Sermons

Holy, Holy, Holy

John Wilkinson                            Third Presbyterian Church
June 11, 2006                              Isaiah 6:1-8/Romans 8:12-17

Perhaps it was your mother who said one time that “many hands make light work.” That is certainly true around here. While we have a dedicated and able office staff, we simply could not do all that we need to do without the hands – and time and commitment – of dozens of people. They run the copier, answer the phones, prepare mailings, process information, make repairs…you get the picture. In fact, a list of such volunteers is listed in the bulletin and we will honor them with a luncheon this noontime. I would ask now, however, that any who are present might stand and receive a token of our appreciation.

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Kathleen Norris writes that “’Trinity’ has always seemed a word more strange than scary, although it has generated some of the most abstruse, mind-boggling writing in all of Christian theology.” (Amazing Grace, page 287) Thanks to Kathleen Norris on this Trinity Sunday, for setting us up for our minds to be boggled.

Today is the only day in the liturgical year named for a concept rather than a biblical event, a concept, in fact, not named by name in scripture. And yet discussion of the Trinity is on the theological front-burner these days as questions relating to the Trinity – including who Jesus was and how we relate to other faiths – occupy not only the minds of the theologians but the work place, dinner table and back yard conversations you and I have all the time.

What is it, this Trinitarian concept, and why does it matter? It is, first of all, biblical, though the word itself does not appear in the Bible. The Gospels lay out the pattern. In the beginning, John says. Jesus refers back to God the Creator, refers to himself as the Savior, and refers forward to the Spirit, the Counselor and Advocate who will come after him. We marked that day last Sunday, at Pentecost.

In the portion of Romans that we heard today, Paul articulates three understandings of God – God, known here as Father, the Spirit of God, differing somehow from God, and Christ, the one who knew human suffering. Paul sends a blessing to the Corinthians church – on most Sundays these are the words that I use: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.” (II Corinthians 13:13)

And so it is biblical, though I sometimes wish the biblical writers had exerted a bit more effort to make this all a bit more clear to we who wrestle with it some two millennia later. Biblical, but more than simply seeking to articulate a doctrine, seeking to understand the experience of God that our biblical forbears had. And more to the point, seeking to articulate the experience that we have as a continuous succession from that moment to this one.

We know the metaphors: water, ice and steam – three unique manifestations of the same chemical community. Or the three-leaf clover – three leaves yet one plant. We took a cooking class one time in New Orleans. The first thing we learned to make was something called Trinity, an equal combination of onions, peppers and celery. Without any of the ingredients, the food simply would not be the same, nor as good.

We know the metaphors. And we’ve known the experience.

• God, who called this world and every other world into being, who formed volcanic mountains and fluttering butterfly wings, who causes the human heart to pump and compresses coal to make diamonds.

• And Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, who lived and breathed and walked with us, who looks us in the eye and knows who we are in our hearts, who spoke truth to power and brought power to truth, who ate and drank and laughed and bled.

• And the Spirit, mysterious and elusive until that moment when we experience it. We Presbyterians are not known for our revivals, but I will never forget several years back. A sermon was preached. Hymns were sung. And suddenly dancing broke out, not very good dancing but dancing nonetheless. I even moved my feet a little. And there was laughter and joy. The same spirit that prompts our consciences, that moves in unlikely places and does unlikely things.

That is our experience – collectively – as the people of God. It is sometimes too bad that we’ve felt obligated to wrap a fairly confounding set of doctrines around it all, but we have. Here is what we’ve said: we have said that God exists as three individual persons, individual and distinct, but not separate. Traditionally, we have known them as “Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” More on that in a moment. The three persons of the Trinity have existed in a kind of internal relationship with one another, a divine community. They are equal. If they were not, they wouldn’t be a Trinity, of course, but more so, we could not ascribe to them what we do.

We have fought and shed blood on that matter, by the way, especially on the issue of the Holy Spirit and its relationship to the first two persons. The great split of the Eastern church and the Western church happened over whether we believed that the Holy Spirit was present from the beginning or proceeded from the Father and the Son.

