May 30, 2010
Trinity Sunday (Year C)
Proverb 8:1-4, 22-31; Canticle 13; Romans 5:1-5;
John 16:12-15
Today is many things: The Sunday of Memorial Day Weekend, Trinity Sunday, The Fifty-second Anniversary of Church of the Good Shepherd, Acton. I am sure it’s also someone’s birthday, though I don’t know immediately whose. Maybe you know someone whose birthday it is today? It is also someone’s anniversary. And it is the day someone will die and someone will be born, although probably not someone any of us know! And it is a day that has personal history for each of us, perhaps memories of Memorial Days past, of “people we love but no longer see” (as the Book of Common Prayer burial service says), or we, I am sure, each remember sterling sermons from Trinity Sundays past? No? I know I have certainly thought a lot about preaching Trinity sermons this week, past, present, and future. And I am poignantly aware that it is also the day I preach my second to last sermon at Good Shepherd, and I wish I could say something profound. I am always hoping the Spirit puts something profound into my fingers to type as I pray and reflect and think and try to discern what God wants me to say each week. But, I am not sure there is anything profound left to say about the Trinity!
Isn’t it amazing that Each Day has the same quality, same reality within it as today? Each day has multiple meanings to multiple people. And yet, each day the sun will rise and the sun will set. In each twenty-four hour period lifetimes can be measured and hours frittered away, both. And if we are stuck in one place or another, a one dimensional, take it for granted sole purpose, sole meaning for a day, the sheer fact of such motion of the earth around the sun, that rising and setting sun, the sheer fact of its regularity, can take us by surprise that it would still go on when we in our heart and minds are so otherwise preoccupied with what we see as the only focus for the day. I know everyone has days like that, when you can’t believe the sun is still shining like it was the day before because your own world or perspective has changed so radically since the sun rose the day before. And today is a day like THAT for someone too.
As universal as this day can be, a day like any other but with as many different places as our minds and hearts might be, I would like us to think this day, not of our own perceptions of our own places in time and space, our own story we bring to the day, but rather to think of God.
That is what I invite us collectively to think about today. God, The Trinity. Or as I described God in one Trinity Sunday sermon a while ago, singing, “Holy Trinity One God.” Today I want us to think about how we could make God known, describe God to others in a succinct and articulate way.
That is the preacher’s dilemma for today – and believe me, it’s pretty universal! The General Convention Listserv has been buzzing with anecdotes and phrases and helpful hints and desperate pleas all week. Common wisdom would say, “Have the curate preach” or “admit you simply can’t do it and speak about something else, like Memorial Day!” If we were to go around the room and have each of us describe what Trinity means to us, beyond Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, beyond Creator, Word, and Spirit, beyond Earth Maker, Pain Bearer, Life Giver, or perhaps including those, we would come up with many ways of describing Trinity – it is my understanding that someone in the Men’s Group yesterday suggested Neapolitan Ice Cream as an apt description for Trinity. We would sing it, as I have done in the past, or we would draw pictures, or we would point to this incredible foil sculpture hanging in our sanctuary, or look to the ocean or mountains or perhaps use the metaphor of water in three forms, ice, liquid and steam, but one thing. (But all of these seem a bit incomplete, still, they are helpful.)
Trinity, how can God be three persons one God? How can God be one God and in so many places and really not in any place alone? How can we describe God and why is it that Christians call themselves Christians and not Trinitarians if we worship the holy Triune equally?
The Hebrew people didn’t even try to describe God. They did not let themselves get caught in a metaphor or description because they knew that to do so was to demean God, to give at best a partial description and at worst a shadow of Godliness. So they used a word with no vowels as a place holder and never said that word out loud to point to the unpointable, to speak the unspeakable. We Christians have not been so willing to live with ambiguity, and so historically we have named names for Trinity, for God, descriptors we want to be immutable, transcending time and space and cultural mores that are so inextricably entrenched in whatever descriptor we use. And yet, of course, any name, description or metaphor we use, no matter how long or how unchangeably it has been used over time, is merely a weak attempt to name the unnamable.
That is because God, Trinity, should probably be a verb and not a noun at all. God is motion and action and relationship, not static in any way except with the steadfastness of love, love in its verb form! Love that under girds all things and gives life to all things.
But that “love” is not even enough to begin to describe the vastness of God, the depth and breadth and sheer volume of God, Trinity!
And, of course, different people, different decades, different cultures, countries, peoples, races, not only name God/Trinity differently, but they may use the same names and comprehend those names differently, just as each of us brings to this day, Memorial Day, Trinity Sunday, Fifty-second Anniversary of GS, a different reality. Because God/Trinity is a verb, a motion, an action, a relationship, each of us understands God/Trinity, knows God/Trinity, perceives God/Trinity from our own world view, our own place in time and space, and even our own experiences in life, just this very year, month, week and day!
God/Trinity is there for all of us – absolutely! But it is my premise that we would be wiser to take up the Hebrew tradition of not trying to call God anything lest we get is so wrong. Rather just allow ourselves to bask in the mysterious reality of unknowing and accept that in our finitude we cannot describe God today any more than any people has ever been able to.
But if we must use words, how about going to The Athanasian Creed (p. 864 of the BCP) which some of us looked at and discussed during our Lenten Reconnect series? I think it says it perfectly. When you are asked, “What is the trinity?” You can quote Athanasius who said, “The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, the Holy Ghost incomprehensible!” And leave it at that! Or you could go on to quote his whole creed. But when you look it up in the Prayer Book, (and I hope you do!) you might agree that you can’t quite get through it all without smiling, if not out and out guffawing, at our feeble, human attempts to describe God.
A blessed Trinity Sunday, Memorial Day, Anniversary to us all!
Amen.
The Reverend Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd