Warren McDougall Richmond Hill United Church Trinity Sunday - May 26 th, 2013 Trinity Trivia Matthew 28:16-20 This week I was thinking back over 37 years of ministry and all the different ways I ve tried to explain the idea of the Trinity - especially to young people in confirmation classes! the Trinity is like H20 present in our world in 3 different forms - as water, as steam and as ice. the Trinity is like a person, like me, for example - a father to my sons, a son to my parents and a brother to my siblings - one person, known in 3 different ways. the Trinity is like a 3-leaf clover, or a shamrock - a leaf with 3 distinct parts, but still one leaf. I can t imagine that anyone has ever been more puzzled and confused by the mystery of the Trinity than those poor kids (many now adults!) when I was finished with them!!! To help us think - [on this Trinity Sunday ] - about the mystery of the Trinity (which is how the Basis of Union of the United Church puts it) and its place in our life of faith, I ve assembled a number of totally unrelated - but nevertheless fascinating - facts about the Trinity. 1) The doctrine of the Trinity is explicitly mentioned nowhere in the Bible. Some would say, however, that the Bible assumes the trinitarian nature of God. As one writer put it: The biblical basis of the doctrine of the Trinity is not to be found in a few proof texts, but in the pervasive trinitarian pattern of the New Testament description of the revelation and activity of God. [That s Daniel Migliore in Faith Seeking Understanding.] Our gospel reading for this morning from Matthew, which contains Jesus command to the disciples to go into the world and baptize in the name of God the Father and Mother, and of Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit is about the closest the Bible gets to even linking these 3 different ways of knowing God. 2) The Christian church has celebrated Trinity Sunday since the 1300 s, when Pope John XXII (22nd) ordered that the festival be celebrated each year.
Facts 3) and 4) Eastern Christian thought (Orthodox) generally starts with the 3 persons of the Trinity, and tries to understand their mysterious unity. So the movement is from 3 to 1. Whereas Western Christian thought (both Roman Catholic and Protestant), on the other hand, starts with the 1-ness or unity of God, and tries to understand the mystery of God s 3-ness. So the approach is to move from 1 to 3. (I m sure this must be interesting to somebody, otherwise why would the church have split over it?!) Facts 5) and 6) At its worst, the doctrine of the Trinity has been used by what I like to call the doctrine police to limit our thoughts and understandings about God, rather than expand them - as a kind of test of our orthodoxy, or even a club to keep us in line. At its best, the doctrine of the Trinity has been used as a representation of the beautiful richness and diversity of God s love reaching into our lives and out into the world. 7) Here s a perhaps less-known fact that - because of the Christian church s belief in the Trinity, some Muslims and Jews claim that Christians are not really monotheistic (ie. people who worship one God) as we claim to be, but are actually polytheistic (ie. people who worship a number of different Gods). The Christian belief in the Trinity is seen by some Jews and Muslims as puzzling (at best) - and even blasphemous (at worst)! Still others accuse us in the United Church - [when we don t put enough of an emphasis on the importance of the Trinity] - of being more Unitarian than Trinitarian. I don t know about you, but I ve certainly been called worse than Unitarian! 8) And finally, on a lighter note, according to the most recent edition of the United Church Year Book, there are 29 Trinity United Churches in Canada [or 31 if you count names that combine Trinity with another name] - making it one of the most popular names for United Churches in the country! Like so many other doctrines in the Christian church, the doctrine of the Trinity came about as an answer or solution to a very real problem the church was facing at the time. In about 320 in the Common Era, a fierce theological debate was raging. It was an argument about the nature of God - and the divinity of Jesus. The controversy became so heated that the Emperor, Constantine, intervened and summoned a church council in Nicea (in what is now Turkey) to settle the issue once and for all. When the conflict broke out, there was no official position - and it was
by no means certain who was right and who was wrong, or who would win this argument! But when the dust settled, at the church councils of Nicea and Constantinople in the 4th century, the doctrine of the Trinity was adopted as the acceptable expression of God s nature. The problem the challenge - of the Trinity for me is when it is used in a way that is rigid, literal, narrow, and limiting of God. From the earliest centuries of the church, discerning theologians have stressed the inadequacy and relativity of all of our language about God - including the language of the Trinity. Today, we are even more aware of how imperfect - how historically burdened - all language about God is. The search for new and more inclusive metaphors for God - [language that corrects and complements the old, one-sided, patriarchal images] - is an important development in recent theology. In the process, we may be surprised and delighted with what we discover about God. Sally McFague is a feminist theologian and author of several books. I remember when her book Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age came out in 1987; I remember thinking how absolutely radical and far-out and edgy it was and, at the time. I guess it was. Now, to be honest, it seems pretty tame. In that book, McFague speaks of God as being present in the world as Mother, Lover and Friend, three metaphors which form a trinity expressing God s love to the world. God as Mother - or Parent - is on the side of LIFE, says McFague. [And McFague argues that both female and male imagery should be used here]. What Mother-God (or Father-God) gives is LIFE. Parental love (while certainly not always pure, not always perfect ), is one of the most powerful and intimate experiences we human beings have of giving love whose return is not calculated, and certainly not guaranteed. It is the gift of life to others. In a perfect world, parental love nurtures what it has brought into being, wanting growth and fulfilment for all, profoundly aware of the preciousness and vulnerability of life as a gift we receive and pass on. This love is truly revolutionary love, because it loves the weak and vulnerable, as well as the strong and beautiful. No human love can be perfectly just and impartial, of course - but parental love is one of the best metaphors we have for imaging the creative and nurturing love of God.
