Trinity

June 15^th, 2014

Holy Trinity Sunday

Genesis 1:1-2:3

Did you know that the word Trinity never appears in the bible?  From Genesis 1 to Revelation 21, not once does this word appear in scripture.  Yet, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is a living and vital part of what we confess as a part of our Christian faith.  The doctrine has its origins in the Great commission found at the end of the Gospel of Matthew, in which Jesus commands the disciples to go out and baptize in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Later on, Paul used a Trinitarian formula as a salutation in his writings. The Grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ, the Love of God, and the Communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.  Sound familiar?  It comes from Paul’s 2^nd letter to the Corinthians.

Even though the word Trinity doesn’t appear anywhere in the bible, lots of time, energy, and God only knows how many trees have gone into attempts to explain the doctrine of the Trinity. Many church fathers and scholars have made attempts to explain the Trinity.  I even have a video which makes an attempt to explain it away, but only ends up as a complicated mess.  In the end, the best that scholars and video editors alike can is throw our hands up in the air, say those words that scholars hate to say “I don’t know”, and let the mystery of the Trinity remain, acknowledging that the closer we think we are to figuring it all out, the further and further away we actually are.

We could try to explain the Trinity using analogies…something concrete as an attempt to explain something so abstract.  

When I was in confirmation, our teacher used an apple and an orange to explain the Trinity.  Apples and oranges, we were told, have three parts – the rind, the flesh, and the seed.  Each are a part of the apple or orange, but each is also distinct in form and function.  The flesh of an apple cannot become the seed, and so on and so forth.  When Chris was in catechism in the Roman Catholic Church, he was taught that the Trinity is like the different states of matter in Water.  Ice and water and vapor are all made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, but they are in different forms. 

At some level the analogies are helpful…but when it comes down to it, they all come up short in trying to capture what the Trinity is. That’s ok, the analogies are supposed to come up short, because human reason cannot wrap itself around what the Holy Trinity is because the Holy Trinity is what it is…a divine mystery…and sometimes letting a little mystery permeate our lives of faith is ok.

So why do we spend a Sunday torturing preachers and parishioners alike with a topic that is beyond human comprehension and always leaves us tied in knots? What the point of assigning a Sunday to something that the more we realize and admit that we cannot understand, the better of we are?

Well, let’s take a step back for a moment and worry less about trying to figure everything out about the trinity and let’s take a look at some things that we do know about God, who is the Trinity.

And I think a good place to start is the question, what is God like?

If you turn on the TV you can easily find televangelists that love to give you their take on God.  God wants you to be rich, if you have enough faith and give enough money to the church, God will reward you…God is angry at this group of people or that group and that’s why natural disasters have happened around places where those people live.  God hates you and me and our children and our whole country…God has let innocent children die in school shootings because we have systematically kicked God out of our schools.  Have you heard these messages? 

There are a lot of folks out there preaching them. 

And, I’m not going to lie, there are some very troubling passage in scripture, particularly in the Old Testament that may lead us to think that these things are true.  In Exodus, God repeatedly hardened Pharaoh’s heart when Moses approached him about letting the Israelites go.  In Job, God makes a bet with a member of the Holy court that Job would not sway from his faith even if he lost everything.  People are struck by lightning for worshipping improperly, the list goes on.  And as these stories become piled upon one another we do start to see an image of an angry and jealous God, a God who pulls on the puppet strings and zaps people with lightning on a whim.

But the problem when we look only to these troubling passages in scripture, when God starts to take on a form that only shows one side of God’s story, the question arises - is the story of God and God is like being told by folks made in the image of God? Or is it a story told by folks who have made god in their image?  Writer Anne Lamont once wrote that you can be pretty sure that you have made god in your images when god hates all the same people you do.  And she’s right.

There’s another side of the story though, one that begins with the beginning of our scriptural witness to who God is. 

The creation story in Genesis 1 tells us a story of a God that exists beyond time and beyond space.  A God not created, eternal, and incomprehensible.  A God who is all powerful…who commands something to come into being and it happens.  A God who calls those things which he created “good” and blessed them and tells them to be fruitful and multiply.  A God who made you and me and the rest of humankind in God’s own image. 

What specifically this means, we aren’t sure. But we can say with absolute certainty that being made in the image of God means that somewhere within us, each of us carry the mark of God.  And though we may try to change it, deny its existence, cover it with tattoos, piercings, different hair colors, it always has been and always will be there.  From our first breath until our last…and then some. 

We were not created out of some whim one day, as is the case in other creation stories of that time.  We are a deliberate creation of God, each carrying the mark of God in us. The mark of a God who cannot be measured by time or space, a God who was not created but created everything, a God in three persons who, though they are individuals, co-exist in a divine dance whose beauty defies our human comprehension.

Each created, as my theology professor in seminary put it, to pray and to play.  To be open to the mysteries of the faith but to trust in their promises.  I don’t know and couldn’t tell you specifically how bread and wine become body and blood in Holy Communion.  But I believe it because Jesus makes that promise to us, to be present in bread and wine at the table. 

I don’t know and couldn’t tell you how the Trinity works.  But of the words of Jesus Christ to baptize in the name of the father, son, and Holy Spirit, I believe in the Trinity.  I believe most of  the words of the Athanasian Creed which speak of an almighty God, three in one, one in three.  Who are three persons and yet one in divinity and glory and majesty.  My faith tells me that this is true, even if trying to understand it means throwing my hands in the air and saying “I don’t get it...and that’s ok.”