Trinity 2007

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

Psalm 8

Romans 5:1-5

John 16:12-15

I preached for the first time on Trinity Sunday 2002 here in this small parish. In a mixture of excitement and anxiety, I shared with a friend who had been a priest for many years, that this would be my first attempt. She laughed and said, yes, seasoned priests often avoid that Sunday. Why? I wondered, but did not ask. For me the Trinity ranks in the top three (no pun intended). The Trinity is the way we describe God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost and the gift of the Son at Christmas. The three are held in unity by the conjunction, “and.” When we want to emphasize the unity, the oneness of the divine mystery we use the term, Trinity. When we want to emphasize their difference the three persons as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit we also use the term, Trinity. Regardless of what terminology we use, we hold that God is not restricted to a distant domain off somewhere else in space ruling from on high, rather we confess God as Father, Son, and Spirit three in unity, the triune God is a social God, defined by relationship.

From the unity of the three and the relatedness of the three in one we can with confidence say that God is love. It is impossible to love alone. Ultimate egoism would be an unholy trinity of me, myself, and I. The Father is father of the Son. The Son is son in relationship with the Father. The father is not the son, the son is not the spirit, the spirit is not the father, but the Father is God, the Son is God and the Spirit is God. It is a new math: 1 + 1 + 1 = 1.

I have a small icon that sits on my desk. Andrei Rublev in Moscow did it in the 15^th century. The three divine persons are seated at a table. In the slight inclination of their heads towards each other and in the gestures of their hands, a deeper unity of the three is suggested. A chalice on the table symbolizes the sacrifice of the Son on Golgotha for the redemption of the world. The painting originated in the story of Abraham and Sarah (Gen 1;18) and their three visitors who gave them the promise of offspring as numerous as the stars of the heavens. Rublef omitted Abraham and Sarah from the painting, leaving only the three messengers. In this icon it is not possible to identify who is the Father or the Son or the Holy Spirit. Thus the unity of the trinity is represented well.

A second image of the Trinity is the Gnadenstuhl from the Latin Church of the Middle Ages. In it, God the Father, with an expression of deep sorrow on his face, holds the crossbar of the cross from which his dead son hangs. The Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, descends from the Father onto the Son. In this image the cross stands in the middle of the triune God. It is the breathtaking image of Easter Saturday, after Christ died, and before his resurrection. This image of the trinity can thus rightly be called the “Pain of God.”

In both pictures the story of our salvation is evident – in one the chalice – in the other the cross. The redemptive cross of Christ invokes divine mystery. The redemption of the world, as an act of God, can only be accomplished by the triune unity – the suffering of the Son is hared by the Father and the Spirit in order to bring victory of life over death and resurrection from the horrific death on the cross. The history of Christ must be Trinitarian; otherwise we could not call the gospel that of the Son of God (Mark 1:1). It is the voice of the Father who declared at the baptism of the Son, “You are my beloved Son,” and the sign was the descending dove (the Holy Spirit’s symbol). From the Son we learned to cry, Abba, Father, and to say, Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be your name. The Paraclete, the Comforter, the Holy Spirit is sent to us by the Son so that we may be led into all truth and understand theological matters as complex as the Trinity.

Baptism is the sacrament through which we acknowledge the unconditional love of God offered to us and to all persons. Just as these two children will be baptized today in the name of the Father and the Son and The Holy Spirit, we too entered into the embrace of God through baptism. We will confess our faith in the words of the Apostles Creed, as belief in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, each of the three doing the salvific work of our one God. If anyone asks you if you have made a confession of faith – you can say with confidence, yes, and not just once, but renewed with every baptism I witness. Furthermore, you make a confession of sin and confession of faith in the Eucharist every week: in the general confession and in the recitation of the Nicene Creed. You are a member of the body of Christ – and inheritors of the place prepared for you from the beginning of creation.

The mysterious, transcendent, unknowable God is also the incarnated one who lived and died and rose, and the wind of the spirit moving in and through and among us, lifting us from our self-centeredness into a greater relationship infused with grace. We need the mystic silence to hear the small voice of God moving us out of our complacency to see the neighbor and new child of God. We need one another – the Trinity is proof of that claim.

I cannot imagine how a person could hear the words of Proverbs or Psalm 8 and not marvel at the creative ability of our God. What was created was declared Good by the only being capable of pronouncing it so. And it was very good, God said. More astonishing perhaps than the multitude of planets, stars, galaxies, mysteries of nature, is that God said, Let us make man in our image. In the image of God we were created and God said ah, that is very good. From the creative narrative in the context of understanding God as triune, we can extract what it means to be human, to be a person. We are relational beings. Yes, we also think, create, image a future, but primarily we are relational. We are capable of love because we are not alone. Every person is as hungry for the love of God as we are. In John’s Gospel we have the promise of Jesus to have the gift of the Spirit lead us forward in our journey of faith. We are not alone. We can accept the love of God; allow it live in us, and to draw us out of ourselves to be for others. Living in God is what baptism is all about and it is what the church has tried to teach us through the doctrine of the Trinity. The Spirit of Life holds everything together in that it enables us to live with each other, for each other, and in each other, created through divine love and destined for eternal joy. The Trinity is a symbol and doctrine that points to unity in love – where there is no second status, no second class, no dominant or marginal positions. The unity is like a perfect triangle, or friendship, each is unique and distinctive and more by virtue of the living solidarity that unites them.

We are baptized into the unity of the Trinity – into the fellowship of God and called to go out and spread the good news in word and deed to every person. The way we live reveals what we believe. If we love as we are loved others will see God still at work in this world, redeeming, creating, and sanctifying – bringing forth the kingdom of God.