Today we celebrate one of the Principal Feasts of the Church. In fact we are celebrating our third Principal Feast this month. Ascension Day and the Day of Pentecost; having just been celebrated, Trinity Sunday, along with Christmas, the Epiphany, Easter, and All Saint’s Day make up the seven Principal Feasts. And all over the world today, congregations are being put to sleep by deep theological treatises on Trinitarian Theology. Good church goers have been blessed by these sermons since the early 14th century, and as Anglicans we can thank Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, who two centuries earlier dedicated his Consecration on the Sunday after Pentecost to the Holy Trinity, for our long history of terribly thick sermons on this Principal Feast Day.
As I pondered over how to preach my first Trinity Sunday I have to admit I really struggled. I didn’t think I would, how hard can Trinity Sunday really be to preach? I chatted with old seminary friends and got laughed at by seasoned priests, and ultimately realized that Trinity Sunday was indeed hard to preach. At the same time, however, it is like every other Sunday; my task in preaching is to make it alive to you. To ignore the Trinity part of Trinity Sunday and preach on discipleship instead was to do a disservice to you just as giving you a heady term-paper type lecture on the Trinitarian theology laid out in the Creed of St. Athanasius would. As Reginald Fuller, the late professor emeritus of New Testament at Virginia Theological Seminary, wrote, “We need to guard against the notion that the Holy Trinity is a mysterious formula or still more a perplexing and complicated dogma, intelligible only to theologians. We must therefore interpret the experience of the believers, particularly their prayer and sacramental experiences, in such a way that they see that they are themselves constantly involved thereby in the life of the Blessed Trinity." [Then quoting Thomas Hancock, a 19th Century Anglican Divine,] ‘Thus the rudest man or woman who cannot reason about the Trinity may know the Trinity more perfectly than some acute theologian who has by heart all the writings of St. Athanasius or St. Augustine, and all the controversies of the first six centuries.’”[1]
And so despite the fact that both New Testament lessons have explicit references to the Trinity, I'd like instead to go back to Genesis. It is in this wonderful Hebrew poem that I believe we get our best understanding of what this Triune God we worship and follow is all about. There are three parts of the first story of Creation that give us wonderful insight into the life of the Trinity. We will begin our journey in the beginning. This time from the New American Version, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. 3 Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light.” We must always be careful when we try to read Christian theological innovations into Old Testament, Hebraic, texts, but I have not found a more carefully designed Trinitarian formula then that of Genesis 1.1-3. It starts with the idea that before the beginning, God is; thus he is there to create “in the beginning.” But it does not stop there; for we have in these three verses God the Father who creates, God the Spirit who moves over the surface of the water, and God the Word who speaks things into being. This One God is in effect Three Persons. Here is where sermons often fall into lectures, and I promised I wouldn’t do that to you, so suffice it to say that this One God in Three Persons is “some sort of community of creativity.”[2] Or perhaps better said, our Triune God is a relationship, is relationship, is in relationship.
This relationship gets fleshed out for us a little better in the second passage we should look at this morning. The first half of verse 26 gives us a glimpse into that relationship of the Godhead - God talking to God. “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness…’” We have here a rare glimpse into the God relationship. As I imagine it, I see God the Father ruminating on the idea of making humankind and offering that suggestion to God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. The Steve Pankey translation is something like, “What do y’all think about making humankind in Our image, you know like us?” And in so doing, the Triune God of relationship makes us as relational beings. We are created by a relational God to have a relationship with Him and with one another.
The loving community that is our Triune God couldn’t help but create more things to love. This was made clear to me during the “building respectful Christian community day” during orientation at seminary. They took three volunteers and asked them to join hands and move around like they were playing ring-around-the-rosie. This symbolized the relationship among the Godhead; three in one, in perfect harmony. They then invited the rest of us to join; as created beings of God into that dance. We each have the opportunity to join in the life of the Trinity as members of their relationship which in turn brings us into relationship with one another. It was a terribly embarrassing way to go about teaching the image, but it made clear to me what it means to join into the dream of God; to be made in the relational image of God; to engage the Trinity.
This lifestyle of relationship does not end with us and God, however. The last verse I’d like to look is 1.31, “God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good.” As we hear the story of Creation it is easy to fall into the rhythm of evening/morning. By day six we have often tuned out to the cycle. We hear that God created light, sky, land, and vegetation, sun, moon, and stars, fish, and birds, cattle, creeping things, and beasts of the earth, and finally humankind, and we know that these were all good things. Then, on day six, we hear that it was very good. The routine has been shifted, and we are awake again. “What was so good?” we think to ourselves, “Day six, hmm, humankind, that was very good; awesome.” But when we look at it we see that it wasn’t humanity that made God so happy. When God saw each and every thing he has made working in perfect relationship with one another, then he said it was very good. This has profound ramifications for our lives. God didn’t get all excited by us, but by the relationship of all of Creation. This means that as relational beings made in the image of God we are to be in relationship with God, with one another, AND with all of Creation. This makes God declare things very good. This means that our relationship to light, sky, land, and vegetation, sun, moon, and stars, fish, and birds, cattle, creeping things, and beasts of the earth is as important as our relationships one with another.
These are the lessons of Trinity Sunday. Not that God is beyond our comprehension, we know that already. Not that the Trinity is so deep as to be the territory of trained theologians. Instead, we are to know first and foremost that God is Three Persons of One Substance in perfect relationship. This perfect union that was before the beginning poured out its abundance in Creation, and we as humankind were made in the image of this relational God. Our three point charge is to join in the relationship of our Triune God; to be match that perfect relationship one with another; and to carry that dance beyond humanity into all of Creation. We live out this charge by following the example of the One through whom all relationships are made and obeying all he has commanded us to do: keeping Sabbath, offering praise and worship, living in peace, and taking great solace in the promise of God the Son that “He is with us always.” Thanks be to God; the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
2 comments:
Steve - this was anything BUT convoluted and dense and as amazing an analysis of the Trinity and its relationship as Rob Bell's - and without pictures!! Well done.
CJ - you are too kind. Thanks for the note, it made my day.
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