know from last week, was God’s creative force in the very beginning, spoke through the prophets, and lit the apostles hearts and heads on fire on the Day of Pentecost, giving birth to this movement that bears the name of Jesus. It’s not hard to find references to the Trinity in Scripture, to God’s threefold action in the world, but why is it so central to our faith?
“Who is Jesus?” That was the question on most people’s minds for the better part of four centuries. In the year 325, Emperor Constantine, who had declared Christianity a legally recognized religion in the Roman Empire 12 years earlier, called together bishops from the Latin west and Greek east to his palace at Nicea. That question – “Who is Jesus?” – was what they were there to answer. Constantine thought it would be quit and painless, he needed this thing shored up in order to prevent actual violence being done in the name of particular points of view. It wasn’t quick, the bishops refused to let the emperor push his own ideas through at his own pace. And it wasn’t painless, just ask Arius, who got punched in the face by St. Nicholas. Santa Claus had a mean right hook.
The consensus at Nicea was that Jesus was made of the same substance, the same ousia, as God. To understand this, one needs to understand how Aristotle thought of all created matter, that there are accidents, which are outward, physical traits that make a person who they are; and also substance, which is that unseeable thing that makes every person uniquely themselves – we might also call that a soul. Jesus and God shared the same substance. Like many legislative decisions, however, Nicea’s rulings didn’t exactly take everywhere, so another council was called in 381 at Constantinople – not Istanbul – for the whole thing to get sorted out. Nicea had only briefly mentioned Holy Spirit, so the work of unpacking that question – “Who is Holy Spirit’s relationship to God and Jesus?” – was taken up by three bishops collectively called the Cappadocian Fathers: Gregory of Nyssa, Basil the Great, and Gregory of Nazianzus. It was the latter Gregory who said that the movement between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit was perichoretic, a kind of free-flowing, mutual indwelling, in which each person is fully present as individuals while also being inseparable in their being. The Cappadocian Fathers were building off ideas that Athanasius had proposed back at Nicea, and later a Creed would be written with his name attached – which is in our Book of Common Prayer on page 864. Three hypostases – persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – in one ousia – the substance of the Godhead. This statement of faith, begun at Nicea and codified at Constantinople, became known as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed – or, simply, the Nicene Creed – which, of course, we affirm, in one way or another, every single week.
But isn’t history simply written by the victors? The Trinitarian doctrine was one of many, many theories proposed at those two councils, after all. It only became the teaching of the Church because it was the most popular. Nowadays, that very word – doctrine – feels icky, too authoritative, too top-down. It doesn’t seem to leave room for other ideas. The reality, however, is that those other voices at Nicea and Constantinople, those that were deemed as heresies, beliefs and opinions contrary to doctrinal statements, were the ones that left little wiggle room. It was the heresies that tried to put God in a box, tried to come up with statements of faith that were clear, concise, and definitive. These statements made a lot more logical sense than what would become the catholic, or universal, faith, but mystery was not a part of them. Some examples of these included: Arianism said that Jesus and the Spirit weren’t divine, they were just creations of the Father: like the sun – you have the star, heat, and light, but the heat and light aren’t the star, just products of it. Modalism said that each Person of the Trinity had a specific job or mode, which didn’t intersect with each other: like water that exists as liquid, ice, and vapor, all separate modes. And then there’s Partialism, that stated the three Persons composed 1/3rd of God individually, which is, of course, like Voltron, the Defender of the Universe, who is composed of five robotic lions that merge into a giant robot samurai that fights evil alien monsters. Maybe you can guess which of those heresies is my favorite.
These may have made – and still make – logical sense, but they don’t leave a lot of room for mystery, do they? That’s the irony of the Trinity. The doctrine itself is intentionally mysterious; even Gregory of Nazianzus, who described the Trinity as perichoretic, free-flowing, argued in the 4th century what Karen Armstrong would argue in the 21st century, that we were always going to fall short of fully capturing the essence of God because human language is limited, and human minds cannot fully grasp the magnitude and mystery of God, and that’s a good thing. It keeps us humble, helps us remember we aren’t in control and that we don’t have to have everything figured it. It helps us rest in mystery.
But there is something about the Trinity that is knowable, and that is the fact that it is relational. The Most Rev. Peter Carnley, who was Archbishop of Perth and my seminary ethics professor, once said that every single conversation about God begins with the Trinity because every conversation about God begins with relationship. God models relationship for us, whom God created to be in relationship with one another. The Trinity is not hierarchical. There is no power-over in it, simply co-existence. It is…the flow. Anyone who has ever seen a preacher just let loose and be led by the Spirit, anyone who has ever done any kind of theatre improv, those who understand the music of jazz or hip hop, know what “the flow” is all about. Flow is creativity, play, and life. It involves both letting go and being fully present to the movement of what is happening. The flow state is a divine state. The flow is the Trinity. The Trinity is the flow.
So, you see, the Trinity makes all the sense in the world. The perichoretic, free-flowing nature of the Persons within the Godhead is precisely the model for our own relationships. And the fact that the doctrine itself is confusing gives us permission to rest in the mystery of God because the quest to define God leads us to do everything from create God in our own image to claim the kind of control over our lives that belongs only to God. So let go, brothers and sisters. Let go of the need to understand, to control, and let the flow of the Trinity take you away. We bind unto ourselves this day, and every day, the strong Name of the Trinity, by invocation of the same, the Three-in One, and One-in-Three.