More recently, at least in the West, we have begun to deal with a question with which we will continue to deal, raised in part – and quite awkwardly, may I say – by things like “The DaVinci Code” but prompted by a century of scholarship or more. That question is how Jesus, whose humanity has been so highlighted, can be both fully human and fully divine, as our tradition insists. For him to be other than both unsettles our Trinitarian thinking, which in turn does the same thing to our understanding of things like sin and salvation.

In his book on Karl Barth, Princeton Seminary theologian Stacy Johnson writes that “Trinitarian theology is the fallible, imaginative construction of the church’s theologians. As such, it is able to point only indirectly to the mystery of its object,” God. (The Mystery of God, page 44)

We need language, Johnson writes of Barth, to help us articulate our experience. We need a “grammar,” a set of words and images, to define who God is, how God relates to Godself and how God relates to the world and to us. For Barth, the grammar understood the three persons as Creator, Reconciler and Redeemer. One work, one God, with three distinct modes of being.

Theologians have battled in the 20th century – and now into the 21st – about whether those three modes were individualized enough to be three persons, and hence three gods, or not. We have said “no,” but now many are questioning that understanding.

One reason why is a cultural one. For centuries in the West, when we have said “God,” we have understood that to be the Christian God, the Trinity presumed but never acknowledged. That can be no more, as the emergence of other faith traditions upon our consciousnesses – they’ve been there all along whether we’ve acknowledged them or not! – has meant that we’ve needed to think again about what all that means.

A second reason is language. It is always inadequate to any task, but particularly this one. Traditional language taught one understanding, however limited. New sensibilities have suggested that the old formula needs re-visiting, particular in light of gender awareness.

This is true especially in the use of the term “Father” and masculine pronouns. We know, of course, that God, the first person of the Trinity, is not a mean old man or a nice old man, depending, preferably with a beard. And yet Jesus called God “Father,” and the English language does not do very well with neutral pronouns. Current practice suggests alternative formulas, things like Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer. That is fine, though it raises the issue of what the theologians call “modalism,” defining God by what God does rather than who God is. As important as what God does – God’s “modes” of being God – they are not who God is, anymore than a parent is simply a chef or a chauffeur or a nurse or a banker.

The Brief Statement of Faith, from which we will share in a moment, solved the problem by saying "We trust in God whom Jesus called Abba, father,” “Abba’ being the familiar term in Aramaic that means something like “dad.” I do not know if that works or not, but it raises the issue very well.

This coming week, as commissioners to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church gather in Birmingham, they will debate a paper on the Trinity, the result of five years of work by a group of ministers and elders and professional theologians. It has become controversial – so what’s new? – because it suggests some alternative language for the Trinity. It says that we must find a balance between always using the term Father and never using it. I agree with that. And it makes some suggestions:
• God as speaker, word and breath.
• God as sun, light and burning ray.
• God as giver, gift and giving.
• God as fire that consumes, sword that divides, storm that melts mountains.
• God as the one who was, who is, and who is to come. (“The Trinity: God’s Love Overflowing,” pages 8 and 9)

If the General Assembly does not do too much with this paper, perhaps that can be a starting point for our continuing conversation.

Why does any of this matter? Why, when the world in which we live seems to be falling apart and human lives are hurting, are we having such a conversation? At some point, since it is a theological abstraction offered by the theologians, more or less from their ivory tower, it does not.

But on another hand, as we human types seek to make sense of the world and hang meaning on our experiences and insights, it is important. Who God is, who we understand God to be and what we understand God to do, is at the center of our human quest for meaning and hope. Any conversation that brings us into greater connection with the God who ever seeks connection with us is a good one, despite our limitations of understanding and language.

The early church theologian Tertullian offered a lovely metaphor, an image of the Trinity as a plant. God the Father, for Tertullian, was the deep root, the Son was the shoot breaking into the world and the Spirit was that which spreads beauty and fragrance into all the world. That is not perfect either, but not bad, as an invitation into the ever-mysterious mystery of who God is and what God does.

As George Herbert wrote: “Enrich my heart, mouth, hands in me,/With faith, with hope, with charity,/That I may run, rise, rest with thee.”

In that hope, may the Lord bless and keep us. May the Lord’s face be made to shine upon us. May the Lord be gracious unto us and grant us peace. Amen.