Last Sunday, we celebrated the Feast of Pentecost and the coming of God’s
Holy Spirit like wind and fire. That celebration gives us hope, because
Jesus has promised the Spirit comes to lead us into all truth, sometimes as
Comforter and sometimes as Prodder.
This raises a great big theological question, however: if we know the God of Israel, who created the heavens and the earth, to be the Abba of Jesus; and if we see God revealed through the life, death, and resurrection of the Incarnate Word, Jesus; and if we know God as wind and fire sent by Abba (and maybe the Son too) then: how are these three ways of being God related to each other?
To say it more succinctly: do we worship one God or three? How much should we
emphasize the unity? How much should we emphasize the diversity and uniqueness
of each of the three persons? And that, Charlie Brown, is what Trinity Sunday
is all about!
There is no fully developed doctrine of the Trinity in the New Testament. There are only hints and guesses in that direction. Answering the questions I have raised took the Church several hundred years or so to answer and even then it was not quite "settled." (Go ask a Unitarian!) That is, I think, a good reminder that good questions often don’t have immediately accessible answers!
This also means our readings for this day can only point us in the right direction. To impose the doctrine of the Trinity onto any of them would be anachronistic. Since my own preaching almost always focuses on a single text (rather than a theme or thread) this has been a challenge for me for almost four decades now. In fact, as a parish priest I almost always tried to give Trinity Sunday to my associates. The primary reason is not that I don't believe in the Trinity. I do. With all my heart, I bind unto myself, this day and every day, the strong name of the Trinity.
Yet this is a day like no other precisely because it doesn't have a Biblical text. Think about Christmas Eve: "In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered..." You can work with that! Or at Easter, "on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb..." But there is no definitive Trinity Sunday text, at least not in the Bible. The reason for this is simple: the latest of the New Testament documents are late first century and the Trinity is a fourth century doctrine.
So if we mean to reflect on the Trinity, then we need to move outside of the Bible to another time and place and to a different kind of “text.” That text is the Nicene Creed. The time in which that text emerged is 325, almost three centuries after the death and resurrection of Jesus. The place is Nicaea, in modern-day Turkey, where a whole bunch of bishops gathered together at an Ecumenical Council to try to figure all of this out. They came together because Constantine told them to come together to answer the very questions that I have put forward. Is God one? Is God three? After a great deal of spirited discussion, they responded, "yes.”
That conversation continued even longer to the Athanasian Creed which you can find on page 854 of the Book of Common Prayer but I’ll spare you that one today and focus on Nicaea. I’m a little intimidated today by the presence of our junior warden, Dr. Tamsin Jones Farmer, who did an excellent study on the Creed pretty recently at our adult forums. If I fall into any heresies today, I trust Tamsin will set the record straight.
Those early centuries in the Church’s history are sometimes called (by the Orthodox in particular) the time of the “undivided Church.” The context in which the Creed emerged was a time when there were not yet different denominations. But just because there were not denominations in the fourth century doesn’t mean there weren’t different schools of thought. Think about how hard it is today for Christians in East Africa and in Central America and in Western Massachusetts to communicate with one another. Or even how challenging it can be for Quakers and Episcopalians to find common ground. The barriers are about more than language: they are cultural.
In our day, the great divisions in the Church tend to run along a north-south axis. Those same challenges of communicating across linguistic and cultural barriers existed in the fourth century, but the primary divide then was between east and west. The Western Church was shaped by Latin and culturally centered in Rome. The Eastern Church was shaped by Greek language and culturally centered in Constantinople. Trying to figure out how to say that God is one and that God is three and trying to find the way to say that while moving from Greek to Latin and Latin to Greek proved to be quite the challenge for those bishops.
Seventeen hundred years after Nicaea (and particularly in the west) it is tempting to turn Trinity Sunday into a kind of math problem. It doesn’t matter whether we were raised as Protestants or Catholics, we are all shaped by western culture, including the Enlightenment. But if we can listen across the centuries to the more mystical nature of Eastern Christianity, I think that we stand a better chance of seeing something new and transformative in the Creed itself that might help us to hear and to proclaim something like "good news" on this holy day.
