Brief history aside....
The doctrine of the Trinity has been one of those hard-to-understand but fiercely fought over doctrines. People within Christianity have fought over just how to word things, and people of other faiths misunderstand the doctrine and think we have 3 gods.
In the early centuries of Christianity, our faith forbears tried to work out in precise detail just how Jesus was connected to God – the early apostles had experienced God in him in a unique way, and were saying he was God incarnate, a strange idea to these Jewish monotheists.The Hebrew Scriptures did talk about God’s Spirit, and some of the older stories seemed to imply that the 3 strangers Abraham encountered, for example, or the dark man Jacob wrestled with, were somehow Divine encounters. But to have God in human flesh was something different. People fought each other over defining how God as Trinity works, calling each other heretics, excommunicating each other, and the like. No one could come up with a universally accepted explanation of how the God of the universe could have three distinct “persons” and still be one God. Eventually, though, those who wrote arguments this way or that way each had to say, “It’s a mystery.” And how do you define and explain a mystery? If we can define and explain it, it’s no longer a mystery, is it?
It was the Emperor Constantine who made all the leaders sit down and hammer things out into words they could all be united about – they came up with the carefully worded Nicene Creed, which we will read later as our creed. Constantine wanted to make Christianity his state religion, so he wanted the Christians to be united on their beliefs & spell them out.
IMHO...
I read about and studied the arguments and definitions in seminary, and I have to admit, it all sounds arcane at this point in history; it’s just not a hot-button issue any more for me and many others. The explanation that works for me about the concept of the Trinity, is that God is experienced in different ways by people of faith, and that a reminder of God’s mystery and freedom is a good thing in a day where Christians who make the news seem to have put God into a little box to which they alone have the key. God can do what God wants, appear how God wants, be present how God wants and communicate how God wants. That's always been true. And it’s all God.
God is far more than what we can understand in the first place, so if God wants to send the Spirit, great; and if God wants to live as a human, great. God is not A being, like we understand “beings;” God is being itself – Matthew Fox used the term “isness” – God just is. Theologian Paul Tillich called God the “Ground of Being;” the Way, the Truth, the Life – good metaphorical and philosophical terms (and mystery terms, btw) that try to capture the immensity of what we somehow intuit as God.
I think of God sometimes as being like a well-cut diamond - with many facets, or faces, each one catching light and refract it in a certain way, making the diamond sparkle. Each facet reflects light a different way, but they are a part of the one diamond, and all contributing to the glory. God could be a trinity or more.
God self-reveals, and in ways we can take in
God wants us to understand as much as our brains can take in. God has continually tried to reveal Godself to us – in creation, in the Law, and then in Jesus. In the wonder and majesty of creation, God reveals eternal truths and aspects about the God who is Life itself. It’s not a perfect revelation, but we can see truth about God in creation - it’s a start. In the Law of the OT, God reveals more about the life humans are to live – acknowledging God, living in right relationship with each other as well as God, with certain ethical and moral standards that will make us live together most effectively and efficiently.
Then God decided to speak “human” to us in a living human, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is what a perfect human life looks like, lived in the realm of God and in perfect unity of relationship with God.
How in the world can we comprehend God anyway?
I mean, think about it – how can we mortal beings comprehend the vastness and “otherness” of God? Here’s a homely analogy:
- How can my cat think she understands me, her human? True, she can learn certain things about me and have some experience of me; but she can’t come close to understanding all the complexities of my existence. She doesn't know where I go when I leave, she doesn't know why I take her to the vet, she doesn't know why I read books or type on the computer – or what I’m talking about as I type.
- If you've read Madeline L’Engle’s trilogy, in the one A Swiftly Tilting Planet we get the illustration of the mitochondria (real things, actually) in the cells of a main character decide to rebel against doing their job – they have no comprehension of the whole body of which they are a minute part, they don’t realize that their rebellion is endangering the death of their whole universe (the person). How can a mitochondria understand the whole body of that character and what part they play? It’s a cool sci-fi book.
Like those little illustrations, we have some interactions with God, some relationship with God. At some point, however, we hit the wall, we run out of RAM - we can’t even begin to conceive of God’s point of view, God’s big picture, God’s purposes. God tells us about Life and Truth and Faith and Eternal things – we basically have to affirm God’s love for us and go with that, and trust what God says about life and relationship and faith.
Faith is more than right formulas
Why do we have to define and figure out the way God works / is/ lives/exists? How does knowing the right formulas and correct wordings grow our faith and trust? Mostly it doesn't Sometimes it’s important to sort things out, especially if we start going out on a limb somewhere too odd for others to follow.
Remember, doctrines are not the same as faith. Doctrines are how we try to organize our experiences of God in a coherent way. The experience with God, the relationship with God – THAT is the vital part of faith. How we try to order those common experiences end up as doctrine. The impetus for the doctrine of the Trinity came from how the disciples – and other early believers – experienced God in Jesus, and experienced God in the Spirit that flowed into them.
So - for today....
So what does the Trinity of God have to do with tornadoes that ravage yet another town? With an English patriot being attacked in broad daylight in London? With teenage pregnancies? With a sluggish economy? With suffering, health crises, divorces, grief? With finishing school, getting a job? I asked this on my Facebook page but didn't get much response - I guess that question is pretty much a stumper.
My answer is that thinking about the mysterious and unexplainable nature of God leads us back to the fact that we are a part of a larger work God is doing, that God loves us, and that God has sought us and found us and made a way for us to be in relationship. It leads back to gratitude for the way God has sought to be known to us humans. It leads us to remember that God is greater than anything we can imagine, and that God’s purposes are ultimately good (though often unclear). Thinking about God lifts our minds from getting stuck in our miseries, to looking outside the box for what God might have in store. Realizing God’s presence can come to us in so many ways helps us look around for how God may be coming to us even now, because God does seek us and come to us, for which we give thanks and praise. AMEN.
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