Tag: trinity sunday

Is Ketchup a Smoothie? A Sermon on (Not) Understanding the Holy Trinity

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

Sermon for Trinity Sunday

Service Bulletin:

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There are several different kinds of knowledge.

First, there’s book smarts, like knowing that tomatoes are a fruit and not a vegetable.

Then there’s practical wisdom, like knowing that it’s not a good idea to put tomatoes in a fruit salad.

And then there’s philosophy, like wondering whether that means ketchup is technically a smoothie.

Today, we’re going to be talking about that third kind.

Today, we celebrate Trinity Sunday, conventionally known in the Episcopal Church as “associate rector appreciation Sunday” because this is the week that senior rector’s most often take as their vacation. They would much rather leave the explanation of complicated and abstract concepts to those younger clergy who have more up-to-date seminary training. Since we don’t have an associate rector in our parish, and I failed to accurately calculate the week of my vacation, this enviable task has now fallen to me.

So, instead of building up to a conclusion, I’m going to cut straight to the chase. Here’s the main thing I’m going to say about the mystery of the Trinity:

If you think you understand the mystery of the Trinity, you do not understand the mystery of the Trinity; if you do not understand the mystery of the Trinity, you understand the mystery of the Trinity.

Got it? Good. Amen. Let’s all get out of here before the Methodists get the good lunch tables at the diner.

Of course, the problem is that this little riddle leaves us right back where we started, so we end up going around and around until our heads fall off… and that’s the point of the whole thing.

The mystery of the Holy Trinity is the primary Christian concept of God. According to the historical documents of the Anglican theological tradition, “we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons, nor diving the Substance” (The Creed of St. Athanasius, BCP 864). The three Persons of the Godhead are “of one substance, power, and eternity” (Articles of Religion, BCP 867). Don’t worry, I can hear all of you mentally checking out, as we speak.

This is why I started with my main statement: If you think you understand it, you don’t understand it; if you don’t understand it, you understand it. It’s like wondering whether ketchup is a smoothie. The question itself supposed to break your brain, not to break it down, but to break it open and leave you slack-jawed in awestruck wonder at the unknowable mystery of ultimate reality.

The doctrine of the Trinity is not explicitly outlined in the Bible. It gradually came together, over the course of several centuries, as the greatest minds of the early Church contemplated their experience of God. Beginning with the monotheism of the Jewish tradition, the earliest followers of Jesus realized that they were, in some way that they couldn’t understand, experiencing the very presence of the God of their ancestors through this individual human being. How was that even possible? They had no idea; they just experienced it to be true. And then, just as mysterious, they continued to experience this Jesus as a living presence in the midst of their community after his death. How was that even possible? They had no idea; they just experienced it to be true. Their knowing had neither the categorical certainty of book smarts nor the effectiveness of practical wisdom. Their knowing was a knowledge of the heart: more like falling in love than solving a math problem. As the philosopher Blaise Pascal famously said, “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.”

After almost three hundred years of contemplation, the bishops of the early Church finally settled on the mystery of the Trinity as their non-answer to a question that, by its very nature, can never be answered. Whenever some innovative theologian claimed to have solved the mystery, the bishops of the Church were quick to stand up and pronounce that answer as a heresy, not because they thought that they had a monopoly on the truth, but because they believed that the main thing is to keep the question open.

If you think you understand the Trinity, you do not understand the Trinity; if you do not understand the Trinity, you understand the Trinity.

I love this central commitment of our faith tradition. We don’t claim to have the answers to ultimate questions. We sit in awestruck wonder before the mystery of reality. This is why I like to say that I couldn’t be a Christian, if I wasn’t also an agnostic.

The ultimate unknowability of the mystery of God affords Christians a certain playfulness, when it comes to expressing that mystery in various ways. The language of our tradition tends to default to language that is very personal, very masculine, and very hierarchical. Most of our prayers use words like “Father” and “Lord” to describe the mystery of God, but the witness of our sacred Scriptures point to a wide array of metaphors for expressing our faith in God.

In addition to the exclusively masculine language of Father, the Bible also describes God as a “Mother” (Isaiah 66:3). In addition to the hierarchical language of Lord, the Bible also describes God as a “Servant” (Luke 22:27). In addition to the numerous personal metaphors for God, the Bible also describes God as a “Mighty Rock” (Psalm 62:7), “Living Water” (John 7:38), “Rushing Wind” (Acts 2:2), and “Consuming Fire” (Hebrews 12:29). As I mentioned in a previous sermon, Jesus even compares himself to a chicken in Matthew 23:37.