To do
that, I want to go back to a single word that was part of those conversations
in Nicaea, a word that comes to us from the east. It was at the heart of the
Trinitarian thought of three eastern theologians in particular who came to be
known as the Cappadocian Fathers: Gregory of Nyssa, Basil the Great, and
Gregory of Nazianzus. It was the latter Gregory who first used the word perichoresis (from
the Greek peri-, around and -chorein, to contain.) Perichoresis refers
to the mutual indwelling within the threefold nature of the Trinity.
Say what? As I said, the New Testament doesn’t have a full-blown Trinitarian theology. But the meaning of that word does grow out of a close reading of the fourth gospel, the most mystical of the gospels. John says that the Father is in the Son and the Son in the Father." (John 10:38) Through the Holy Spirit, you and I dwell in Christ in the same way. We participate, in other words, in the divine life. This can sound almost heretical to western Protestant ears, but it's at the heart of those earliest Greek theologians. And even when we say it differently, its clearly rooted in St. Paul's writings as well as the fourth gospel: we are the Body of Christ, members of the risen Lord who dwells in us and we in him.
This word, perichoresis, means to convey intimacy and relationship: a “cleaving together.” The Orthodox tended to develop and stress the love and communion that the three persons have for each other.
Fifteen years or so ago, I had the chance to see Archbishop Desmond Tutu at St. John’s High School in Shrewsbury, in the flesh. (It was actually our second meeting as I'd once "bumped into him" walking along the Charles River when I was staying at the monastery and he was at Episcopal Divinity School.) In any case, he spoke about the African idea of ubunto which means (in contrast to Descartes) “I am, because we are.” Many of you have heard or read about this idea, as I had also. But hearing the Archbishop himself talking about it one evening in Shrewsbury made it real in a different way. And true.
Moving beyond my name-dropping, I invite you to hold these two words: ubunto and perichoresis, as we ponder the mystery of the Trinity. Both take us out of our western heads and into our mystical hearts. We discover who we are not by our separateness but in relationship. When you begin to ponder the meaning of the Trinity in these ways, it changes the questions and invites us to take another look. It's no longer a math problem. It's a mystic sweet communion.
It’s not
like we don’t have any notion at all of this in the west. The Christian idea of
marriage, for example, is that two become one. As a math problem, two can only
become one if you make less of each partner. But if you begin to understand
marriage more mystically, as something like perichoresis or ubunto,
then it is possible to imagine each person becoming more fully
themselves in marriage. Two become one as each dwells in the other, and in the
process each discovers who they truly are meant to become. It’s not addition
and it’s not subtraction. It’s multiplication.
If you apply this wisdom to the question of how God can be three, and yet one, then adding words like perichoresis or ubunto to our vocabularies helps the conversation along. Jesus says that he came into the world that we might be one: as he and the Father are one.” (See John 17:21) Father, Son, and Spirit permeate each other. It is not their separateness, but their perfect unity, that draws us into their love and calls us to share in the divine life through that love. It's good to remember, then, that the first word of the creed is we. It is we who believe. It is we who are loved: not sentimentally but fully, and mystically. We are because God is. We are, because God, the holy and undivided Trinity, first loved us. “Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.” So said St Catherine of Siena.
I love
the Book of Common Prayer, but the collect for today is not
the BCP's finest moment. It seems overly steeped in our western confusion about
the Trinity, especially as it tries to be sure that we stay focused on “the
confession of a true faith.” In my humble opinion today’s collect is overly
focused on the document that came out of Nicaea more than on the conversation
that got us there. It is a clunky prayer.
I offer you then this simple Orthodox prayer to the Trinity, not as a replacement, but as a way into the deeper meaning of this day:
The Father is my hope; the Son is my refuge; the Holy Spirit is my
protector.
O, all-holy Trinity, glory to thee.
The Trinity isn’t a math problem to be “solved.” It is an invitation to enter more deeply into the mystery and love of God. As we bind ourselves this day to the strong name of the Trinity, to the God who is three in one, and one in three, may we discover and rediscover our true selves, and our shared calling to light the world on fire! The divine spirit dwells in us!
O, All-holy Trinity, glory to thee!
