A Doctrine Worth Celebrating

Trinity Sunday: Matthew 28

Today is Trinity Sunday, the day when the Church celebrates and contemplates the triune nature of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. As feast days go, though, this Sunday has seen better days. Sure, Trinity Sunday has never had the “magic” of Christmas Eve, or the trumpet-filled joy of Easter, or the cinematic fireworks of Pentecost. Trinty is rather dull by comparison. It doesn’t help that Trinity Sunday is the only day in the church calendar that is devoted to a church teaching. All the others—Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Ascension, Easter, and Pentecost—celebrate an event, a happening in the life of Jesus or the early church.

It used to be that the question of the Trinity was at the center of vital debate in the Church. Nowadays, though, churches and church theologians are quite happily to relegate the Trinity to the margins—and rectors are happy to pass on preaching this Sunday to seminarians and curates, if they have them. Here you go: “Seminarian Sunday! Good luck!” The upshot is, the Trinity is seen by a lot of folks as something abstruse, unnecessary, and, frankly, an embarrassment to reasonable-minded believers.

And yet, it is important that we continue to observe this holy day, because it serves as a reminder to us that Christianity is fundamentally and undeniably a “revealed religion.” By that, I mean that Christianity is not something natural that can be extrapolated from everyday life. You can't come up with it from long walks in the woods or by ruminating on your thoughts alone in your study. It is not something you can calculate or test or devise. It's got to be shown, revealed to us by God himself. Trinity Sunday puts this fact right in our face, for there is no teaching that more clearly illustrates the revealed nature of our faith than the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

Now, if you are at all familiar with the church's teaching on the Trinity, you probably think that the whole idea must have been cooked up by some ivory-tower theologians, who typically were making things more complicated than they needed to be, confusing and obscuring the simple faith of regular believers with this convoluted notion  Except that, so far as we know, this process worked pretty much the other way around. Practicing believers and worshippers were driven by their experiences of God to the awareness that God related in several different ways to creation. God, they recognized, exists in different forms of relationship with us, in ways at least like different persons, and that all these ways were divine, that is, were of God. Yet there could not be three gods. God, to be the biblical God, had to be one God. This complex and profound affirmation was then handed over to the theologians to try and make it more intelligible. And they have been trying to do so ever since.

Indeed, theologians throughout the centuries have found the Trinity a pretty rich seam to mine. St Patrick is said to have explained the Trinity to the Irish by using a shamrock: three individual leaves, yet still one plant. St Augustine of Hippo said the Trinity was best understood as the Lover, the Beloved, and the Love which exists between them. The Cappadocian Saints (Basil, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus) thought of the Trinity as a dance of three persons, moving together in a circle. The metaphor I like the best is that the Trinity is like three torches in which the fire of the first passes to the second and then is relayed to the third, until they are all burning in one blaze of holy fire—three torches, one fire.

Yet all these metaphors break down in the end. That is why Christian thinkers have cautioned us against thinking that we can ever fully grasp the Trinity. “To deny the Trinity,” Martin Luther warned, “endangers our salvation. But to try to comprehend the Trinity endangers our sanity.” Augustine, for his part, once told his students, who were trying to understand the Trinity, “Lest you become discouraged, know that when you love, you know more of who God is than you would ever know with your intellect.” The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing echoed that wisdom: “God may well be loved, but not thought. By love, he can be caught and held, but by thinking, never.” As these three theologians all attest, the Trinity is beyond rational analysis.  But that doesn't mean it is irrational. Just as we can never understand the concept of the Trinity, but that doesn't make it inconceivable. In fact, God’s non-rational, nonsensical nature just proves that the Trinity is not something that we could have come up with by ourselves on our own. We had to be told it. It had to be revealed to us.

But the fact that it has been revealed to us makes all the difference. For it means that the God of the universe, who made the Sun, the moon, the planets in their courses, and every living creature on earth, who is so above us, beyond us, nevertheless is determined not to remain distant and unknown. This God, the God of the Bible, has come to us, spoken to us, even become one of us, that we might know him personally, that is, as three divine persons.

Most people in our society would prefer to think of God as a general idea or high-sounding principle—abstract, vague, and arcane—but God refuses to comply, insisting on being explicit, particular, close, indeed too close for comfort for many. I mean, we have designed this modern world controlled by us, functioning rather nicely on its own, thank you very much, everything clicking along in accord with natural laws we’ve discovered, served on command by technological wonders of our own creation. So, who needs a God showing up, getting involved and disrupting the way we’ve ordered things? We modern people don’t much like the idea of a God who is beyond our control or a world other than one that is here solely for our use and exploitation.

