Trinity Sunday, May 30, 2010
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Psalm 8
Romans 5:1-5
John 16: 12-15
This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. AMEN.
Trinity Sunday is the first hinge Sunday of the church year, to link the biographical part of the church year to Christ the King Sunday, the other hinge, which links this teaching part back to the biographical new year, and then we roll along again. This hinge is theological, the other, biographical. Although this year we follow Luke's teachings, because this is a theological Sunday, we hear from John's Gospel today, rather than from Luke.
Years ago I heard the great Scottish Anglican theologian John Macquarrie lecture on Trinity Sunday. What I heard him say was that the Trinity was an experience, rather than thought, theory, or theology. I've held to that for all these years, and added other thoughts and images too. Elizabeth Kaeton reminds us of this, quoting from the Creed of St. Athanasius, "The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible. The whole thing incomprehensible. Amen."- True, but neither particularly enlightening, nor experiential.
Ancient simile-seekers, particularly Irish ones, offered a shamrock as symbol for the Trinity. God-ness fills the whole, but its three leaves are distinct, equal, and cannot survive separated from the whole. No one petal-leaf can live independently: the Son is never without Father/Creator, or the Spirit's life-giving energy.
Recently I've read that descendants of such simile-seekers have felt a better modern equivalent to convey the Three in One and One in Three's lively reality is water, H2O, existing always in the three presences of water, ice, and steam, and at one point where all three can co-exist. It's more scientific and basic, but it seems to me that they're only equivalent in a contained space, and my hope or image of and for God is anything but limited. Sure, steam into the air eventually returns to the earth as water, or ice can both melt and evaporate, but it doesn't further my understanding of the life and reality of the Trinity.
I've read a couple of fine one-liners, about the Trinity, each of which blooms in thought, too. "They took poetry and made it into a rule." I think the sentence gets at the struggle from incomprehensibility to the effort to articulate. Another line apparently from Karl Barth, "The Word became flesh, and theologians made it words again." This seems more dismissive and limiting for an effort that people have pressed hard to do, to explain their own God experiences.
It seems to me that Christian efforts to get at the living reality of the god-force, the god-energy in their lives, imaginations, hopes, anger, and disappointments are in a long line of such attempts. Having just seen the wonderful statue of -is it Poseidon or Zeus-Poseidon again, I am reminded of trying to catch an image of the Father/the Power of the Sea in action. Seeing again Athena emerging from the forehead of Zeus to embody wisdom is an attempt both to connect power and wisdom familially, but also to recognize the innate separation between creator/creation and initial power of existence and creativity and wisdom. The story of the acquisition of the city of Athens's power is shown in sculpture depicting a great competition to be her patron. Statues show Poseidon, God of the Sea, offering sea power, while Athena offers the olive tree, giving, of course, the successful trade product of olive oil, a guarantee of leisure in olive oil used domestically for exercise and relaxation massages and for cooking, and best of all representing a guarantee not of power, but of peace- better even than sea domination. Athena won and so the city took her name.
Capturing the Father's strength, power, and creation gifts with the on-going life and spirit of a city in Athena's victorious competition offers me a mind-set that accepts our struggle with the Trinity. I think we keep yearning to explain what we see, know, and do in some rational containable or set of complementing images. We experience wonder at creation, in its "original frame," and in its developing mysteries. As we research on large or small scales, we find coherent order in weather patterns, the Gulf Stream, or huge forces like earth temperatures, but also in genetic maps, tiny particles, or new found elements. We both manage the discoveries as "just science" or "just real," while we also experience a wonder at the simplicity of the reality, and the wonder both that we didn't used to know about the science of them, and the wonder at how did the whatever get that way already, but we hadn't made it. The reality of creation's immenseness continually inspires and challenges scientists who continually recognize that while they work to contain all knowledge in their fields, there's always more energizing both their searches and the actual fields they thought they could explain.
