Trinity Sunday, Year B

Exodus 3:1-6
Romans 8:12-17
John 3:1-16

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

"Moslems have one God and three wives; Christians have three Gods and one wife." That quip of enlightenment is from James Pike, the 1960s bishop who considered the Holy Trinity to be ‘excess baggage' and who – incidentally – had three wives. Of course, Bishop Pike's ‘wit' misrepresents both Islam and Christianity, but he does accurately express a popular view that the Trinity is not an attractive bit of Christian belief, that it is confusing, even obsolete, that the Church should gloss over it, if not reject it altogether. The Holy Trinity, however, is not some mere doctrine that can be quietly swept under the rug. The Holy Trinity is God – not some abstract idea, but the ground of being, reality itself: our Creator, our Redeemer, our Sustainer.

Part of the difficulty for the Church in proclaiming God, in spreading the gospel, is that we are presenting a mystery. While we can say some things about the Trinity, and I'm going to do so this morning, first we have to recognize that ultimately God is a mystery. Our words necessarily fail to describe him. How could a pot describe its potter? Our imagination, our language, our understanding fails. We can't fit God into our minds: the Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, the Holy Ghost incomprehensible – not three incomprehensibles, but one incomprehensible.

In our prayer life, we call upon the various persons of the Trinity, sometimes praying to the Father, sometimes to Jesus, sometimes to the Spirit. We have the great privilege to call upon God's name, to have such intimacy with him as to say, "Dear Jesus." Christians do not hesitate to use quite personal, affectionate terms in addressing God. A devout Jew doesn't say the name of God – ‘Yahweh', I am who I am, the most holy divine Name revealed to Moses at the Burning Bush. (Ex 3:14) Jews don't say the divine name because it's too holy and because they reverently, humbly do not presume to control or to know God that fully. Calling a person by name gives us some degree of control over that person and knowledge about them. So while Christians enjoy the privilege of such familiar, friendly address of God, we do so with great humility, aware that we know so little, that we are so unworthy, of the God to whom we speak.

The Christian understanding of the mystery of God, of the Holy Trinity, is unique and distinctive. The Trinity describes the inner being of God, what he's like in himself. That's what the Athanasian Creed describes. God is three persons, meaning that within God there are personal relationships, but he is not three; he is one: one being, one substance, one energy, one will. Within God, there is unity and diversity, stability and dynamism, equality and obedience.

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity does not come from a bunch of theologians and philosophers dreaming up a notion of God. If so, the Trinity would probably appear to be a more rational idea, a more obvious human construct. Instead, it comes from human experience, from Christians reflecting upon how God has revealed himself to us. We know God through history. In a simplified form, we might say that the Father revealed himself to the Jews; the Son revealed himself in Jesus; the Holy Ghost reveals himself in the life of the Church, and really throughout the world. Indeed, the Holy Ghost has led us to understand that God is the Trinity.

We are not going to find the doctrine of the Trinity on the lips of Jesus or even in the Bible. Sure there are bits and pieces of scripture that may suggest it and support it, but it certainly is not explicit. Some might take issue with this, and they will point to the end of the Gospel according to S. Matthew in which Jesus commands us, "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." That quote from Matthew, and quite likely it was a late addition to Matthew's gospel and probably not the actual words of Jesus, tells us only the names of the persons. It says nothing about the relationships that exist inside God, that exist between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

What the Bible does say about the relationships of the divine persons is often confusing. S. John, for example, quotes Jesus saying, "The Father and I are one." And at another point in John's gospel, Jesus says, "The Father is greater than I." The Church, however, teaches that the three persons of God are co-equal: each un-created, each eternal, each all powerful. Nonetheless, over centuries, the Holy Spirit has led the Church to know about God through inspired reflection upon the Bible and upon our experience.

The Bible tells us that God made us in his image: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. . . So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." (Gn 1:26-27) In Genesis, we find the idea that a man and woman not individually so much as corporately, together reflect the image of God. This suggests that a human being has to live in relationship to other human beings in order to be a human being, in order to reflect the image of God. In other words, our relationships with other people make us a person. Our relationships with other people more fully develop the image of God in us.

Let us start at the beginning of life. Where does a human being develop a sense of his self? An infant is confused about who he is. An infant confuses his own identity with that of his parents'. He can't separate his existence from them. When an infant becomes aware that the parent is not present with him, if even for a moment because the infant has no sense of time, the infant often becomes overwhelmed with fear. I think it's a fear of a type of death, of aloneness, of isolation, of termination. Shrieking is healthy in this case. The shrieking essentially expresses the infant's fear: "I don't exist because my mother is not with me. I've lost my main appendage. Life, existence as I know it is over." Gradually the child learns that he exists independently of his parents, but his relationship with his parents gave him this sense of self; people, his parents, drew him into being.

Gradually, human beings become human beings through relationships with other persons. How would we have any self-consciousness otherwise? We are human beings, and we have life and substance, because of other persons, because we have received love and given love. We can not be isolated and have the fulness of life, the fulness of personhood. Part of the purpose of the Church, and specifically of this parish, is to give people a place to belong, a place to be accepted and included, a place to have caring relationships with other people so our humanity may grow. For our humanity, like God, is social. God is not alone. In his very being, he has relationships. Human relationships ought to be like God's inner relationships, where there is no coercion, no domination, no callousness, but rather there is equality, caring, sacrificing, giving.

There is one other quality of the life of the Trinity to look at this morning. Jesus told his followers to take the gospel to all nations. God is not only for one nation, for one tribe, for one race, for one ethnicity, for one place; God is for all people, for all places, for all times, and God's followers have to tell other people about his truth, that we are not alone, that we are loved, that we may have eternal joy. God in himself doesn't need anything; he is wholly content and joyful, ecstasy without ceasing. But he created human beings so that he could share himself. God goes beyond himself to share himself; he suffers so we may have his peace and joy. The Father sends his Son into the World; the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son into us, strengthening, enlivening us. The inner life of the Trinity, the being of God, includes mission. It includes reaching out to all people. That image is in us, individually and in this community, and we need to make it shine.

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.