A
lot of pastors, and other ne’er-do-wells like theologians, don't know what to
do with the Trinity. So the passages
we’re offered in the Lectionary readings for Trinity Sunday tend to be like the one I just read*:
they mention all three members of the Trinity in more or less the same
breath. Any actual information about the
matter is incidental. That's because, of
course, the doctrine isn't in the Bible, a fact that allows groups that
are nominally Christian, such as the various Churches of God of various places,
to not “believe” in the Trinity, whatever that means.
And
though our passage from Paul is nominally about suffering, it does mention the
activities of each member: “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ”—that is, we are “saved” or justified
through him—and hope doesn't disappoint because “God’s love has been poured
into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” We are saved through Christ and powered by
(the love of) the Holy Spirit. It’s a
classic formulation of the Trinity. And
notice that it makes no mention of one in three and three in one, no mention of
persons or substance, it is based on the lived experience of the early
Christians. It describes the activities
of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the world, their interactions with us in
salvation history, sometimes called oikonomia,
literally “economy,” and translated sometimes as God’s “plan.”
Exciting
stuff, really . . . We're made right with God through our faith in Christ, and
our hope, our life, our becoming more and more like God, is powered by love, by
the love of the Holy Spirit. And we’re
right there in the mix . . . it is not only through Christ but through our faith that we are saved. In a way we
don't fully understand, we cooperate in our own salvation. The oikonomia,
the economy, the plan of God sent
God's divine Son to become one of us, to experience all that creaturely life
has to offer, and it brought the Holy Spirit, that blows where it will, strong
as a gale, light and playful as a zephyr, to power our Christian endeavor.
And
this is how the New Testament consistently speaks of what would become the
Trinity, and if it had been left at that, it might not have become the
moribund, dead-end idea that it was for over a thousand years. Unfortunately, the great early theologians
got ahold of it, in the great quest to figure out just who this Jesus Christ we
worship is. You see, there’s a problem: we are
monotheists, and yet we professed to worship this Jesus fellow in addition to God, whom Jesus called Abba.
Doesn't sound very montheistic to me.
And to make matters worse, in the
plan of God, Jesus Christ is clearly subordinate to God’s own self, because God
sent him, and the sender is always subordinate
to the sent.
Oy vey.
What's a
theologian to do? Well, what they did was develop the doctrine of the
Trinity, where God subsists as three hypostases—that’s
the Greek word we rather unfortunately translate as
“person”— where God subsists as three persons
in a Godhead. And in that Godhead, God
the Father is of the same substance as God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, no
subordination there. But in the economy of the Trinity, in its activities
in the world, the Son is still clearly subordinate to the Father. But only
in the actions: in the actual theology of
the Trinity, all are equal. In fact,
they are considered one God in three persons.
And
as the first millennium progressed, the gap between the two ways of looking at
the Trinity—the economic, dealing with its members’ actions in the world, and
the immanent, dealing with its internal structure and dynamics—the gap between
the two grew ever wider, until it became absolute. The economic Trinity became subordinate itself, shoved aside in favor of the
immanent (or theological), and the intra-divine
life was declared impenetrable, the nature of its members and their
interrelationships unknowable, and thus it became walled away in its
hermeneutic shell. And if an idea is
like that, if it's completely opaque, of what interest could it possibly be? Of what good
could it possibly be?
Then
along came Catherine LaCugna, who in 1991 published the book “God For Us: The
Trinity and Christian Life.”
Miraculously, it didn't sink into oblivion in some academic publishing
house, but it was published by Harper Collins, and with that one book, she changed
the course of Christian theology. It
opened the flood-gates of Trinitarian research, and single-handedly restored
the Trinity to its rightful place at the center of our faith. She did this by restoring the Trinity to one thing, by demonstrating that the economic and immanent Trinities were really
one and the same, linking its activities in the world to its intra-divine life
and relationships. Suddenly, the notion
of the Trinity as a dynamic, ever-changing picture of the divine was restored,
along with renewed research and thought that continues to this day.
Meanwhile,
in other theological news, another notion gaining increasing traction is one
realized by the Mystics thousands of years ago: God is nothing. Zip.
Nada. But hold your cards and
letters and pitchforks. I didn't say God
doesn't exist, but that God’s not a thing, as in God’s “no-thing” or
nothing. Since the time of Augustine,
1500 years ago, the notion that God is a substance has held sway. Not that God is matter, but that God is some-thing
nevertheless. Further, though God indeed
has substance, it ain’t nothing like what
you and I have.
