The Rev. Patrick Keyser: The Great Paradox

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen. 

Trinity Sunday is in many ways one of the most unique Sundays of the year. The Book of Common Prayer styles it a Principal Feast, equal in importance to Easter, Christmas and Pentecost. Though I imagine few of us experience it as such. It is the only primary feast of the church year that celebrates a doctrinal claim as opposed to an event from the life of Jesus or from the life of the early church. The implications of which we will return to soon when we look at the readings appointed for this day.  Today seems to be about doctrine, and doctrine does not excite or capture our imagination in the same way as the rushing wind and speaking in tongues of Pentecost, or the empty tomb and encounter with the risen Lord of Easter, or the Christ child wrapped in swaddling clothes with Holy Family and animals surrounding the manger of Christmas. Though we are not presented with a specific image or a scene that we can easily grasp onto this day, we are asked to consider and reflect on something of fundamental importance for our faith.

Today I would like to invite us into a consideration of why our belief in the Trinity and our celebration of it this Sunday matters. Because it matters a great deal, not as a bit of abstract doctrine, but as something vital for our daily life of faith.  At the start, we must acknowledge that we are dealing with mystery at the deepest level, by which I don’t mean to imply anything negative. But simply to highlight that we are seeking to speak about truth that can never be fully known or understood. Truth that our limited words and language will always prove inadequate in describing. If you find the concept of the Trinity to be confusing or mystifying, welcome to the very good company of the faithful across the centuries. It presents us with the paradoxical tension between remoteness and intimacy, between the familiar and the incomprehensible. God is beyond our ability to ever fully understand and yet is revealed to us in human form in Jesus, experienced and known to us in that undeniable presence of the Holy Spirit. The soaring prologue to John’s gospel puts it this way, “No one has ever seen God. It is God, the only son who is close to the father’s heart, who has made him known”.

No one has ever seen God, yet we have seen God in Jesus Christ, the Son. Such truth and seeming contradiction is so characteristic of the sort of language required when discussing the Trinity. A mystery that defies our ability to comprehend because it touches at the core and identity of God leading us toward God’s holiness and majesty, which demands less keen theological insights and more awe, reverence, and worship. Where then can we even begin to explore this theological truth? The Catechism at the back of the Prayer Book simply says this, “The Trinity is one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”. While succinctly capturing the idea of one God in three persons of unity and in diversity, that definition does mask the considerable complexity that underlies it. Perhaps the most significant challenge when examining the Trinity is the highly technical language that emerged as the church worked towards this understanding well into the course of the 300’s some almost 300 years after the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Though this complex history and theology is no doubt richly informative, our starting point must be, as it was for those theologians of the early church, with scripture.

And here we are immediately confronted with a great paradox. The Trinity is rooted in a deep engagement with the scriptural narrative. That is to say, it is thoroughly scriptural. Yet there are few, if any, specific passages that explicitly define it and serve as foundation for the doctrine. The word trinity, for example, does not appear anywhere in the Bible. Even the explicit use of the Trinitarian formula, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is surprisingly quite rare. This morning we heard the two most important passages containing a clear example of it. The first, the final verse of St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, includes the beautiful text often referred to simply as The Grace that has long been used in the context of worship. “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you”. The second passage from the final chapter of Matthew’s Gospel includes the Great Commission and Jesus’s instruction to the 11, “To make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”. Now, as important, as beautiful as these two passages are, they hardly constitute the foundation upon which a systematic understanding of the Trinity can be built.

A clear and concise scriptural explanation of that, of the idea, is not to be found. Instead, the doctrine emerges from the Christian community’s experience of God and from the sustained reflection and engagement with the narrative of God’s mighty acts as revealed in Holy Scripture. Experience of God’s power, of God’s presence within the life of the community, was then the foundation and the starting point from which a process of deliberation unfolded, beginning with those who lived in the immediate reality of the resurrection. The first question to be grappled with was, how to understand the identity of Jesus. Who was this Jesus of Nazareth who had died but risen from the dead? One of the earliest assertions, something we might think of as a creed, was the simple statement, “Jesus Christ is Lord”. Later expanded to the full understanding that Jesus was truly human and truly God. This Jesus was born of his mother, Mary, but also as those who experienced his healing and loving presence could testify, was one who reflected the glory of God, who was indeed none other than God incarnate. The word made flesh, dwelling among us. In that brief portion of Matthew’s gospel we hear today, we saw that when the Eleven came to Jesus, they worshiped him. A recognition that they saw him not just as human, but as their Lord and their God, worthy of worship.

As the church came to understand and defined how this Jesus, the Christ, related to God, there was a growing effort to understand the role and identity of the Holy Spirit, the spirit of truth, the advocate who in keeping with Jesus’ promise, was poured out on the apostles that great Pentecost day. Though the Spirit is attested to throughout scripture, it took prolonged theological reflection well into the fourth century by some of the greatest theologians in the church’s history, to finally affirm that the Holy Spirit is divine, is indeed God. Sanctifying us through baptism, still working in the world and the church, even now. Our understanding of the Trinity naturally followed these reflections on the nature of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. It was not an esoteric theological formulation designed by detached theologians. It was a faithful encapsulation of the Christian experience of God. The one God who created the universe, and all that is, was revealed in human flesh in Jesus Christ of Nazareth who suffered, died, and was raised to new life, and abides even now with us through the Holy Spirit. This God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is the one we know, trust, love, and adore.

At the heart of this mystery that is the Trinity, is relationship, relationship of perfect love. And while that is a lovely theological claim about the divine, there are significant consequences for us as well, evidenced by that very extended sweeping narrative of the creation that we heard from the Book of Genesis. There we hear that God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness”. The implications of this idea are profound. As children of God, we are created in love, bearing the image of this God who is perfect love in relationship. It is a vision of the sort of life that we are called to live. Of course, we fall short of this ideal, but with God’s help, we are called to ever grow into the fullness of this image of God, to grow into harmony, into loving relationship with God, with one another, with all of creation. The Orthodox tradition calls this idea theosis or divinization. Rather fancy term for a remarkable process of constant growth, constant movement toward union with God. Or to take that fancy Greek word at its literal meaning, of being made like God. Now this startling claim does not confuse creator God with creature us. It’s not saying we literally become like God in God’s essence.

But instead it proclaims that as Christ Jesus humbled himself to share in our humanity, so too might we be raised to that divine life, that fellowship of love, that is the Trinity. In short, it’s growing into the likeness of God, into the image in which we were created. That journey begins at baptism, that great sacrament of cleansing and incorporation into the church, which in keeping with Jesus’ commands to the Eleven, continues to make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Baptism welcomes us into this divine life and initiates this never-ending process of growth of movement, even as it empowers us and sends us forth for mission and service in the world. This growth into the fullness of God’s image and likeness is a journey that is never completed this side of the life to come. Before this feast day of the Holy Trinity was adopted by the church universal sometime in the 1300’s, there had been fairly significant opposition to the idea of establishing it. Not because of any opposition to the doctrine, but instead because it was thought that the Trinity was properly celebrated and honored each and every day in the offerings of prayer and worship that reflect the Trinitarian life.

There is, I think, wisdom in this way of thinking. The celebration of this mystery ought to be less something we turn to only once a year on this very unique day, and instead become something we live out in the daily life of discipleship and our striving to grow into the fullness of our created nature. As we worship this God of unity in diversity, this God of perfect love in relationship, who ever summons us to grow in that image and to dwell in that eternal love, which is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.