For those who define Christianity as fourteen unbelievable things to believe before breakfast, the Trinity might be at or near the top of the list of unbelievable beliefs. The lack of explicit scriptural references to the Trinity keeps the doctrine on the defense. The Trinity’s arithmetic is confounding: 1 + 1+ 1 = 1? The begotten-but-not-made, true-God-from-true-God wording of the ancient creed fails to clarify. The 4th Century councils that funneled all those questions about Christ’s divinity and humanity into a three-personed container labeled monotheism did not seal the lid on the matter.
But I suspect 21st Century Christians are neither particularly interested in nor entirely stumped by the three-in-one-ness of God. We have a more general problem with the Trinity. God as a personal being is what snags some of us. Feminist theologians, for instance, are troubled that God as a male being (Father, Son, and neutered Spirit) enshrines patriarchy and elevates men over women. But more basic than concern about God’s gender is our skepticism that God even has gender or personhood or personality.
Conceiving of a too-human God might cause us to imbue our concept of the Divine with our own human limitations and prejudices and lock God in some physical realm in the sky that modern science says does not exist. Always imaging God in concrete and creaturely ways comes close to violating the second commandment against making graven images of God. If we consistently name God as Father or King, for instance—we erect a metaphorical monument to a part of God that we eventually will mistake for God’s essence and totality. We then worship an idol and not the living and evolving and Still Speaking God. Whether God is one being or one being with three personas is less the issue, for me, than whether God is best imaged in any exclusively human form.
But that’s not to say that Isaiah’s vision of a human-like God, for example, lacks truth. Given Isaiah’s culture, it’s understandable he experienced the Divine as a gigantic Eastern potentate, an emperor on steroids, attended by 6-winged creatures. Isaiah’s God is such a superhuman figure that the mere hem or edge of his robe completely filled the temple. Isaiah begins describing his vision by explaining it came to him in the same year that King Uzziah died, so perhaps Isaiah was comforted to realize, through this dream, that God wields a power that earthly rulers do not. Such a critique of earthly empires was also one of Jesus’s themes. And especially at a time of political instability after the death of Isaiah’s king, it would have been reassuring to picture God as the ultimate and enduring ruler. Isaiah’s emotional response to the divine—his awe—is palpable. His specific image for God, however, may say more about the prophet’s own circumstances and values than about any essential characteristic of the Divine. Likewise, our own images for God express partial truth without ever capturing the fullness of God.
Last Sunday, when we celebrated Pentecost, we focused on a very different and still incomplete understanding of the divine as holy spirit or breath or wind. From John’s Gospel we hear again today that God’s movement in the world is like the invisible and uncontrollable wind that blows where it chooses (John 3:8). John says God interacts with the world not like a person of power but like a force of nature. Do you see how different are these 2 images of God? Which is correct?
We don’t have to choose. We experience the Holy in many ways. The perfect words or images for the sacred will always be just out of our reach--even for poets like Mary Oliver, who expresses the illusiveness of the sacred in her poem “Where Does the Temple Begin, Where does it end?”.
There are things you can’t reach. But
you can reach out to them, and all day long.
The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of God.
And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.
The snake slides away; the fish jumps, like a little lily,
out of the water and back in; the goldfinches sing
from the unreachable top of the tree.
I look; morning to night I am never done with looking.
Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around
as though with your arms open.
And thinking: maybe something will come, some
shining coil of wind,
or a few leaves from any old tree—
they are all in this too.
And now I will tell you the truth.
Everything in the world
comes.
At least, closer.
And, cordially.
Like the nibbling, tinsel-eyed fish; the unlooping snake.
Like goldfinches, little dolls of gold
fluttering around the corner of the sky
of God, the blue air.[i]
How do we ever hope to fathom God if poets and theologians admit they fail to find words and pictures for awe-filled experiences of the Holy? For Christians, the human Jesus who became the eternal Christ is the best revelation we have of the divine. I’m not ready to give up all human-like mental pictures of God! No. Jesus remains for me the very best depiction of the Divine, and Jesus’s way of self-giving love is the very best way of enacting the Sacred.
For that matter, the Hebrew creation story, the opening narrative of our scriptures, insists that we were created in the image of God. So God is a part of us and, as Christian scriptures say, the Christ dwells within our very human hearts.
But increasingly, Christians also see a bigger God. Not in Isaiah’s terms of a supersized human but more abstractly. So Tillich named God the Ground of All Being, the foundation upon which all that exists has being. Others use the term Ultimate Reality because God is that which has ultimate value and is that which is really real. I like Marcus Borg’s term The More. Yes. God is MORE than we can know or experience and that which is always becoming even more. But it’s no wonder our Jewish friends do not presume to speak God’s holy name. Maybe verbs rather than nouns get us closer to saying Sacred things. I like the Gospel of John’s active image of the blowing wind. I like the Force of Life or the Source of Love. Yet when we name God through activities, we’re still stuck with nouns: Creator. Redeemer. Savior. Lover.