Therefore, kindred in Christ, since the Bible itself gives us such a wide array of metaphors for the Divine, and since the bishops of the early Church were so doggedly committed to keeping open the question of God’s unknowable nature, we too ought to remain open to exploring a wide variety of metaphors for God.

God is with us always and in all things. Therefore, let us also look for her, for him, for them, for it, always and in all things. How is God like a cloud or a tree? How is God like a chair or a bookshelf?

Jesus, in his parables, often pointed to agricultural metaphors that were common to the everyday experience of ordinary people, when describing the realm of the divine. For Jesus, the realm of the divine was like a woman baking bread (Matthew 13:33), like crops growing in a field (Mark 4:26-29), like a merchant trading in the marketplace (Matthew 13:45-46), like a small seed growing into a great tree (Matthew 13:31-32). This is not an exhaustive list, by any means.

I want to encourage you today to be playful in the many ways that you imagine God to be present in your life. The language we use about God matters, not because we have to be careful to get it right, but because we cannot get it wrong. Everything is potentially a symbol of God, yet nothing fully encapsulates the mystery. Whenever we try to put God in a box, whether that box is Pope-shaped, Bible-shaped, Church-shaped, man-shaped, or colored white, we commit the sin of idolatry and close ourselves off to the great mystery of the divine.

God is with us always, and in all things, therefore let us keep open the question of what God truly is. Let each of us remain humble in our own conceptions of God and tolerant of the expressions of others. As brothers, sisters, and siblings, let us stand side-by-side, following the example of the Bible and the early Church, and maintain a posture of awestruck wonder before the divine mystery that is beyond our understanding.

God is a Relationship

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized2 Comments

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Dorothy Day. Image is in the public domain. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.

I hear a lot of folks talking lately about how the world isn’t what it used to be.  They’re worried about the decline of human society, the decay of public morals and values, and the emptying of mainline Protestant churches.  For many of these folks, these three series of events are related.  They say, “People just aren’t coming to church anymore, so society is going to pieces.”

A lot of people wonder why this is the case.  There are a lot of theories.  Some say it’s because of the cultural changes that happened during the 60s.  Some say that our country’s tolerance of religious diversity has left people in a state of moral and spiritual confusion.  Others say that our society’s addiction to busy-ness and constant entertainment has distracted people to the point where they just don’t even have time to think about church anymore.

Personally, I think some of these theories have valid points.  And I think the whole truth about the matter is probably bigger and more complex than any single theory can fully explain.  But there’s one theory that stands out to me more than the rest, if only because it’s the one I hear most often from people who don’t come to church.  And here it is (the number one reason most people give for not coming to church): “It’s hypocrisy of Christians who claim to believe that God is love but do not extend that love to other people.”

Isn’t that interesting?  When you actually go and ask people why they don’t come to church, they tell you: it’s not because of diversity, and it’s not because they’re too busy, and it’s not because of the 60s.  It’s because of Christians.  The author Brennan Manning once said, “The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, and then walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyle.  That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.”

As Christians, it seems that we don’t take our theology seriously enough.  We think we can love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength without loving our neighbors as ourselves, but Jesus calls FOUL on that play.  He says you can’t have one without the other.  If you try to separate them, you end up with something other than the God revealed in Jesus.

Central to our Christian faith is the belief that God is love.  Did you get that?  God is love.  Most people breeze right by it without thinking and end up with the wrong idea about who God is and how God works in the world.  What they tend to hear is “God is loving” (i.e. “God is basically a nice person”).  In other words, they think that the Old Man in the Sky (who made the world and controls everything that happens) is a nice guy.  But that’s not what the text says.  The text is taken from 1 John 4:16 and it says, “God is love.”

There’s a big difference between being loving and being love.  God is love itself.  God can be found in the dynamic interchange of energy between people who care about each other: family, friends, lovers, even enemies.  Wherever there is love, there is God.  In fact the full text of 1 John 4:16 reads, “God is love and those who abide in love, abide in God, and God abides in them.”  The Creator of the universe is not separate from it.  God is not “out there,” floating on a cloud or in some alternate dimension.  No, God is right here.  As the apostle Paul says in Acts 17, “In [God] we live, and move, and have our being.”  God is within us and all around us, wherever love is found.  God is love.  God is a relationship.

