It’s Trinity Sunday, when we’re supposed to contemplate the one-ness of the Godhead. Only problem is, of all the mysteries of the church, this may be the most mysterious . . . and at the root of it is what we sang in the first hymn: “God in three persons, blessed Trinity.” How can there be three persons in one? How can we speak of one God, when in the bible it’s as if there are three? Well, the way we usually do it is . . . we don’t. We say the words but don’t really understand it, or . . . I’ll go so far as to say . . . believe it. But there it is: a bed-rock doctrine of the Christian faith. And if you ask any Christian theologian on almost any seminary campus, she’ll tell you that you can’t be a Christian without believing in the Trinity.
Which used to tick my friend Daniel off mightily, because he claimed to be a Christian without believing in the Trinity, and who am I to argue? As far as I’m concerned, the only one who gets to determine who’s a Christian is God’s own self. Daniel was an official in a denomination called “The Church of God, General Conference, Morrow, Georgia,” and when I knew him he was publications editor. He was a classmate of mine at Columbia, which just happened to be the nearest seminary to . . . you guessed it, Morrow, Georgia. And the reason he didn’t believe in the Trinity is that it isn’t in the Bible. Really . . . it isn’t in the bible. As far as members of the Church-of-God in Morrow Georgia are concerned, if it ain’t in the Bible, they don’t believe in it. If God were really three-in-one, they imply, God would have told us so in the Bible. And so, my friend Daniel would wince every time somebody in our theology class—usually the teachers—would make some snide comment about non-Trinitarians. Of course, Church of God, General Conference, Morrow Georgia-ites don’t accept the divinity of Christ, either, and for the same reason, but that’s another story . . .
But for orthodox Christians, the Trinity is a foundational idea, even though it isn’t in the Bible, a fact that I know surprises some folks, they say what do you mean, it’s not in the Bible, look—here it talks about the Spirit, and over here the Son, and it’s just fullof talk about the Father, and of course that’s right, in the passage I just read—the lectionary passage, by the by--Jesus talks about God the father and the coming of God the Spirit, the Spirit of truth, but what’s missing is the idea of three in one and one in three.
That idea had its genesis in the early days of the faith, as people reflected on the scriptures and their own experience with the divine. For his earliest followers, encountering Jesus was somehow encountering God; at the same time, Jesus spoke of God as both distinct from him (as when he prayed to God, or spoke of God as the One who sent him) and yet nevertheless “one” with him. There was both a “two-ness” and a “oneness” in play, and so Christians looked for ways to express this mystery with poetry and precision. At the same time, early disciples experienced encounters with the Spirit as encounters with God—and at the same time, Jesus spoke of the Spirit as a guiding, challenging presence distinct both from him and from the One to whom he prayed.
And as the early Christians meditated on all of this, the doctrine of the Trinity emerged: the idea that God is properly thought of as both Three and One. Not three Gods, because for that would miss God’s oneness. And not merely One, because that would miss God’s three-ness, and wouldn’t do justice to the sense of encountering God in Jesus and the Holy Spirit. And we can see that far from being an esoteric, metaphysical picture of God somewhere “up there,” the teaching casts a vision of God down here and everywhere, continuously redeeming and creating and sustaining the universe. As Luke puts it over in Acts, it is a God “in whom we live, and move, and have our being.”
But its foundation in real, theological wondering doesn’t mean it didn’t serve apologetic purposes as well . . . early Christianity was having to defend itself from critics who said “What’s all this about a Father, Son and Holy Spirit? I thought you were monotheistic . . . sounds like three Gods to us.”And the doctrine became a political football as well, as several Roman Emperors sought to force the church to come to a definitive doctrine, the better to use Christianity to stabilize the Empire by.
But as things got more complex, as the doctrine matured, it didn’t filter down to the people in the pews. It gained a reputation as esoteric, and un-understandable, and it became largely unknown and ignored, even in theological thought. As prominent Jesuit scholar Karl Rahner observed, “Christians are, in their practical life, almost mere ‘monotheists.’” Note the word “mere.” He continued: ”We must be willing to admit that, should the doctrine of the Trinity have to be dropped as false, the major part of religious literature could well remain virtually unchanged.”
