On Trinity, Answers, and Voltron

**This post is from my sermon on Trinity Sunday, 2015 at Good Shepherd, Asheboro**

So I'm supposed to tell you all about the Holy Trinity, right?  And afterwards, you're supposed to have all of this knowledge about the nature of God, huh?  Fat chance of all that happening, but here goes!

Years ago I actually preached on the Trinity as a teenager.  My priest asked if I wanted to preach and officiate Morning Prayer one week, and I think she gave me Trinity Sunday just because she didn't want to bother with such a tough day.  So with zero theological education, I preached from my gut, what the Trinity meant to me.  I said the Trinity was God's way of interacting in human history--God the Father in Old Testament times, Jesus in New Testament times, and the Holy Spirit ever since.  And, I said, whoever you are and wherever you are in life, you likely relate to one of these three Persons.  Maybe you think of God best as a parent figure.  Or maybe you relate better to the human God in Jesus.  Or maybe you're more spiritual and relate to the Holy Spirit best.  Each of these, I said, is a true image of God because God knows we are all different, so God reveals Godself to us in different ways.  And as a teenager it made since.  

Fast forward several years to my days in seminary.  I learned a few things in my time in seminary.  The first thing, which blew my mind, was that the Bible never really mentions the Trinity:  only one quick reference from Jesus, who tells us at the end of Matthew’s gospel to make disciples by baptizing in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  That's why every Christian baptism is in the name of the Trinity, and any baptism that isn't cannot be considered Christian.  But St. Paul never mentions the Trinity; in fact, the doctrine is something that God has revealed to Holy Mother Church through the ages since Jesus returned to heaven.

 I learned about famous theologians and heresies that I never knew existed, and I realized I wasn’t entirely right about the Trinity, nor entirely wrong.  One heresy I learned about was modalism, which said God in Trinity had three specific tasks or modes, but that those tasks did not intersect with each other.  This is like saying the Trinity is like water, where you have three distinct modes of liquid, ice, and vapor.  Arianism was a heresy that said Jesus and the Holy Spirit are creations of the Father and not one in nature with the Father. So it’s like the sun, where you have the star, the light, and the heat.  The light and the heat are part of the star but are not actually the star.  And then there’s partialism, which says the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not distinct from the Godhead but are simply different parts of God. each composing 1/3rd of the Divine.  This, of course, is like the great defender of the universe, Voltron, who was one giant robot samurai and fighter of alien monsters, who was composed of five individual robot lions, each making up 1/5th of the giant. Ask someone in their 20s or 30s, they’ll tell you all about Voltron and how awesome he is!  

Voltron, Defender of the Universe.  Seen here in his combined form, along with his five component lions.

So there’s your heresy lesson for the day:  modalism, arianism, and partialism, all of which we want to stay away from.  Confused yet?  Good.

So if the heresies are what the Church said God isn't, what did it say God was?  One bishop named Gregory from Nazianzus, coined the term perichoresis, which means an eternal dance. The three persons of the Trinity, Gregory said, are eternally engaging in a dance with one another, perfectly in-step with each other. At the Council of Constantinople in 381, used his argument to defeat modalism.  

St. Gregory of Nazianzus, who coined the term 'perichoresis' to describe the Trinity as an eternal dance.

At that same council  the church leaders affirmed something they had suggested at the first council  the Council of Nicea earlier in 323, and that was that God was 3 hypostasies in 1 ousia, that is 3 persons in 1 substance; God, the council declared, was one God that was revealed in 3 particular persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  The result of this affirmation was our Nicene Creed, which we say every Sunday.

The person who put all of this into written form and trumped all of those hersies was St. Athanasius.  He was at Nicea, and even though he died before Constantinople, he had written his own creed,  his own VERY long creed, which explained the Trinity by saying that the Father is the Son and the Son is the Spirit and the Spirit is the Father and the Spirit is the Son and so on, and that we worship one God in Trinity and one Trinity in unity, neither confusing the persons, nor dividing the substance.  You can find this crazy long creed in the back of the Prayer Book on page 864.  I highly suggest reading it if you can't fall asleep tonight!

St. Athanasius, whose crazy long creed helped solidify the Church's definition of the Trinity.

So how do I understand the Trinity now? The truth is the more I think on the Trinity or read on it the more mysterious it becomes and the more my head hurts.  And I think that's the point.  We cannot ever fully understand why God exists in Trinity of persons.  The mystery is ok.  It's a comfort, actually.  We don't HAVE to know everything, And we can rest in the mystery and the reassurance that we don't always have to have all the answers.  We may have to have all the answers in other areas of our lives--school, work, parenthood--but not when it comes to the nature of God.  

But I do think that there is plenty that God teaches us through the Trinity.  Peter Carnley, the former Anglican Archbishop of Perth, says that everything begins with the Trinity, every conversation about God, and even every conversation about relationship.  You see, we didn't talk much about what the Trinity IS, but we did talk about what the Trinity DOES. And what the Trinity does is show us how God's love is shared in communion. The three persons of the Trinity exist in communion with one another and offer us a glimpse of what living in communion with one another is like.  The three persons do not ask anything of each other, they do not hold grudges toward each other.  They simply dance with each other, to borrow Gregory of Naziansus' imagery.  They simply dance and love one another.  And in doing so they invite us to dance with one another.  To dance with one another in a beautiful dance of love.  When we do that we get glimpses of what the Kingdom is like.  At Good Shepherd we saw that last week, when we gathered to celebrate this place.  We gathered in love, love for Good Shepherd, love for one another, love for God. This, brothers and sisters, is what the Kingdom looks like, and this is what the love of the Trinity looks like.  It's the no-questions-asked kind of love.  If you’ve ever read the novel The Shack, which is a modern allegory for the Trinity, that’s the point of that book:  that God exists in Trinity for the purpose of love.  That's it!  And when we love in the same way, we can see the Kingdom realized here and now!

When it comes to the Trinity our language is limited.  It's helpful to put the Trinity in human terms, but it’s not absolute.  We will never adequately describe in human terms just what the Trinity is, and if we try we'll just make our heads hurt, and we'll probably commit a heresy anyway.  Religion does not exist to answer all of the questions.  Instead it exists to encourage our questioning, and in those questions we find our faith.  And the doctrine of the Holy Trinity can only be understood by faith.

So let us rest in the mystery of the Trinity, comforted by the fact that we don’t have to have all the answers or fully understand who God is. Let’s rest in the love of God that is shared between the three hypostes in the one ousia and share it everyone we meet.  Let's dance with each other!  In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.