All-holy Trinity, glory to thee!

Yesterday we celebrated the Feast of Pentecost and the coming of God’s Holy Spirit like wind and fire. That celebration raises a great big theological question: 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) to lead us into all truth, then: how are these three related to each other? 

To say it more succinctly: if we proclaim God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, 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?"

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 that as we prepare to celebrate Trinity Sunday our readings for the day can at best point us in the right direction. To impose 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 more than three 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. 

But in all my years of preaching I have not yet figured out how to avoid something of a Church history lesson on this day. (Which is still better than succumbing to the the temptation to try to be an answer-giver and to "explain" the Trinity.) And no...God is most definitely not like a three-leaf clover!

It 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 is 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 hundred years 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." (But not before old Bishop (Saint) Nicholas got up and slapped Arius across the face.)

In spite of that little episode, the 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, and the lines between Episcopalians and Baptists and Roman Catholics would not be drawn until much later. But just because there were not denominations in the fourth century doesn’t mean there weren’t differences. Think about how hard it is today for Christians in Central Africa and in Central America and in central Massachusetts to communicate with one another. The barriers are about more than language: they are cultural and economic and social. 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, both linguistically and culturally and centered in Rome. The Eastern Church was shaped by Greek language and culture and 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 when words lose their meaning and even change their meaning from Greek to Latin and Latin to Greek proved to be quite the challenge. (Good thing that the Father, and maybe also the Son, sent the Holy Spirit to guide us into all truth!) But it’s not always as easy as Luke makes it sound on Pentecost Sunday. 

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 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 Trinity Sunday.

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 this word grows out of a close reading of the fourth gospel, the most mystical of the gospels. In John’s take on all of this, 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 the 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: the Trinity as family. Rublev’s fifteenth-century Russian icon gets at this notion well, I think.

Some of us have inadvertently been mal-churched to think of Holy Baptism or Confirmation as akin to joining a club where "membership has it's privileges." I don't think anyone means to teach us that, exactly, but it's in the air we breath in a consumer culture. Ask any pastor about those who want the 'benefits" of congregational membership without the costs of discipleship! It's a short journey from that kind of thinking to the commodification of even Baptism and Eucharist, which tend to become something focused more on us as individuals rather than on the community into which we are welcomed. We have been well taught to think that our separateness makes us who we are and we learned from Descartes a little too well: “I think, therefore I am.”  

A decade or so, I had the chance to see Archbishop Desmond Tutu 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 at St. John’s High School and spoke about the African idea of ubunto which means (in contrast to Descartes) “I am, because we are.” Many of you reading this post will 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. And related to this post...

Because moving beyond my name-dropping, I want the reader to imagine how differently we think about the meaning of Holy Baptism or Holy Eucharist from these two very different perspectives. Just ponder it. A Cartesian worldview so quickly becomes transactional and is ego-centric. Formation is also trying to "explain" to a child what it "really means." (And damn it, they better not receive it until they can understand!) Ubunto, in contrast (which I think is much closer to the Biblical worldview and especially the Jewish context) is about what we are a part of. Of course all of the community should share in the Eucharist because it is who we are together in Christ - not about what is in one's head. This is why the Orthodox share the Eucharist by way of just a drop of wine on the day of Holy Baptism. 

Now I don't think I've lost my way, exactly. I may have moved from "preaching to meddling." In any case, let me bring it back to Trinity Sunday: it seems to me that ubunto is much closer to this eastern idea of perichoresis, which is to say that we discover who we are not by our separateness but in relationship.  And then I want to add this: 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 part. 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. 

“Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.” So said St Catherine of Siena. If you apply this same insight 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. 

I don't know how the preacher gets around having a Church history lecture masquerade as a sermon next Sunday. It's why I punted whenever I could on Trinity Sunday. Because I don't think what I've written above meets the expectations of most sermons. It may be interesting. It may help faith seek understanding. But where is the good news? 

If one could call everything above a preface, or a teaching or as something just meant to set the stage by offering some context and managing some expectations, and adding a couple of vocabulary words, then it allows for a very short homily. It might go something like this: 

What does a meeting of a bunch of bishops in the fourth century have to do with us, here and now, called to be one body, with many members and yet scattered and isolated in this time of the COVID-19 pandemic? 

I love the Book of Common Prayer, but the collect for today is not the BCP's finest moment. It may be overly steeped in our western confusion about the Trinity, in particular as it tries to be sure that we stay focused on “the confession of a true faith” - that is to say, on the document that came out of Nicaea more than on the conversation that got us there. It is a clunky prayer, as too often Trinity Sunday sermons are clunky. Sometimes when we recite the Nicene Creed it can feel the same way, as if we are reciting a list of “bullet points” that we better believe—or else. (This is one reason I think we should always sing the creed.) I offer you then, this simple Orthodox prayer to the Trinity, if not as a replacement, then at least a way in to the 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’s 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! 

In Missional Church in Perspective, Craig Van Gelder and Dwight Zscheille argue for a more Trinitarian understanding of mission. They note that sometimes Western missiology has assumed that as Christians our job is to take the gospel out into the world, kind of like we are selling a product. The authors of this book argue, however, that it is God’s mission in God’s world. The world that, as we hear in those first verses of the Book of Genesis appointed for today's Old Testament reading, is already a world that God has created and is still creating; a world that God has already redeemed through Jesus Christ, and is still redeeming; a world that from the beginning has been sustained, and is still being sustained, by God’s Holy Spirit. 

We don't need to be in church buildings for God the Undivided Trinity to be doing that work in the world. Rather, as we go out into the world to do the work that God gives us to do, we discover that God is already there. When we go out into the world to do mission, our job is to discern what God is up to, and then go from our buildings to help out in the neighborhood. 

The divine spirit dwells in us! Go then, in peace, to love and serve the Lord, O, All-holy Trinity, glory to thee!