In the name of the Holy & Undivided Trinity – Amen
Today is the day known as Trinity Sunday, always the Sunday
immediately after Pentecost. It’s a day perhaps infamously known among clergy
and preachers as the day when we all stand on pins and needles trying to avoid
accidentally professing major heresies by using misplaced metaphors,
poorly-constructed analogies or faulty theological logic! No easy task at all,
even for the wisest & most experienced leaders of the Church, to explain
perhaps the greatest & central mystery at the center of the entire
Christian Faith. And so it falls upon this Cathedral’s newest clergyperson,
having been ordained only 8 days ago, to explicate the great mystery of the
Holy Trinity in my very first Sunday sermon as a deacon in this church, under a
tent at the church picnic! I will certainly need the help of the Father, Son
and Holy Spirit!
About 5 years ago, I’d just started seminary, maybe 2 or 3
weeks into my very first semester, and I was in a class called Patristics.
Patristics is the history and theology
of the early church fathers in the first few centuries AD, which laid the foundation
for the theological doctrines we believe and practice today. For 90 very long
minutes, I’m convinced that the professor explained the entire trinity using
words like “homoousious” and “consubstantial” (both of which mean “of the same
substance”, but more on that later) and to this day I’m not sure whether the
class was taught in English, Latin or Greek! I remember looking around at some
of the senior members of the class, all of us genuinely dizzy from confusion,
wondering how in the world I was ever going to make it through seminary! Thankfully
I gradually began to figure things out in the following months, and with God’s
grace I did indeed eventually manage to graduate. J
Those of us who are longtime churchgoers are well accustomed
to saying “in the name of God, Father, Son & Holy Spirit” or “Glory be to…
as it was in the…..”. But why do we say it? What in the world do we mean? We
say the Nicene Creed every week and some among us know it by heart from
repetition but do we ever pause to consider its meaning or implications for our
lives?
These aren’t just vague or inconsequential doctrines the
church forces us to believe. These are the believes we corporately and
individually hold at our core – for which the ancient saints like Augustine
were willing to endure torture, exile or even death, and for which martyrs
today, like the 26 Christians murdered in Egypt a few weeks ago, continue to go
to their graves professing.
We believe in ONE God – not three, ONE. And we believe in
three PERSONS of God, not three faces or appearances or modes, and not three
beings, deities or separate gods but three PERSONS of the One Holy and
Undivided God. To some of our ears that may come of confusing and impossible to
wrap our heads around. You’re right. To others of us it may be so commonly
repeated and reinforced since childhood as to seem obvious. But imagine
yourselves in the shoes of the early bishops of the church, without the benefit
of the historic creeds, without the tools of mass information and communication
today, without two thousand years of Christian theological writings upon which
to rely, and still 400 or so years AFTER the resurrection and ascension of
Christ. Try to imagine gathering a church council – essentially a huge church
committee – and I know some of y’all know a thing or two about serving on
church committees – to try to come up with a viable orthodox definition of the
Trinity AND the essential beliefs about Jesus in 225 words or less that would
survive for the next 1500 years as a leading source of unity among Christians
across the globe. How many of us would sign up to join that committee? How many
of us would feel up to the task?
The Trinity really is first and foremost a sacred mystery. And
the Nicene Creed, along with the shorter Apostles Creed which you’d find on
page 96 of your Prayer Book, and the longer Athinasian Creed which you’d find
on page 864 of your Prayer Book, are the best markers we have to teach us
constantly about the great unknowable Triune God as Father, Son and Holy
Spirit.
But as great as those tools are, no creed, no document, no
three-part phrase can contain or define the boundless indefinable God we love.
Even those beautiful words Father, Son and Holy Spirit cannot even encapsulate
a tiny fraction of the overflowing God who surpasses every language under Heaven.
And no other phrase – whether in English, Latin, Greek or any other can begin
to do it either.
But one of the beautiful things about those ancient creeds
is that, in the words of a wise priest I know, they can tell us more about
ourselves than about God. They help us to hold ourselves together on one living
and life-giving faith throughout the generations and centuries of constant
change. They help us to believe.
The Trinity is not something that we simply “believe”
intellectually, this priest reminded me, but it is something to which we “give
our hearts”. We believe it not in our heads but in our whole beings, body mind
and spirit. As we pray – not read – pray the creed and profess once again our
Trinitarian faith, ask yourselves this:
Do you give your heart to One God, the Father
Almighty, the Maker of Heaven and Earth?
Do you give your heart to One Lord Jesus Christ, the
only Son of God?
Do you give your heart to the Holy Spirit the Lord,
Giver or life?
Go home and pray the words of that creed day after day.
Meditate on them. Discuss among one another and with your clergy what we mean
when we say them. On days when you struggle to believe them or simply cannot
bear to say them again, rely on the community of believers gathered here and
around you to carry you through. Rely on us to believe with you. And when
others cannot carry themselves in belief, you carry them along the way.
Because if we believe – if we truly give our hearts to that
sacred faith that we have one God and three unique but undivided persons of
God, maybe we can take on the same for ourselves. As people made in Gods image,
we are called also to be unified and unique, undivided and uncontainable in
God’s love. WE are called to love one another, and to be united to one another,
as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are united, and yet individual as they are.
May the Triune and Triumphant God make it so.
