HOLY TRINITY SUNDAY

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

Psalm 8

Romans 5:1-5

John 16:12-15

Prayer of the Day: Almighty Creator and ever-living God: we worship your glory, eternal Three-in-One, and we praise your power, majestic One-in-Three. Keep us steadfast in this faith, defend us in all adversity, and bring us at last into your presence, where you live in endless joy and love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” John 16:12-15

The scriptures do not contain the terms “trinity” or “triune.” The ecumenical creeds are the church’s best effort to articulate what, in the final analysis, is beyond the capability of human language to express. No better illustration of this point can be found than in the creeds themselves. For example, the assertion that the Son is “eternally begotten of the Father” defies everything we know about conception and parenthood. To beget is a temporal act that results in the birth of a person, another temporal event. Moreover, begetting is an act involving sexual intercourse between two persons. The idea of the Father timelessly begetting the Son without a consort shatters our notions of time, sexuality and gender. That is because time, sexuality, gender are all aspects of human existence. They have no place within the Godhead. Nevertheless, human language, as inadequate as it may be, is the only tool we have with which to speak about God and our only frame of reference for doing so is our human experience. Thus, we end up speaking the unspeakable in words too small for such an undertaking. Bottom line, God is God and we humans are not God.

But then comes the second article of the creeds-Jesus. Jesus is a human person born in a certain time and place. Though he is God’s “eternally begotten” Son, he is also the son of Mary. His conception by operation of the Holy Spirit is, though shrouded in mystery and related to us by the evangelists through the mediation of angelic visits and dreams, nonetheless a fully human occurrence anchored in time. According to the second article, God is “incarnate.” God, at a certain point in human history, became human and remains so. The Miracle of the Incarnation was not a clever disguise. Neither was it a temporary state of affairs. God became flesh. God remains flesh. God will forever abide in human flesh, so much so that when Philip pleads with Jesus to “show us the Father,” Jesus replies that, in seeing him, Philip has seen the Father. To say, as we do, that Jesus is at the right hand of the Father is to say that Jesus is how God remains fully present to creation. Jesus is all the God there is.

And then there is the Holy Spirit, the one who takes the fullness of God revealed in Jesus and declares it to Jesus’ disciples. Jesus has much to teach us-too much for any one human lifetime. That is why Jesus continues to guide, teach and inspire his church through the presence of the Spirit in its midst. That is why Saint Paul can declare to the church in Corinth that it is the Body of Christ. This is no mere metaphor for Paul. The church is Christ Jesus inviting the world to be reconciled to its Creator and to the divided factions within itself.

God is not through speaking. We dare not place periods where God intends only a comma. The creeds do not represent the last word on everything to be said about God. They represent rather the limit of the church’s efforts to gaze into a mystery that is finally beyond human ability to comprehend in full. Better, it is the precipice on which one stands to get the best view possible of what exceeds every human field of vision. The creeds take us as far as human language can go into the mystery of God’s self. Indeed, as we have seen, they take us to the point where human language begins to falter. Nevertheless, paradoxically, the Spirit calls us to go further, to keep gazing into the mystery, to seek Jesus in the here and now, to push against the boundaries of our understanding.

As much as I appreciate my theological education, I must say that too much of what I learned was mediated through prose and framed in logical argument with little in the way of the lyrical playfulness expressed in the words of the prophets, in the psalms and in Jesus’ parables. As those who follow me regularly know, I am an Augustinian Christian. That is not to say that I agree with everything the Bishop of Hippo ever wrote or concur in all the conclusions he reached in his many writings. What I do mean is that Augustine has given me many powerful conceptual tools for reflecting on the scriptures and the creeds. His writings have informed my thinking and shaped my preaching, teaching and pastoral ministry. More than anything else for which I appreciate this great teacher is his approach to theology. Augustine’s writing is interspersed with prayer and a profound sense of God’s presence. Theology, teaching and preaching are all for Augustine a form of prayer. It is as though he is questioning, probing and praising God as much as he is speaking to his hearers. His sermons, commentaries and treatises represent a process of thought rather than an orderly summarization of completed ideas.

Our gospel lesson for this Trinity Sunday was pivotal for Augustine’s reflections on the Trinity, wherein he speaks of God’s Triune self as love. Of course, love always seeks an object beyond itself. If it did not, it would not be love. Thus, God’s essence is the mutual love between the Father and the Son mediated by the Holy Spirit. Following directly from this understanding is the doctrine of Creatio ex nihilo, namely, that God created the universe out of nothing. The assertion is not a metaphysical claim about the universe’s origin, more properly the inquiry of astronomy and astrophysics. It is really a statement about the perfection of God’s being and God’s total freedom. God has no need to create and did not create the universe out of boredom or loneliness. God has eternally known love and the joys of communion within the Godhead. Creation adds nothing to God.

Yet, in another sense, creation was necessary. Love is always expanding, always seeking new objects, always transcending every limit. Thus, as one of our finest hymns asserts, “The universe of space and time did not arise by chance, but as the Three, in love and hope, made room within their dance.”[1] When God said “Let there be,” God was making space for another, for something or someone not God. That is what love always does. It makes room in the heart for another. It generously gives another space to be who and what they are without compulsion, coercion or threats. So perhaps, rather than asserting that God made the universe out of nothing, we should say that God made the universe out of love.

These days, I tend to recite the creeds more lyrically and poetically than assertively. To be sure, the creeds make some definite assertions about who God is-and thereby negate some other assertions that might be made about God. Nevertheless, the creeds do not give us the kind of airtight metaphysical definition that a lot of believers crave. God will not be boxed, not within the scriptures, the creeds or any system of doctrine. Yet these testimonies, assertions and explanations of belief can stimulate our hearts and minds to seek deeper understandings of what is finally beyond human understanding, at least on this side of the grave. The creeds are better read, I believe, as the lyrical narration of God’s story. The story of the One who created us out of love, redeemed us out of love and out of love forms us into the kind of people capable of living joyfully, thankfully and obediently under God’s just and gentle reign.        

Here is a rendering of the well known Prayer of St. Patrick that I have previously shared in connection with Trinity Sunday. I do so again without apologies because I believe it reflects the kind of poetic, lyrical and worshipful expression of Trinitarian Faith expressed in our gospel lesson and in the creeds.

The Prayer of St. Patrick

Source: Though attributed to the legendary Irish Saint Patrick, no one knows the precise origin of this beautiful expression of faith which appears in many abbreviated forms and has inspired numerous hymns, including “I Bind unto Myself Today,” by Cecil Frances Alexander in Evangelical Lutheran Worship, (c. 2006 by Evangelical Lutheran Church in America; pub. by Augsburg Fortress Press) Hymn # 450.  

[1] “Come Join the Dance of Trinity,” by Richard Leach, Evangelical Lutheran Worship, # 412.