The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
Trinity Sunday, Year A
It is a good tradition to be wary of the Trinity Sunday sermon. A notorious day when clergy look to find the nearest seminarian to force into the pulpit – both out of a desire to avoid writing oneself into pretzel knots to avoid heresy and out of a desire to have someone else try to explain the doctrine of the Trinity in a way that makes more sense than what has been said over the last two thousand years.
But, alas, I have no such luck – our seminarian has graduated and been ordained a deacon and now a priest, and so the church rules about heresy fully apply and we want her to enjoy the collar for a while longer before she strays into some modalistic, modern-day Sabellianism or, even worse, some kind of subordinationist Eunomianism.
And so, many clergy rush to find some fresh expression of the doctrine of the Trinity to try to be both orthodox and interesting, to avoid heresy and to make the doctrine more understandable. Generally those sermons will talk about the “divine dance” of the Trinity. I have done such a thing. But I find myself this year wondering if we need a different approach entirely. I also find myself wondering if we need to re-evaluate how we approach some of our more dogmatic, confessional statements about God and everything differently.
I am reminded of our Jewish siblings approach to the Torah: build a fence around it. Not a fence to keep people out – that’s been the erroneous interpretation in Christianity about Judaism for a long time, that the rules and principles that decide what actions are permissible and which are impermissible were just about showing who was right and good, and who was a terrible sinner. The principle of “building a fence around the Torah” is about not trampling the Torah with careless missteps. Those systems of rules are about how to show respect and honor to something so deeply important in life.
So, too, is our language around God and theology. They can give us a “fence” so we don’t step on God – not that God needs us to avoid stepping, but so we treat God as God, not an idea of God.
We see people treat God as an idea all the time. People claim God blesses their nation above every other nation, blesses their war, blesses their sports victory – God is merely an idea that always supports whatever they support. God is treated as an idea that gets trotted out to say that certain other people are bad and deserving of condemnation. God is treated like a vending machine powered by prayer. God gets reduced to an idea all the time. Another word for that would be “idol” by the way.
And so our theological, confessional language around God is meant to preserve the distinctiveness of God, the vibrant life of God, the personhood of God. If I can understand God, do I really understand God? Or do I understand my *idea* of God?
Much like when we’re in a relationship or friendship – if we think we truly, completely, absolutely understand the other person, we need to check whether we love the person or if we are in love with the *idea* we have of this person. Each of us, at heart, is a mystery. We don’t need to understand to love – but through our love we will be open to understanding more and more deeply.
Our theology of the Trinity is stated just a handful of times in the Bible, and nothing with any of the fancy words that we’ve come to know. But we know that God creates: the movement of the Creator, the breath of the Holy Spirit, the order that we call the Logos, the incarnate Word, Jesus. We know that God blesses: the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship or communion of the Holy Spirit. We know that it is the action of the Trinity in bringing us to the gift of salvation we proclaim in baptism: Baptizing in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
We want our words to be careful, to be respectful, to honor God as God, God who is also a holy mystery to us – a mystery to be loved, and in being loved we will grow to understand. As we turn to the summer months ahead, I am inviting you to reflect more deeply on our language about our faith. I have copies of the catechism printed out with space for notes. I want you to take your time reading the catechism from the prayer book, to reflect on it, to ask questions, even disagree and explore why. The more we honor our faith with love and curiosity, the more we will understand, and the better our language will be to talk about God whom we love deeply. We do not comprehend God, we do not have God “solved” like a math problem, and we know that God is greater than any idea that we can tame to do our bidding. God is God, and God is glorious, and God is Trinity, mystery of love unfolding and overflowing into all that God has created. Amen.