Feast of the Most Holy Trinity

Isaiah 6:1-8
Revelation 4:1-11
John 16:5-15

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

“The first casualty of war is truth.” Speaking of that cliche sixteen years ago, when he was a university professor and in the context of another war, Rowan Williams noticed that we don’t feel much outrage about the loss of truth. “It is as though truthfulness were a luxury commodity,” not essential for sustaining human beings in pain, something dispensable in a crisis, “to be dusted down and reinstated when things are easier.”1

In good times and bad times, the truth is everything to Christians. When we’re being faithful, we search truth out – honestly, rigorously, critically, all kinds of truth – philosophical truth, historical truth, scientific truth. We try not to make facts conform to our set ideas. We try to learn from new information and change accordingly. We try to confront our own deceitfulness, our own prejudices. Otherwise, we become self-righteous, divisive prigs.

Williams said, “To try to identify the sin of the politician without identifying, bitterly, with it [with the politician’s sin] is simply to treat the world’s untruth as something that does not touch me.”2 We all belong together. We all succumb to self-deception and lies.

How to know the truth is very much on Jesus’ mind at the Last Supper. As he speaks in today’s gospel, his disciples are full of sorrow and anxiety because they expect soon to be separated from Jesus, cut off and left alone. How can their community hold together? How will they know what to do? Where will they receive further guidance?

Jesus didn’t give explicit answers to most questions and problems we face, individually and corporately. The issues dividing the Church today, as in the apostles’ day, as in every day, aren’t easily answered simply by pointing to what Jesus said. Even if he could’ve told us what to do in every instance, he wouldn’t have. It would’ve degraded our humanity.

But Jesus did want us to know that he was still with us, that he was not abandoning us. He would leave, but he would send the Holy Spirit to guide us into all the truth. The community of disciples would have new experiences that would change them and expand their capacity for the truth. Over the next three hundred years, the Holy Spirit would lead the Church to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which we celebrate today. Even today the Holy Spirit continues to guide the Church deeper into truth and understanding, although along the way we do run down a lot of blind alleys.

In our parish’s catechumenate, when we start to talk about God, and address the question “Who is God?”, the first point we make is that God is a mystery, that human language and human comprehension could never adequately answer the question: who is God? There’s a story of a theology professor who at the beginning of the first day of his class would say the word ‘God.’3 Then he would pause. Students would start to anticipate what he was going to say about God and would begin to make associations. Then he would say, “Whatever came into your head when I said the word ‘God,’ is not God.” So before we say anything about God, we need awe and humility to recognize the mystery.

Before I became a priest, I attended a three day retreat with about twenty others, and Church officials sought to discern whether each of us had a vocation to be a priest. It was a high pressure affair at an old manor house, the days full of interviews and group exercises so they could measure us up. My first one-on-one interview was with the psychiatric expert. We met in the finished attic, the ceiling so low you could only stand straight in the center of the 8' x 8' room. It was quite snug, claustrophobic – perfect for setting you ill at ease.

When I came in, he smiled weakly behind his thick beard, motioned me to sit down, and said, “Tell me about yourself. Who are you?” I asked a few questions for some direction, some sense of what he was looking for, but he said nothing, just shrugged, positively rude behavior. Nonetheless, I played along and gave an awkward, often halting 15-20 minute monologue, trying to be as honest as possible, but it’s impossible to give a good answer to that question. Reflecting upon it later, the exercise impressed upon me that I really didn’t know the answer.

Who are you? We don’t know. I began by talking about my family and my relationships. I think that may, as well as anything, get to the heart of who we are, more so than where we live, our favorite color, what we do, what we believed in five years ago.

If we can’t answer the question about who we are, we’re not going to be able to answer the question, “Who is God?” Michael Himes says, “God is mystery not because God is so distant but because God is so terribly close.”4 God has to be mystery because we are mysteries to ourselves.

While there is no wholly accurate way for us to talk about ourselves, we do know some things about ourselves, and we also know some things about God. Perhaps St. John told us the most helpful thing about God: God is love, love that wants nothing in return, love that is wholly self-giving, completely absent of self-regard, love that is completely directed toward the well-being of the other.

Just as a crucifix is a symbol of this love, the doctrine of the Trinity is the fundamental Christian statement about this love. We generally envision and think of God as a person, but maybe we’d better think of God as a relationship between persons, between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. God is a communal relationship where the way of relating to one another is eternal self-giving.

Michael Himes suggests that the word “‘God’ is closer to being a verb than a noun. ‘God’ is what is done, not the one who does it, nor the one to whom it is done. God is the doing, the loving.”5 For centuries and centuries when the priest re-enacts Jesus’ washing the feet of his disciples on Maundy Thursday, the Church has sung ‘where love and charity is, God is there.’ Where we see love, there is the presence of God. The Trinity means that God is not remote, not out there, not someone whom we placate. The Trinity means we participate in God’s life. We know God’s life in our experience of love, love which is sometimes pleasurable, sometimes painful.

The Trinity is a doctrine, really the source of all Christian doctrine, but before it is a doctrine that we believe, it is something we live in. It is a way of life, an orientation. The Trinity is not an abstract, remote concept. Rather, it’s relevant to how we live, the model for living. It’s truth is not a luxury, but the purpose of our existence.

We see the truth of the Trinity most clearly in Jesus’ teaching and ministry and life: in healing the broken, in restoring the forgotten, in raising up the poor, in helping us to see God’s presence in each person we meet, in directing us to value love and mercy even above justice, in enduring the cross, in giving his life for those who betrayed him.

At times, the truth of the Trinity is too much for us to bear. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. A mighty command. If that’s the truth, then we think, “Maybe sometimes the truth should be a casualty. Maybe the truth is a luxury for easy times.” But it is precisely in the most difficult times, the greatest crisis, that we have the best opportunity to know the life of the Trinity most fully by loving those we find beyond the pale.

Abbot Farkasfalvy, originally a Hungarian monk and now a Texan, remembers the story of a friend of his, a Catholic woman of Jewish decent, a Holocaust survivor.6 During the Second World War she was imprisoned at Auschwitz and two other Nazi concentration camps. The day the Allied troops liberated her camp she learned that the war was over and that Hitler had committed suicide. She went to church. Despite being the victim of injustice and cruelty we can’t fathom, she still identified with the sin of those who had imprisoned her. So she made her confession. She attended mass and received Communion.

Then she got a prayer book and prayed the Office of the Dead for Hitler and those who had died with him. She prayed for those miserable, hate-filled men, her enemies who had tortured her and murdered her family. She remembered the Last Supper and the Cross. She remembered “pray for those who persecute you.” This moment of her liberation was an opportunity to live according to truth, according to God’s love, an opportunity to draw closer to Jesus and to experience more fully the life and love of the Trinity.

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

1 Rowan Williams, ‘What is Truth?’ sermon in A Ray of Darkness, Cowley (1995), p.107.
2 Ibid., p. 108.
3 Michael J. Himes, Doing the Truth in Love, Paulist Press (1995), p. 9
4 Ibid., p. 8.
5 Ibid., p. 18.
6 The Rt. Rev. Abbot Denis Farkasfalvy, Holy Thursday sermon, April 5, 2007