But to insist that God has made himself known as Trinity means that God will not let us persist in such a delusion. Creation does not exist to serve us, but is the work of God intended to give him glory. History is not simply “one damn thing after another,” or a sorry record of man’s inhumanity to man, or the account of humankind’s ongoing progress towards perfection. It is rather the story of God’s acts of salvation, worked out in time, which will culminate with Christ’s return. And our lives, they are not our own either, to do with as we please, but are a gift given to us that we might know and love God. Only in relation to Him can we find our ultimate purpose and meaning. God created us, created us for himself, and we find all our deepest desires and hopes for ourselves and for humanity realized in him.

This is to say, Christianity is not only a revealed religion but also a “universal religion,” a religion that is intended for all. Our God is not God just for one race, the Jews, say, or the God of Europeans. He is God for the whole world. The God we know as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is not a tribal God, or one god among many, in a pantheon of gods. Our God is God alone, embracing all people, indeed all existence.

What this means is that our God refuses to be confined to what we today think of as “religion,” a recreational pastime or voluntary association, relegated to private life. The God who’s revealed himself as Trinity refuses to cede authority in any sphere of life to any other god. There is not one area of life that God does not seek to reclaim, to reconcile to himself, to heal, fix and bring back into order. The God revealed as Trinity is revealed as God over all.

And yet, to speak his name, to make God particular, to refer not simply to “God,” but to Jesus or to Father Son, and Holy Spirit, has become something of a taboo, seen as exclusionary, intolerant. Best to keep God generic, vague, inoffensive, and easily managed.

I know of a church that was celebrating its centennial not long ago. The church made a huge banner to go outside the building: “Celebrating a hundred years of community service!” Community service? Is that what this church has been doing for the past hundred years? How is that any different from the Lions Club or Junior League or Rotary?  Nothing against those organizations, but it’s incredible to think that the Church has no higher purpose, no greater calling that that!

But of course, we do. Jesus says this explicitly in our gospel lesson this morning from Matthew. As Jesus prepares to take his leave, he gives his disciples an assignment. He tells them to “go and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit and teaching them everything that Jesus has taught them.” This is what the Church has known as “the Great Commission,” the core mission of the Church, our raison d’être, our reason for being.

Fact is, though, Christians in the West, especially we Mainline Protestants, have neglected this command, not seen it as relevant anymore, or just pushed it into the margins. Which makes sense, I suppose. Talking about God, inviting people to church, can be risky. You might get turned down, rejected, made fun of, or just avoided. But as much as we’d like it to be otherwise, mission is not optional for Christians, not optional for the church. We are disciples of Jesus who make disciples, students who make other students, Christ-followers who make other Christ-followers.

This is not just for our own benefit, mind you, to grow the church, to attract more members. It is because Christianity is also a missionary religion: we want others to know God as we know him, as our heavenly Father, as our Savior and Friend, and as the Spirit that enflames our heart and guides our steps. But more than that, we do mission because mission is who God is. Our God is a missional God, a God who sends, a God who reaches out to others to bring them into communion, into relationship with him. God is not content to enjoy eternity alone, but wants us all to enjoy it with him.

This understanding is contained, encoded in the Trinity itself. In calling God Father, Son and Holy Spirit and baptizing others in that name, we are not employing some magical incantation or ritual formula. We are invoking the God who sends. The Father sends the Son, the Son sends the Spirit and, as we heard last Sunday, the Spirit sends us. When we are baptized in the name of God, we are immersed, plunged, into the mission of God. We are commissioned to go out to speak in God’s name, to teach others the ways of Jesus, and to draw others into the life of the Spirit.

God has been moving, active long before we showed up to the scene, but now that we are here, He has clearly made known that He wants us in on what He is doing. He invites our participation in his mission. The more we understand God as Trinity, the more we realize that we are welcomed into everything that God is up to.

The Church's teaching on the Trinity too often seems esoteric, abstruse, irrelevant and embarrassing, something we’d just as soon forget about if we could. But contained in the triune name of God is the whole story of salvation, the whole of what we believe as Christians. For when we speak of God as Father, Son and Spirit, we are pointing to how God, out of love for us, his fallen creatures, sent his Son Jesus to be with us, to reveal to us the very heart and nature of the Father, and to die for us in order to free us from sin and death, and how the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, was sent by God to gather us together into the Body of Christ, bringing us into communion with God, with each other and with all creation.

To speak of “Trinity” is to say all that. It is to insist that God is identified not by remoteness but above all by mission, by outreach, by an expansive and embracing love. Our God is a communion of divine persons whose shared love is so abundant it overflows their bounds and draws others into that love as well. We have been caught up in that love, and we are invited, encouraged, commissioned to bring others into that love, into that communion too. And so we see, the Trinity, far from being a dusty academic notion, is in fact a profoundly moving picture of God and of what it means to share in God’s triune life. And that is surely a doctrine worth celebrating! Thanks be to God!