But here is where Trinitarian theology offers us so much more than we had assumed. The Trinity pictures not three gods and not really even three persons as we think of persons and not so much the actions of persons—but the interactions of a "a communion of persons" (LaCugna 84). God IS relatedness and mutual interdependence, says the Trinity, and this communal existence is what we aspire to. To be fully human is not, according to the Trinity, a matter of self-sufficiency but instead requires mutual, self-giving communion with others[ii] (LaCugna 91). The Divine is recognized in the actions of love. Self-emptying love among a community of equals is the kind of love for which the Trinity is the prototype. If I’m losing you here, let me say it again as you learned it long ago: God is love. God is the One who gives love, and the One who receives love, and the love itself flowing between them. God is what happens between and among loving human beings. God is loving energy and process and connection.
The Trinity says further that love is not exclusive but is ever-enlarging. God’s love does not close off the possibility there are new ones to love.
Before we turn our attention to an artistic rendering of Trinitarian love, I want to describe a more mundane example of that love. I’ll do that by first introducing you to Julie and John, two of our daughter’s childhood Sunday school teachers, who co-taught children in ways that made everything fun and made every child special. Actually, John was in charge of the fun; Julie was in charge of John, whose methodology the parents sometimes questioned, but whose loving influence on the childlren was undeniable. For instance, John taught the children a not-so-secret signal to use during the worship service. When John, a choir member, adjusted his glasses during worship just so, the children in his Sunday school class understood him to be saying “hi” to them, and they were told to reply to him by rubbing their noses. Of course, the children never knew when John would send them his signal, so his devotees probably paid more attention to his eye glasses than the pastor’s sermons. But I think John was signaling more than “hi.” He was saying, “You are special.” He might have also been implying: “And I have my eye on you.”
John and Julie made the children feel empowered when, for instance, they encouraged the children to come up with a name for their class. For weeks they debated in secret before announcing to the church that they had become the WLSTPTWA class. No one outside the class knew what those initials stood for. Eventually the children disclosed, with broad smiles, they were the “We’re lots smarter than people think we are” class. At our daughter’s wedding three years ago, the former members of the “We’re Lots Smarter Than People Think We Are” class gathered for a photograph with the bride and with their adored teachers, Julie and John.
But John and Julie had created more than enduring friendships among that group of children. Knowingly or unknowingly, the class had practiced being the Trinity. The opening ritual on Sunday mornings began as John greeted the first child to enter the classroom that day by offering his chair to the child. The chairs were arranged in a circle, and John sat near the door, so when the first child entered, John in effect gave up the nearest chair for that child’s convenience. When the next child entered, the first child would greet that friend by name, get up, and insist that the new child take the special chair. If the peer politely offered to sit elsewhere, the ritual required that the one offering his or her chair would, in mock seriousness, reply, “But I insist” and gesture with a flourish. Whenever the next child entered the room, the person in the closest chair at that time would rise, welcome their friend by name, and give the best chair to them. This was a joke, of course. This is not how children interact. It was a game. The children laughed at the ritual. But they also loved it. And think about the way they came to embody in that ever-enlarging circle the self-giving love of the Trinity, which is best defined as a loving community of persons.
The Trinity’s loving community is pictured perhaps most insightfully by the medieval icon painter, Andrei Rublev. Study again that image of Rublev’s icon on the front page of your worship bulletin. The 14th Century iconographer gets it right. What his three figures capture is loving and ever inclusive interaction. See how they incline their heads to one another in conversation. See how they gesture as they talk. See how their postures remain open to one another, no figure being excluded. And see how they remain open to us, making room for the next person to join their circle. God is not one person or three persons. God is communion that connects us and enlarges us. God grants space for us to enter. The Trinity’s circle is perfect—and yet not closed, not completed. God’s power is not through imperial commands but through gentle invitation, not for the purposes of adoration but for communion and mutual love and self-sacrifice.
The Trinity is best understood as a picture rather than a doctrine. It invites us not to believe certain things are true but to live out that truth. The Trinity makes a hospitable place for us to inhabit and imitate. In fact, “The Christian community is supposed to be itself an icon of God’s triune life” (LaCugna 106). We are baptized into this inclusive, equal community so that we become its living icon. If we can save the Trinity from those who would turn it into a math problem or a doctrinal test, it will picture for us the community we embody.
I love the picture of the Trinity. Do I believe in it? I am living within it. There is an infinity within the Trinity. “To Infinity and beyond,” is the catchphrase of Buzz Lightyear. I say, “To the Trinity—and its infinity—and beyond!” May that circle remain open! Amen
[i] Oliver, Mary. “Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does it End?” Why I Wake Early. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004, 8-9.
[ii] LaCugna, Catherine Mowry. “God in Communion With Us: The Trinity” in Freeing Theology: The Essentials of Theology in Feminist Perspective. Catherine Mowry LaCugna, ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. See LaCugna's interpretation of Rublev's icon.
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