'The eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”'
--Matthew 28: 16-20
One summer when I came home from college, I went to church with my Dad like normal, and our priest, The Rev. Fran McCoy, of blessed memory, asked me at Coffee Hour if I would like to preach the next Sunday. To give you some context, this wasn’t that unusual. I’d preached my first sermon when I was 13 and led my first service at 16. It was fun, I thought – I never once thought for the first 22 years of my life that I was gonna actually do this thing forever as, ya know, like a real job or something! So I agreed. “Sure!” I said. “Great!” Fran said, “Next week is Trinity Sunday…good luck!”
I was naïve – or dumb – enough not to really understand why that was a big deal. I didn’t know that it was something of an inside joke for priests to ask their deacon, curate, or some other sucker to preach on Trinity Sunday, to try and encapsulate the defining doctrine of Christianity in a sermon that would or should be – God help us – less than 12-15 minutes. With absolutely no theological knowledge in my back pocket, I tried my best, and while I don’t have a copy of that sermon anymore – he says wishing he could’ve just recycled that one – I do remember talking about the Trinity as expressions of God for us in the world as a comforting Father, as Jesus our friend and Lord, and as the Holy Spirit that still speaks to us and guides us. Not sure what my seminary professors and classmates would’ve thought, but the church didn’t spontaneously burst into flames when I preached it, so that was a win.
How do we even preach on the Trinity, really? How do we make sense of something that appears in the Scriptures precisely once – right here, at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, where we have the only time that “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” in that order, appear – and yet, we’ve based our whole theology around it. The Trinity defines who we are as Christians – at least, in the historical sense, so much so that people who may call themselves Christians but who have not received a baptism done in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not regarded as Christians by the Episcopal, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and most mainline Protestant branches of the Jesus Movement. That’s kind of a big deal, and yet we are expected to sum the whole thing up on one day out of the whole year. Good luck to any preacher who had to preach this past Sunday!
Writer Karen Armstrong, a former Roman Catholic nun, says in her seminal work A History of God, that we use allegory, metaphor, story, and anthropomorphism – that’s granting human qualities to that which is not human – in an attempt to make sense out of the senseless. The Trinity is such an example. It doesn’t really make sense in a logical, head-based way, but if we consider the ways God has acted throughout human history, and we move into the place of mystery and wonder – which is more of a heart-based place – then it begins to come together.
The Trinity as doctrine can be traced back to the Council of Nicea in 325, called by the Emperor Constantine after Christianity was made legal. In a show of unity, he gathered bishops together in both the Latin and Greek-speaking churches and made them come up with an answer to the question: who was Jesus? Easy, right? Reading the Scriptures and talking amongst themselves about what they knew of the nature of God, they declared that God was one substance in three persons, which they called Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It wasn’t just the end of Matthew’s Gospel that helped them get here, but it was clear through the Hebrew Bible, as well as the Greek Christian Testament, that God has always acted in such fashion . But the original version of the Nicene Creed ended with “we believe in the Holy Spirit,” and that was it, so another council was held in Constantinople (not Istanbul!) in 381, where the Holy Spirit’s role was shored up and it was declared that all three persons of the Trinity were God, yet there was only one God, that the Father was equal to the Son and the Son to the Spirit, and that the Father was Lord, the Son was Lord, and the Spirit was Lord, but that there was only one Lord….you know what, forget it! Go read the Creed of Saint Athanasius on page 864 of the Book of Prayer Book if you want to learn more…and give yourself a headache.
Does any of this really matter? Maybe not is we're just trying to win a theological argument – don’t, for starters, tell an Orthodox Christian that the Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son, unless you want things to get ugly! – but for our walk as Christians? Yes, I think it does. The Most Rev. Peter Carnley, former Archbishop of Perch and my ethics and systematic theology professor in seminary, once said that everything begins with the Trinity. Every single conversation we have about God, or even about ourselves, begins with the Trinity. Or, more accurately, begins with relationship, and how to be in relationship. God, Archbishop Carnley would remind us, is in perfect union, perfect relationship with Godself. The folks at Constantinople called this perichoresis, the Divine Dance, in which the Persons of the Trinity are engaged in a kind of endless waltz with one another. But unlike our human form of dancing – of which I am terrible – nobody leads, and nobody follows. It’s perfect synchronization, each Person moving through each other. The heresy of Modalism, which was denounced at Constantinople, said that each Person had a specific job, and that was it – so the Father was the Creator, Jesus the Redeemer, and the Spirit the Sanctifier. But it was denounced because that’s not perfect relationship, is it? Perfect relationship doesn’t relegate each person to their own role to perform their own task, but instead there is an invitation for sharing, for being at one with each other in each activity, so the Father, Jesus, and Spirit all create, redeem, and sanctify.
The Franciscan friar and author Richard Rohr borrowed this image for his book The Divine Dance, in which he talks about the Trinity being in “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 about 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. There is a scene in the book The Shack in which the protagonist, who meets the three Persons of the Trinity in a rundown shack over a weekend – sees Jesus and the Spirit dancing together. “That was the dream,” God the Father says to him, “that all of you would love each other and be in that kind of relationship.” It’s the flow, and it’s a beautiful.
Is it even possible? That we could all be in relationship with each other as perfect as the relationship God is in with Godself through the Trinity? For humans by ourselves, left to our own devices, maybe not. But anything is possible with God. And regardless of how possible or logical a thing may or may not be, we still pray for it. We still pray for the kind of unity expressed in the Trinity, that we could possible love one another in such a way, that we could all let go of that which holds us back and just be swept away in the flow relationship grounded in divine love. Trinity Sunday is not just for commemorating the doctrine, but it is a renewal for us to commit our lives to living and loving and being in right relationship with one another as God is with Godself. Who will have this dance?
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