Trinity Sunday

 Trinity Sunday

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31       Psalm 8 Romans 5:1-5        John 16:12-15

One of the risks of following a faith that is as old as ours - two thousand years and counting - is that along the way, lots of stuff gets set in stone as immutable doctrine. And passed down as ideas about God that other people came up with centuries ago and argued and fought over until finally they achieved the musty sanctity of extreme age. The even greater risk is that we can lose sight of the fact that as Christians we daily experience God for ourselves - and are called to reimagine and express our knowledge and love of God in the shapes and colours and movements of an ever-changing world.

The 1600-year-old notion of God as a Trinity is a prime example. A doctrine that was hammered out in passionate disagreements and much bloodshed over centuries into an uneasy compromise at the Council of Chalcedon in the year 451; and which preachers, once a year, are still invited to explain. Well, it can’t be done, but the good news is that belief in the God we proclaim as Creator, Son and Spirit doesn’t need to be explained, much less proved.  It has to be encountered and experienced as a lived relationship. 

It's like falling in love. We don’t need an explanation of the psychological processes involved in falling in love, we don’t need to understand it or even to believe in it, but we sure know when it happens to us.

So I think the doctrine of the Trinity is a bit like that. The experience comes first, and then gradually theologians come along and try to describe it, and like all attempts to pin down our experience of God in words the theology of the Trinity maybe helps a bit - but it’s awkward in comparison with the uninhibited, life-giving and breath-takingly beautiful reality it is trying to describe.

I think one of the most stunning images contained in the dry philosophical language of the fifth century for the impossible Three-in-One God we proclaim is the image of the dance – in Greek, perichoresis. I like to imagine it not as a ballroom dance just for two, and certainly not a nightclub dance floor where it’s hard to tell whether any of the dancers are connected to anybody else at all – but a dance where multiple dancers are weaving fluidly, continuously in motion yet fixed on one another, their movements individually choreographed yet intertwined, interdependent and wordlessly communicating - a dance that, like the dancers, has no beginning and no end and in which the dancers lose themselves in one another and continually invite others to join in. 

The dancers are many, but the dance is uniquely one. That’s really all that matters – not whether we can explain it but whether we’re being drawn into the dance. Are our lives taking us deeper and deeper into the dance of God?

It’s not that I don’t think the theological underpinnings of the doctrine of the Trinity matter, because I do. I think we need to talk about God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and I want to suggest two main reasons that the Trinitarian understanding of God is important.

The first reason is that we need to connect the diversity of our ways of experiencing God, to draw them all together and decide whether we are still talking about one God. This was a very serious question for early Christians who because they worshipped Jesus as Lord were routinely accused of being polytheistic. Can we as Christians, together with our Jewish sisters and brothers, recite the Shema, ‘the Lord our God, the Lord is One’? Paradoxically and mysteriously, the doctrine of the Trinity is the assertion that, despite appearances to the contrary, there is only one God. That at the heart of the universe we find, not fragmentation but cohesion, stability and meaning, not multiplicity but oneness.

The God who thunders out of the chaos of creation sends ripples across time that we encounter on a daily basis: the patterned elegance of chromosomes seen through the power of an electron microscope or the stunning pyrotechnics of galaxies exploding, the simple breathtaking beauty of an outback sunset or the restless force of the ocean. The mystery of creation is the same mystery of being that we contemplate in our own birth and death.

The One who heals and forgives, who feeds the multitude and who weeps over the fate of the women of Jerusalem while struggling through the streets to his own execution – becomes the One we encounter daily in the faces across the breakfast table or on the train, as we marvel at the birth of a child or sit with a dying friend. And so we discover that being finds its fullest meaning in being for.

The same breath of God that hovers over the chaotic waters of precreation in the first verses of Genesis - and mysteriously falls on the disciples at Pentecost - moves within us as the inspiration of a writer, the genius of human creativity and the aha-ness of life itself; the miracle of intelligibility, the leading of conscience and the stillness of contemplation. We do encounter the sacred, every one of us, at every moment of every day, and the doctrine of the Trinity affirms that all this is the one God of heaven and earth.  That all these mysteries are the same mystery, that the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Being is transcended in becoming. 

And the second reason the doctrine of the Trinity is important?

Because it tells us that God’s own life is – at its very heart – about relationship. The Triune God is the God of community, the fullness of love in perpetual motion, love poured out and received in return. The fullness of the Father poured out in love to the Son, the Son’s own life poured out into creation, the Holy Spirit as the fullness of love given and received.

But it’s an outpouring of love that doesn’t just go around in circles in a sort of divine mutual admiration society. Like the ripples on the pond that get wider and wider, God becomes human, God’s love spills over into creation, inviting us into the dance of love, never condemning us for our lovelessness but always yearning for our response.

This Triune God is definitely a God we can’t pin down into tired old categories of thought. A God of novelty and diversity and wonder that, by stretching the capacity of Greek philosophical language, theologians 1600 years ago decided to describe as three persons in one living essence - while recognising that the God of creation was also beyond thought, beyond time and beyond being - of course such a God can’t be pinned down by any of our pronouns! 

Unbelievably, it was only forty or so years ago that Christian churches seemed to agree God really wasn’t a ‘he’ - or even a ‘she’ - though some theologians thought we should balance the books by calling God a ‘she’ for say another couple of thousand years. Actually, a newer pronoun that some persons adopt nowadays might be better for God - the first Hebrew word for God the Creator that appears in the Bible right from the beginning is Elohim - literally ‘the strong ones’ - God is grammatically plural, so maybe we should start calling God ‘they’! The God whose fundamental essence is inclusivity!

So, what does all this mean for us, in our everyday lives? For a start, it means you can forget the judgmental image of God that Christians sometimes carry around with them - the God just waiting for you to put a foot wrong to punish or reject you. This false and punitive God has no place in the vision of God as a Trinity of wasteful love. For another thing, it means you can forget the tribal image of God, the small and false god we sometimes make in our own image to justify excluding people who look or think or live or worship differently from us. Because the Triune God is the God that revels in diversity, the rainbow God, the God of the dance that swirls the whole of creation into movement, the God continually in motion, orienting us not toward past remembered injustices or the familiarity of old ways but toward a future of reconciliation and wholeness and new possibilities.

The Triune God is disturbing, exciting and attractive. You don’t know where this dance is going to take you, but you really don’t want to be a wallflower. If we want to be a people of light and truth, if we want to be a people who bring hope and creative change to a world fixated on competition and death, then there’s only one way to do it, and that’s by accepting the invitation to the dance. That’s why we’re here today. The God who creates the universe in a pirouette of love is the same God who says, ‘take and eat. This is me – broken and poured out for you’. This – today - is where heaven and earth touch each other and the dance of love begins.

Amen.