We can understand having three of something: three jobs, or three ideas, or three cars, but actually being three things? Even worse, three persons? A person is the basis of who we are as individuals, who each one of us is. How can God be three people?
First of all, there’s confusion introduced by translating the Latin word personaas “person.” It’s derived from the verb personare, which implies a process, not a thing. And the process it points to is “to sound through.” As Richard Rohr puts it, members of the Trinity were considered a personas, or “faces,” of God. “Each person of the Trinity fully communicated its face and goodness to the other, while fully maintaining its own facial identity within itself. Each person of the Trinity ‘sounded through’ (per-sonare) the other.” Each member of the Trinity is thus a “sounding-through,” as in a note or even a full symphony. I like to think of the God-head that way, as a simultaneous, polyphonic, joyful noise, or maybe a jazz trio, riffing off of one another through eternity.
Of course, any way of thinking about the Trinity is a metaphor—Richard makes a joke in one of his books when he says “metaphors be with you” (get it? May the force be with you?). Any way of talking about the Trinity is using words to describe about something beyond words, or as Buddhists put it, a finger pointed to the moon. And another metaphor has been around for millennia, though largely forgotten until just recently. That’s the metaphor of a “circle dance,” referenced in the word perichoresis: the picture of the Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer in an endless dance, an eternal pas de trois, where the members prance and leap and sashay joyfully one around another, personaring—sounding through—one another with abandon.
Eastern theologians likened the interaction between the members in the eternal dance to an endless flow, circulating throughout the dance from Father to Son, Son to Holy Spirit, Holy Spirit to Father, and so on, like and endless, cascading stream with no beginning or end. And what flows between the Comforter, the Redeemer, and the Creator? Life. Vitality. Creation. What flows in never-ending pools and eddies, currents and rapids, ripples and cascades, is the motive-force of the universe, round and round. In short, what flows between the Father and Spirit and Son is nothing less than an endless waterfall of love.
Note that the members of this joyful dance are together the Godhead, they are collectively God. So the thing about the dance metaphor is it’s not that God is participating in the dance, not that God is dancing, but that God is the dance. God is not a noun, not a thing, but a verb. God is process and motion, God is a dance. And what it the defining thing about a dance? The relationships between the dancers. In fact, it can be said that that’s what God is: interaction. Communication. Relationship. And what is that relationship? Love. Remember what First John said? God is love? Could that be what he meant?
Andrei Rublev’s fifteenth-century icon The Hospitality of Abraham has three figures that represent the three angelic visitors of Abraham at the Oaks of Mamre. Because there are three of them, and because they together represent the divine, the painting has also been called, and interpreted as, The Trinity. The winged individuals are gathered around a table, and the perspective is such that it almost draws an onlooker in. On the end of the table facing the viewer is a square patch of what spectral analysis has found to be glue, and what may have been glued there was a mirror. Placed there by Rublev himself or by a later hand, taken together with the perspective, it indicates there’s room at the table for a fourth: the observer. You. Me. We participatein the divine economy, we dance in the perichoretic flow.
And it makes sense, doesn’t it? After all, Jesus said he abides in us and we in him, and we know the Holy Spirit dwells deep within our hearts. So it makes sense that the divine flow goes right, smack dab through us as well. We stand in the flow, bathed in God’s love . . . unless we block it. Unless we refuse to participate. And how do we do this? By drawing into ourself . . . the flow is love, relationship, and we block the flow—through us, not the universe—we block it when we cut off relationships, when we despise another person, when we refuse to forgive.
Richard Rohr is convinced that when we “try to stop this flow moving through us, with us, and in us, we fall into the true state of sin—and it is truly a state more than a momentary behavior. It is the state of being closed down, shut off, blocked . . . By a hardened heart or a cold spirit, by holding another person apart in hatred” we cut ourselves off from the flow.
And here’s where I loosen my collar like Rodney Dangerfield and admit that too often I do this, too often I stopper up the flow with my petty prejudices and dislikes, that I become a blockage to love rather than a clear conduit. But the good news is that we don’t have to do that, we can let ourselves be open to it, we can let down our guards and let others in. It’s not necessarily easy, it’s not necessarily easy to be vulnerable, to cast aside our prejudices and open ourselves up to our neighbors. But when we do, we not only open ourselves to others, we open ourselves to God’s ever-flowing energy and love. Amen.
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