Faith Seeking Understanding

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1 Faith Seeking Understanding Binkley Baptist Church ~ May 31, 2015 Stephanie Ford Coming to Binkley to celebrate Trinity Sunday, we may find ourselves a bit uneasy. The word Trinity in the mouth of a Baptist tends to be somewhat rare, tasting more as though it belonged in an Episcopalian prayer book. For a lot of our history, Baptists have been wary of creeds, preferring to stick close to the biblical text, which never actually uses the term Trinity, even though a theology of three undergirds our prayer. For others of us, the problem is more about reconciling the idea of Trinity with what we ve come to believe about the Jesus who walked this earth long ago. The Jesus we ve studied and revered taught a revolutionary vision, a kingdom where the last are made first and tables of greed are overturned. The Jesus at the center of our witness looks more like the humble statue of St. Francis standing in our courtyard than a majestic deity. Trinity calls to mind a princely Christ, robed and bejeweled, sitting on a throne next to his father. What do we do with such a Christ, who seems quite removed from the Galilean preacher we ve met in the gospels? Sadly, Trinity also comes layered in images that are dominated by masculinity and hierarchy. We can almost see the heavenly board room where Father and Son consult regularly and then send the Spirit, the amorphous and loving third, to do their bidding. Three personas of one God, we say in the creed. God both beyond gender and inclusive of gender, we try to affirm. But when push comes to shove in our psyches, God the Father appears to be the guy in charge, the Son comes next, and the Spirit follows in third place. I don t mean to offend. Rather, I am asking myself and asking you to join me pulling up these dry roots of stereotype that deaden the greening vitality of a Trinitarian vision. Our Celtic Christian forebears claimed a living Trinity. Daily they prayed through their chores in rhymes of three sacred and profane intimately intertwined. In the 1800s, folklorist Alexander Carmichael recorded many of these Celtic prayers; in one, he describes a ritual of s mooring the fire at night in preparation for the morning: 1

2 The embers are evenly spread on the hearth and formed into a circle. This circle is then divided into three equal sections.... A peat is laid between each section. The first peat is laid down in name of the God of Life, the second in name of the God of Peace, the third in name of the God of Grace. The circle is then covered over with ashes sufficient to subdue but not to extinguish the fire, in name of the Three of Light. 1 Thinking about the Trinity today, though, we must parse through echoes of the Nicene creed: Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth Jesus, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father Holy Spirit, the giver of life, proceeding from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified. These words for the Trinity, beautiful though they are, are hard to connect to mentally and spiritually. Barbara Brown Taylor likens our dilemma to hearing a Buddhist koan: Two hands clap and there is a sound; what, then, is the sound of one hand? Yet a living faith seeks understanding. We want to know the Holy better, the Source of our very being, the Love behind all of our other loves? We long to understand the mystery of the three better. The name Trinity comes most alive for me in the story of Jesus baptism: he rises out of the water, heaven opens, the Spirit like a dove descends upon him, and a voice speaks out of heaven, saying: You are My beloved Son, with You I am wellpleased. 2 Another image that breathes life into the Trinity for me is Adrei Rublev s famous painting, Icon of the Trinity. It is painted as all icons are, from the depths of prayer. It s there in black and white on the cover of your bulletin, and sometime you should look it up on the Internet and find it in glowing color. The icon seems simple at first. Three almost identical figures, though with differing garments, sit at a small table. They are painted as the angels who came to Abraham and Sarah to give them good news of God s promise of an heir. Nevertheless, these angelic visitors were believed by the Early Church to also prefigure the Trinity. So, here at table, we see the Trinity as a circle of good friends. They lean with hospitality toward one another and seem to beckon the viewer to join them. At the center of the table is a chalice, to which all of the figures bend. The chalice symbolizes God s love. 1 Alexander Carmaichal, Carmina Gadelica. 2 Mt. 3:13-17; Mark 1:9-11; Luke 3:

3 Sometimes poetry speaks more aptly than prose, and sometimes art better than either. Rublev s icon is rich in textures that words cannot convey. His figures open up gender without landing on either male or female (for who can tell if these divine visitors are men or women?). Hierarchy is likewise overturned: the one in the middle is slightly higher than the other two, but seems to look for guidance from the one on the left of the table. Equality and mutuality are writ large, and perhaps what strikes the viewer most is the caring hospitality. Each figure welcomes the other, deferring with the nod of the head as if to say, No, you go first I want you to drink first. I find three gifts in Rublev s depiction of the Trinity. The first is the Triune friendship that is so clearly visible in the icon. And it s an open friendship; there is room for a fourth. Near the end of John s gospel, Jesus offered his disciples the deepest form of hospitality: No longer do I call you servants, I call you friends. You are the guest that the Trinity has been waiting for; you are the one being welcomed. Irish priest and poet, John O Donohue writes, For love alone can awaken what is divine within you. In love, you grow and come home When you learn to love and let yourself be loved, you come home to the hearth of your own spirit. You are warm and sheltered. 3 Pull up a chair and sit down. The divine friendship of the Trinity is not an exclusive club. Like the icon itself, the Trinity radiates beyond to draw us in. Another gift of this icon is that it calls you and me to join in a work of imagination. Imagination is key to growing a faith, and as such it takes our intention, our time, our spiritual energy. In the past, icons were avoided in the West for fears that in imaging the Divine, we would create idols. We now realize that icons, like music, like poetry, vibrate with possibility opening our minds and our hearts to God s presence in new ways. Andrei Rublev in the 15 th Century imagined angelic visitors, prefigures of the Trinity, as beyond and inclusive of gender. Back in the 4 th Century, a young church sought to envision a reconciliation of the divinity of Jesus they had witnessed and the arrival of the Spirit at Pentecost with the one God, Creator. A theology of Trinity was the fruit of their imagination. And way back in the 1 st Century, in a letter to the church at Rome, Paul imagined a theology of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit, Paul wrote, bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God, heirs of God; did you hear that, 3 John O Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom 3

4 heirs of God! The Spirit, Paul declares, joins creation, groaning as a woman in labor, waiting for the fullness of God s salvation. And when we cannot pray, the Spirit intercedes with signs too deep for words. Paul s imagery of the Spirit brings us to the final gift in Rublev s icon. This intimate community of the Trinity portrayed hints of a community beyond the three, or even a fourth, joining them at table, and beyond the divine-human community. In the end, theologian Elizabeth Johnson notes, the Trinity provides a symbolic picture of totally shared life at the heart of the universe. The Trinity as pure relationality, moreover, epitomizes the connectedness of all that exists in the universe. 4 Perhaps this best names the moment we are in theologically. How do we move beyond our human concerns to recognize our interconnectedness to all of creation? What does a theology of the Trinity look like now? Perhaps my meditation on the Trinity has given you glimpses of something new, but I still stand before this Christian koan of ours humbled by great mystery. Yet I am helped by a story that Meredith Bratcher shared from a sermon she heard. It is the story of a boat that was shipwrecked near a coast, and tells about the nearby villagers' attempts to rescue as many of the sailors as they could. Then as night fell, it was too dangerous for the rescue boat to go out any more among the rocks that had wrecked the other boat. But one man was still left clinging to the wreckage. So the villagers stayed on the shore, all through the night: they build a big bonfire, and every once in a while, they would shout "hurray for John (to the man out in the waves) and toss their hats as high as they could in the firelight, hoping he could see and hear them. And they kept this up all night, until day came, and they could get out to him. He had kept on clinging to life and hope with the help of their cheers for him. If nothing else, perhaps you can sense the Trinity as weavers of a community of love that is cheering you on. And you are not alone! For God as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, is with you always. 4 Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is, pp

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