**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.