Articulating the force, energy, liveliness, connecting links, and glue of the Holy Spirit also eludes our powers of description. I think of the concept of 6 degrees of separation or Tinker toys. Both fail to show just how one thing is connected to another, especially in timely or providential fashion. Fire's warmth, energy, and power is fine as an image, but we now see energies far beyond fire, and understand any such image as shadowed by its power for destruction, as fire can also be. The great destructive power of volcanic fire was part of the mythic memories for many early cultures, but was not the constant man-made or natural widely-known fire-y disasters we all can name and see, both in our imaginations and in actual documenting pictures, from the past and immediate present. We are amused by the image of Hermes bringing messages or Cupid launching an arrow of desire, but how messages are transmitted between generations, cultures, individuals, and how they bind connections into communities and forces for good, all, appear more than random, disconnected, or haphazard. Whether we aim for big explanations or small, images don't get at our feeling that sometimes there are forces, which do connect the great good of creation with on-going actions in people's lives. The Holy Spirit is both too literal and too vague an image, so it suits us pretty well.
The hardest and easiest part of the living personae of the Trinity is Jesus Christ, Son of God, the Savior, and our Advocate. He is so finite and particular, that our troubles with accepting him as part of the force of the Holy One range from that he didn't exist, he didn't really ever live so he couldn't have died and risen again, or that he did die and couldn't have risen, to he was a Jew, and so not one of us. There are lists more of the difficulties from the finite side, matched by those from the infinite side. How could he have lived and been a reality always, as well as having been born in a particular time? (This question is often articulated as: how can the people unlucky enough to have been born before Jesus, ever be saved, and if not, how mean does that make God?) For Jesus to be believed as a universal Savior makes it harder to believe him as a particular historical man, but not accepting him as that, makes him unavailable as a universal Savior. Yet people read about him and know his words, his deeds, and his life-giving power in the resurrection to be absolutely real, and experience that life in what they do, being fed with him at the Eucharist. Knowing his relationships with his mother, with his friends, with people who came to him in need or with eternal questions about the reign of God, help us know him as living in our lives, as he has been for eons. He was of God, and was God, and we each have some personal encounters we rarely share with each other, but ones of our own/ and of others we trust. We have these rare encounters in every way humans convey big things to each other: in poetry, music, story, legend, myth, sculpture, and every other kind of endeavor that pushes the particular to the universal, and the vast to the precise. Here's one:
God Is Not A Problem, by Killian McDonnell in Swift Lord, You are Not
God is not a problem
I need to solve, not an
algebraic polynomial equation
I find complete before me,
with positive and negative numbers
I can add, subtract, multiply.
God is not a fortress
I can lay siege to and reduce.
God is not a confusion
I can place in order by my logic.
God's boundaries cannot be set,
like marking trees to fell.
God is the presence in which
I live, where the time between
what is in me and what
before me is real, but only God
can draw it. God is the mystery
I meet on the street, but cannot
lay hold of from the outside,
for God is my situation,
the condition I cannot stand
beyond, cannot view from a distance,
the presence I cannot make an object,
only enter on my knees.
Each term of the poem hints at one face, one apprehension, and one tack of the Trinity, but each of us has our own balance of the Trinity's triangle and its tension and push-me-pull-you of its three points ever held together in the dynamism of the living God. Similarly the great poem attributed to Rabanus Maurus of the 9th century, which we know as the Veni Creator, holds perhaps the best attempts to provide eternal images. The hymnbook version is somewhat clunky, but Dryden's better version sounds stilted. It starts: "Thrice holy fount, thrice holy fire/Our hearts with heavenly love inspire..." but ends:
"Make us eternal truths receive,
And practice all that we receive;
Give us Thyself that we may see
The Father and The Son by Thee.
Immortal honor, endless fame
Attend The Almighty Father's Name;
The Saviour Son be glorified.
Who for lost man's redemption died;
And equal adoration be,
Eternal Paraclete, to Thee!
However the best opportunity for grappling with the gift, reality, and life giving energy of the Trinity, the Creator, Redeemer, and Giver of Life, the Father Son and Holy Spirit, is what we each have in our own lives and listening. We don't get it, but we've been given it. Enjoy this quiet time for you to hear, know, and accept this incomprehensible, but eternally present Good News.
© Katharine C. Black, 30 May 2010
