TRINITY SUNDAY

June 15, 2003

Exodus 3:1-6

Romans 8:12-17

John 3:1-16

Year B

Recently, during an interview with someone seeking ordination, the person being interviewed looked directly at me and said, ‘Tm sorry but theology doesn’t do a thing for me”. He looked at me because I had taught the theology section for the Diocese. Now I could have been offended, thinking he was saying I am a bad teacher: which may indeed be the case. Or, I could have gotten defensive and reminded him that he missed an entire weekend of classes in theology. I probably thought all those things at once, but that’s not important. What was/is important is the fact that the theology that exists as the bedrock of the church is not about theological tomes that makes one’s eyes glaze over as he suggests, but about experiencing the living God and the communication of that experience. Apparently he missed that truth. So the feeling I had, over and above all the rest, was a feeling of deep sadness.

My brother has a theory that the ultimate truth that will be revealed is that we will find out that the entire universe has been run all along by some computer like the one named “Hal” in “A Space Odyssey - 2001”. This will, of course, make all of us, especially the theologians, look like absolute fools. He says this with some degree of seriousness: although I find my brother to be a deeply spiritual man: a man hungry for truth, a man not unlike Nicodemus.

Today is Trinity Sunday. The only Sunday in the liturgical year that proclaims a specific doctrine of the church as opposed to some particular event in the life of Jesus. The doctrine of the Trinity reflects upon the inexhaustible mystery of God as Christians have experienced it. Did you catch that? Not as Christians have declared it, but as they have experienced it.

Now you might be thinking you have a hard enough time understanding who God is, let alone be able to unravel Trinitarian theology. But don’t jump to that conclusion so fast. Let’s go back to that question of “Who is God?” before we throw up our hands in frustration.

It has been said that God gives us just enough (information) to seek him, and never enough to fully find him. To do more would inhibit our freedom and our freedom is very dear to God. Meister Eckhart said, “God is like a person who clears his throat while hiding and so gives himself away”.

The God who is revealed in the Old Testament is a God who comes and goes at will. When we make our way through scripture we focus on the dramatic events, such as Moses at the burning bush or the visions and dreams of the prophets. We only give a nod to the “Still Small Voice”, and the multiplicity of ways that God weaves in and out of scenes in quiet and hidden ways. It seems that God is shy; or that God takes care to remain hidden. When God does show up humans become completely incapacitated, thus God shows self-restraint. Part of our problem is the difficulty of trying to relate to an invisible Being in a world that is very material.

God, it would seem, faces the exact opposite situation. Unlike us, God sees hidden things we do not see. God sees history as a whole. We see only a finite piece at any given time. Not constrained by a body. God exists as spirit. Thus, every time God chooses to manifest God’s Self to us in our world, God accepts limitations. God “condescends” to us.

As God called out to Moses from the bush that was burning, God was accepting limitations in that moment. It happened in the Sinai wilderness, not in Chicago or Hong Kong. What happened in that moment is what is called the “scandal of particularity”. Why should Cod choose to show up in Israel? Why should God become flesh in the person of Jesus and settle into that particular situation or moment? But then asked another way, “Why not?” Israel was a body of people who intensely sought communion with the invisible God. For the most part they were not like the neighbors, who placed their gods on the living room shelf. The crack open for communication with Israel was unlike any other at the time.

All the eyewitnesses to the resurrection were observant Jews who paid homage to the God who had been revealed to Israel. For them to move outside of what was accepted in Judaism, something extraordinary would have had to occur.

The earliest Christian declaration was that Jesus was a man raised by God from the dead. “We have seen the Lord” was the primitive Christian creed. But what did the word “Lord’ mean to them? We use it so often we don’t understand what it meant. It was a name applied not to the mortal Jesus but to the risen Christ. This is what Paul declares when he says, “God has made him both Lord and Messiah. God has bestowed upon him the name that is above all names, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven, on earth, and in the depths”.