Now: God as Lover. If there is any one word that the Christian tradition has applied unqualifiedly to God, it is the word love. God is love...love comes from God...Those who love know God...God exemplifies love...is the model for love. But while we insist that God is love, we recoil from using the noun Lover, because here - of course - we encounter the issue of eroticism. We can handle the idea that God is love - so long as God s love contains no need or interest, and certainly no desire or power. It should, in other words, be totally gratuitous, dis-interested and passionless. Why - [given its importance to and power in human life] - has the metaphor of Lover not been used more often in Christian imagery? As the most intimate of human relationships - the one giving the most joy (as well as the potential for much pain) - does it not contain enormous possibility for describing our relationship with God? The Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon), in Hebrew Scripture, praises human love, but is most often used (when it is used at all) as an analogy for the relationship between God and humanity. This book is part of our scriptural tradition in the Christian faith, but we largely ignore it reading from it only occasionally at weddings. Many Christians find it a huge embarrassment, in fact, because it is highly erotic, passionate and very physical. The occasional mediaeval mystic has latched onto this as an analogy for the Incarnation. Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, who lived in the 11th Century, declares that Jesus is God s kiss to the world. Happy kiss, he wrote, in which God is united to Man. The image of God as Lover powerfully expresses divine passion for the world, as well as extraordinary intimacy and longing between God and the world. The third aspect of McFague s trinity is God as Friend - God as Mother, as Lover, and - now - as Friend. Few would deny that the love of Mother and Lover is central to human life, but what about friendship? Here is what makes friendship an interesting analogy for our relationship with God: practically everyone who has written about friendship [Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Bonhoeffer, and others] - agrees that what distinguishes friendship from other relationships is that friendship alone exists outside the bounds of duty, obligation and responsibility. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for instance, says that marriage, labour, the state and the church all exist by divine decree (I m not sure I agree with all of that, but that s what he said!) - but friendship alone exists in freedom. One does not
choose one s mother or father...and even falling in love seems to have a certain kind of destiny about it...but friends choose to be together. There are other qualities important in friendship, but at the centre of its power and its mystery is that [of all of our relationships] - it is the most free. Friendship [at its most elemental] - is the bonding of two people by free choice in a reciprocal relationship. One chooses to be with a friend simply because one likes the person - (imagine, God likes us!) - and because one allows one s friends to be - to just be - just the way they are! We have a very powerful model here of God as Friend to sustain us as we go about our work of befriending the world. In this model, God is present as our Friend - choosing us and loving us as we are. God as Mother, Lover and Friend. McFague says that she chose these words to describe God in order to deliberately unseat the names of Father, Son and Holy Spirit as descriptions of God which allow no supplements and no alternatives. If we can share images of God other than the traditional ones, and if we can share our experiences of God in our lives without feeling that we have to correct each other, or judge one another, or ensure that everyone remains within the bounds of orthodoxy, then an important conclusion is reached: God has many names, is known in many ways, is - above all - mystery. For me, the whole concept of the Trinity - Father, Son and Holy Ghost...Parent, Child and Holy Spirit...Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer...however you slice it...is most helpful when it is seen as poetry, as metaphor. When it is literal and dogmatic, when it is proscriptive rather than descriptive, when it is used as a litmus test of our theological orthodoxy, then it is controlling and narrow and exclusive and limiting of God. On the other hand, when seen as a way of describing our varying experiences of God [when seen as poetry, as metaphor ] - it points to the inexhaustible mystery of God. Thanks be to God - who is revealed to us and is known to us in a myriad of ways - and yet who remains wondrously, awesomely and divinely mysterious. Thanks be to God!
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