But
increasingly, it looks like good ol’ First John had it right, lo these many
years ago: God is love, and though
it's hard to say exactly what love is,
one thing it's not is substance. You can't pick it up and bounce it off the
wall, or give it out like a sandwich, or steal it like a car. And the New Testament bears this out. Although it does talk about love as a noun—the familiar agape, of course—it uses it as the verb agapaow more than three times as much. In the New Testament, love is first and
foremost an action verb, and to say
that God is love is to say that God is action, God is activity.
But
what kind of activity is God? What constitutes this “love?” Well, let's look at it in our own, earthly
life, specifically in a relationship between two individuals. Each partner typically has to adjust his or
her life for the other, they have to give up some of their independence, they
have to let their partner know where they are all the time, for Pete’s sake, what time they’re going to be home,
and etc. You have to give up some of
your favorite foods for the sake of meals together, compromise on where you want
to live, what to watch on TV, and
these seem trivial, and perhaps they are,
but the point is, love is giving up,
surrendering things that we consider ours for the sake of the other or the
relationship.
How
does it go? God so loved the world that
God gave his only begotten son . . . note that little old verb “gave,” as in “to give.”
God gave of God’s own self, God's own flesh and blood or, as Paul put
it, “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.”
And the Gospels show that the incarnate Christ, Jesus of Nazareth,
demonstrated this self-emptying, this surrender of part of himself in every
practically every interactions know of: every healing, every demonstration of
the kingdom, every refusal to retaliate, to fight his way enemies, leading up,
of course, to the ultimate surrender, giving up of his life. (In one story, he actually felt part of himself –his power—leaving
as he healed the hemorrhaging woman.)
So. We know what God is, God is love, and like Forrest Gump, we know what love is—at least in the context of the
divine—it's emptying, or surrender, of self.
And so taking out the middle-man—the word love—we can say that God is
self-emptying surrender. God is “no
thing”—not a thing, nothing—and is instead an activity, an action, a movement, and
that movement is self-emptying, or the
surrender of self.
So
Catherine LaCugna—remember her?—seems onto something when she says the Trinity is
relationship in action and motion. And
that action, it seems, is self-emptying surrender. In other words, love. And so a profitable
image of the Trinity is a big circle dance, where self-emptying love is poured
like life-giving water between the members.
The Father empties himself into the Son, who empties himself into the Spirit, who empties
herself into the Father, and round and round, love flowing between the members,
who are not substance but love themselves, round and round through all
eternity, without beginning or end.
But
wait just a cotton-picking minute. How
is that any less hermetically sealed
than the static, person-based classical doctrine? Where are we
in the equation, what difference does this make for us? Ah . . . that’s where
the passage from John from a couple of weeks ago comes in. Remember?
It was Jesus’ final prayer, in the upper room just before he was
arrested, tried and executed. And we
noticed that it was in large part about union with each other and union with
God. Jesus prayed to his Father that his
followers be one in the same way he and
the Father are one, and as we have seen, the father and son, together with
the Holy Spirit, stand in eternal, self-emptying relationship with one another.
Further, because Jesus is in us and
we are in him (I in you and you in me, he tells us), it looks like we stand
right in the middle of that flow, receiving—and passing on—the self-emptying
flow. As creatures of a self-giving God,
who are adopted as Children of God through Christ the Son, we are right there
in the midst of it all, we are standing in the flow.
Cynthia
Bourgeault has called the Trinity a “mandala of love in motion” and I, who can
be as literal as the next person, said wait a minute: a mandala has four sides, and the Trinity only three,
but then it struck me: we, along with
the rest of creation, are the fourth side.
It's like Andre Rublev’s famous painting of the Trinity, which has a
perspective that draws you in, and at one time had a mirror affixed to the canvas
just where we would be. We are part of
the Trinitarian structure of reality, we are standing in the flow.
Richard
Rohr says that this is the point of the incarnation, that we are invited into
the great relational flow, into the great cosmic dance that is the Trinity-infused
universe. He says that the nature of sin
is when we block the flow, when we refuse that mutuality, that relationality.
How do we know when we’re blocking the flow?
Here’s what he says: “Whenever you find yourself being
self-preservative, holding in, resenting, blaming, accusing, or fearing” you're
blocking the flow. You can actually feel
it as a hoarding, a drawing-in energy, sometimes as a clenching of the gut. When that happens, you can release it, you
can surrender it, you can let it go. And,
of course, that is exactly the movement, the surrendering, the self-emptying. When we let go of the self-preservation, the
blaming, the resentment, we are restarting the flow within us, and fully taking our place in the great, Trinitarian
dance. And I say these things in the
name of the God who creates us, the God who redeems us, and the God who teaches
to pray with sighs too deep for words.
Amen.
*Romans 5:1 - 5
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