It was later generations of Christians, living in a world where thinking was along the lines of Greek philosophy and having to give an account of their belief in such a world, who asked the questions of “Was this man just a great prophet or the prophet to end all prophets?” or “Was there/is there something more to be said about him?’ The developments of thinking about who Christ was/is did not come out of philosophers or teachers who spent their lives with their noses pressed into theological writings. They came out of the need to describe what had been experienced in the risen Christ.

The doctrine of the Trinity is the church’s effort to give coherent expression to the mystery of how God has been experienced. Scripture tells of a progression of God’s movement toward us: a progression of intimacy, from the Creator God who is ‘like’ a Father, a Mother, who deeply cares for creation and humanity like a parent cares for a child. In Jesus we experience a further step in intimacy: one in which God condescends to take on flesh and blood, flesh and blood that even gives itself over to suffering for nothing less than the love that we say God is. From Easter onwards the spiritual vision of the witnesses was that Jesus was risen and that he was communicating to them in abundance, the Spirit or life-force of God. This was the experience that caused all the reflections or, as my first professor in theology used to say, “Who was that masked man?”

I have often said that we take it far too much for granted when we use the phrase “God is Love”, but it was only this week that I discovered that the Koran never - not once - says one word about God being love. That is something profoundly Christian. To say that God is love declares the core of truth about God; that God is not absolute power, not infinite ego-centrism, not majestic solitariness. The power of the triune God is not coercive but creative, sacrificial and empowering love; and the glory of the triune God consists not in dominating others but in sharing life with others. Because love cannot exist in a vacuum the Trinity is reflective of God’s innermost life: that God is a community of personhood, not needing communion with us, but seeking it so much that ultimately that love gets nailed to a cross.

This week I was trying to make sense of the interrelatedness of quantum physics and the Trinity. It’s easy to get lost in it all. How do we poor created creatures ever contain the immensity of God? We cannot of course. If we could devise a telescope that looks beyond the edge of the universe, perhaps we might see God. Yet, if we could devise a microscope that sees into the essence of the smallest particle of matter, we might also see God. In terms of quantum physics the physical world turns into an Alice in Wonderland irrationality: the impossible, the unreasonable, becomes the norm. And as God chooses, be it at Sinai or under our very feet, there is holy ground.

Accepting the doctrine of the Trinity is about accepting the way that God operates: not the way that we operate. We exist because we are loved: loved by the Father through the Son in the Spirit. To grasp that you do not need to have a degree in theology, you need only to open yourself in faith to God’s Spirit. Reading scripture through that lens delivers, not a formula for theologians, but tears of joy for the believer. We draw together, not to bend low and knock upon the door of a Presence that is far removed from us. We draw together before the mystery of a God who has bent low to us, to intertwine with us in the intimacy of love: divine love. That is what it means to be sons and daughters of the Father.

This is why the church baptizes only in the name of the Triune God. This is why she blesses the living and the dead in the undivided name of the Trinity. The church is bound to the Trinity because this is our experience of the unexplainable God: an experience of transcendence, relationship, and intimacy.

Jesus says to Nicodemus: “I have tried to make things simple and still you do not see. How can you expect to understand the deep things if even these simple things are beyond you?” There is warning here for us as well. Christianity is, in the end, a truth meant to be experienced, in the same way that swimming can only be experienced by jumping into the water. Nicodemus wanted to stay safe on the sidelines, yet to experience the depth of the reality of God that Jesus brought close to him: that which he crept away in the darkness to seek. And Jesus says to him, as he says to each and every one of us, ‘What you seek is here. It is beside you and around you. It is within you’. But you must jump into that reality: allowing it to overwhelm you, to wash over you with such power and such force that you think you might die. And then to come up into a new birth: a new life, where the presence of God will surround you like a mother’s arms, where the Father’s blessing and love toward you will never leave you. And you will never be the same again.

AMEN

The Rev. Virginia L. Bennett, D.Min.

St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church

Edwardsville. Illinois