26 May 2024 Trinity Sunday
Isaiah 6.1-8; Psalm 29; Romans 8.12-17; John 3.1-17
Trinity Sunday is one of the few Sundays in the year when most clergy would give their eye teeth for someone to offer to ‘preach’ for them. It is probably one of the hardest Sundays to ‘get it right’. Because our gospel and probably all our readings could easily come with a warning ‘multiple interpretations possible’. But the thing about Trinity Sunday, and the Trinity in general is, it is difficult for us to voice what we believe by ‘one God, 3 persons’, how can we put into words that make sense to me, let alone anyone else, how God can be three, yet one, and one but also three. In the past we may have tried to explain it like ‘an apple, skin, flesh and seeds, three parts, one fruit’ or water can be ‘ice, liquid and steam’, three forms but all the one substance. And there are others which I will not expand on because they all fail to really do justice to the concept of ‘one God, 3 essences’. They are united, yet separate, one being, but different presentations. And I will stop here before I fall down that wormhole of heresy.
The Ecumenical Patriarch and spiritual leader over all the Eastern Orthodox churches, Bartholomew 1, captured God’s transcendence and God’s immanence in his book ‘Encountering the Mystery’. He speaks of God as ‘unknowable’ yet ‘profoundly known’; as ‘invisible’ yet ‘personally accessible’; as ‘distant’ yet also ‘intensely present’. He says the infinite God thus becomes truly intimate in relating to the world.
If you have ever looked at the Athanasian Creed, you will find it encapsulating the Trinity in profound ways, albeit in very difficult and very wordy language. But it says that ‘we worship one God in trinity, and trinity in unity; neither confounding the persons; nor dividing the essence’. And although the Western Church affirms this creed, it is not widely used in Eastern Orthodoxy, which some may find curious because Eastern theologians like the ‘Cappadocian fathers’ of the fourth-century, made major contributions to the doctrine of the Trinity. But it may be explained when we realise that Eastern Orthodox believers start in a different place than us in the west when they celebrate the Trinity. Rather than our ‘intellectual abstraction’, Eastern theology emphasizes adoration of the mystery, and is wary of the inadequacies of the human language, the limitations of the human mind, and the infinity of God.
A number of years ago I read the book ‘The Shack’, and later saw the movie of the same name. And this book goes a long way to explain the doctrine of God in story form. It tells of how Mack, who has ‘lost his faith’ due to the tragic disappearance of his daughter on a family picnic, meets ‘El-ousia’, [God-essence] an African-American woman (Father), a “small, distinctively Asian woman” named Sarayu who collects tears (Spirit), and a Middle Easter man dressed as a labourer (Jesus) and they welcome ‘Mack’ back to the shack where he discovers God is not the way he had pictured God. He finds that God is good, wants to heal, not humiliate us, and Mack learns to trust God fully and believe that God is always near us.
Richard Rohr writes, in his book ‘The Divine Dance’ that we need to remember that caring comes from starting in the right place. He writes “don’t start with the One and try to make it into Three, start with the Three and see that this the deepest nature of the One”. We often speak of God as only Father, or Son, or Spirit, we often forget to see ‘threeness’ as the ground and essence of God’s being. And if we can do this, we will discover that God’s self is dynamic and fluid. God moves. Or as Rohr says, God flows, and God is flow. God dances and God is dance.
When we look at the well known picture painted by iconographer Andrei Rublev, we see in it the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit (depicted as the three angels who appeared to Abraham near the trees of Mamre). The three sit around a table, sharing food and drink. Their faces are nearly identical, and they are dressed in different colours. The Father wears gold, the Son blue, the Spirit green. The Father gazes at the Son. The Son gazes back at the Father and gestures toward the Spirit. The Spirit gazes at the Father, points with one hand to the Son and with the other opens the circle to make room for others to join the sacred meal. This picture exudes openness, revealing that there is room at the table for the one who is viewing. For me. For you. For us. As if to say, the point of the great Three-in-One is not exclusivity, but radical hospitality. The point of the Three is always to allow for one more to join, to extend the invitation, to make the holy table more expansive and more welcoming. In fact, the deeper the love between the Three grows, the roomier the table becomes. The closer we draw to the adoration of the Three, the wider and more hospitable our hearts will grow toward the world.