Our ancestors in the early Christian church came up with an interesting way of expressing this truth.  They left us with a kind of puzzle that could never be solved.  And they called it the Trinity.  According to the doctrine of the Trinity, we Christians believe in only one God who eternally exists as three persons: traditionally called Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  God is both three and one, one and three.  Each person in the God-head is co-equal and co-eternal with the others.  There is no hierarchy or pecking order among them.

The doctrine of the Trinity has always been controversial.  In ancient times, Jews and Muslims accused Christians of being polytheists.  In more recent years, people have identified the sexism inherent in using exclusively male terms to describe the Father and the Son.  In any age, the Trinity comes across as confusing.  Many have tried to solve the puzzle, but all have failed.  So, this morning, I won’t even try to offer an answer to its question.  We’re going to let the mystery stand and focus instead on the implications of that mystery for our lives as Christians.

And just what are those implications?  Well, according to the mystery of the Trinity, our one God exists in a state of relationship between three persons.  In other words, God is a relationship.  God exists, not as an individual entity, but as the dynamic exchange of perfect love between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Because of this, it suddenly makes sense to say that “God is love.”  God is love because God is a relationship.  Wherever love and compassion are established on earth, God is present.  “God is love and those who abide in love, abide in God, and God abides in them.”  That is the practical application of the theological doctrine of the Trinity.  That is where we begin to live what we believe and show ourselves to be either followers of Jesus or just another group of hypocrites.

The only way to faithfully testify to the presence of the Triune God in the world is through acts of love, not supposedly infallible announcements of dogma.  If God is a relationship, then we usher and invite people into greater spiritual awareness by being in relationship with them, regardless of whether or not they ever darken the door of our church.  Moreover, if God is a relationship, then we come close to God, not through dogma and rituals, but by intentionally engaging in relationships with the people and planet around us.

Jesus spoke about this very clearly in Matthew 25 when he said, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”    Offering food to the hungry, clothes to the naked, shelter to the homeless, friendship to the lonely, and justice to the oppressed are not simply good deeds that improve the reputation of the church in the community, they are our best way to participate in relationship with the Triune God.  God is a relationship, so relationships are the places where God is most fully known and experienced.

There is no one I can think of in the last one hundred years who lived this Trinitarian theology more fully than Dorothy Day, a Catholic activist who opened homeless shelters and soup kitchens for the unemployed workers of New York City during the Great Depression.  So remarkable was this woman, she was not content to simply found and fund a charitable agency for the poor, she moved into the shelter and ate the donated food with her clients, who she simply regarded as friends.  In them, Dorothy Day was seeking and serving the Triune God.

She wrote in 1937:

Every morning about four hundred men come to Mott Street to be fed. The radio is cheerful, the smell of coffee is a good smell, the air of the morning is fresh and not too cold, but my heart bleeds as I pass the lines of men in front of the store which is our headquarters. The place is packed–not another man can get in–so they have to form in line. Always we have hated lines and now the breakfast which we serve, of cottage cheese and rye bread and coffee has brought about a line…

The [Pope] says that the masses are lost to the Church. We must reach them, we must speak to them and bring them to the love of God. The disciples didn’t know our Lord on that weary walk to Emmaus until He sat down and ate with them. ‘They knew Him in the breaking of bread.’ And how many loaves of bread are we breaking with our hungry fellows these days–‘ 3,500 or so this last month. Help us to do this work, help us to know each other in the breaking of bread! In knowing each other, in knowing the least of His children, we are knowing Him.

This morning, I want to urge you toward similar action in your own life.  I invite you to participate in the life of the Trinity, to get caught up in the infinite whirlwind of perfect love that flows between the persons.  In that Great Love, incarnated in the myriad little loves that surround us every day, may you find God: not the monolithic “Old Man in the Sky” but the dynamic energy of love that pulses through all creation.  And, through you, may others come to believe in the God who is love.  May they find that God here in our church as they enter into relationship with a community of Christians who really do live as if they believed that “God is love, and all who abide in love, abide in God, and God abides in them.”  May it be so.