Trinity Sunday
30 May 2010 Proverbs 8
Romans 5: 1-5 John 16: 12-15
I approach Trinity Sunday today much differently than I did 30 years ago. Then I was new to the priesthood and to preaching and had just spent several years studying the old fathers of the Church and all the controversies about doctrine that took place in the first five hundred years of our era. Trinity Sunday was and is a kind of Orthodoxy Sunday—that is, a time when we celebrate the hard-fought and hard-won victories over grave errors in understanding who God is and how Jesus is related to Him and how our salvation was wrought. I delighted in the Doctrine of the Trinity—its balance and subtlety, its seeming contradictions and deep interior harmonies. That was then. Now, after having been at it for a while, I realize that our world and even our church—that is, the Episcopal Church in general—do not delight in doctrinal correctness. To be concerned about the truthfulness of what one believes to any serious extent is thought to be a kind of fundamentalism. Our culture has understood the mutual tolerance we need in a democracy as requiring us to hold to our beliefs very gently and with a certain reserve, as if we really didn’t mean to offend anyone by being too certain about anything. Fundamentalists of all stripes do not concern themselves with offending others, of course, so we have left Orthodoxy—that is, right thinking about God—to them, while we have gone about being pastoral and trying just to love folks instead of thinking clearly.
Now it is very true that at times in the past, too much concern for being correct about doctrine, accompanied by a desire to be certain about almost everything, has led to needless conflicts. I am always saddened by the fact that in the old Christological controversies of the fifth and succeeding centuries, the Orthodox, winning party in the general councils of the Church, ruthlessly suppressed the so-called unorthodox and created centuries of bitterness that only weakened all Christians, when some of the issues could well have been resolved with time and charity. Even in recent days and in the Episcopal Church, differences in understanding have driven wedges between people and parishes and have led to bitternesses and lawsuits and departures from the Church. Still, there is some point in wanting to speak truly about God. Not all opinions about God can be true, not all are of equal worth, and they make a difference as to how people live in this world. They also make a difference as to what we hope for in the future. We believe that there is a revelation about God and his nature and his purposes that has been given to us through the history of Israel and in the person and work of Jesus. This revelation has reached us through the writings that have come out of that history, the collection of which we call the Bible: Holy Scripture. At various times in the history of Israel and in the history of the Church these writings have been examined and their number and content fixed. This is what we call the Canon—the normative collection of books out of which we can discover all the truth that we need to know to be saved, that is, to take our place in God’s purposes for us. All clergy at their ordination in the Episcopal Church solemnly declare: “I do believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, and to contain all things necessary to salvation.” We do not believe that every word is literally and inerrantly true as do fundamentalists; we are not all agreed in our church and across denominational lines about how to take various texts. A recent Christian writer put it this way: “Perhaps when our conservative Christian friends ask those of us on this quest if we believe in the inerrancy of Scripture, our reply should be: ‘No, I believe the Scripture is better than inerrant. I believe it is beautiful.’ If they ask us what we mean by beautiful, we can explain: ‘It’s beautiful for creating a community that extends across generations and cultures to engage with God so they can experience in that engagement the gift of revelation.’” [B McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, p. 272.] I rather like that. The Canon of Scripture is the place we look to take our bearings about the nature of God and his plan for us and our world. There are two issues involved. First, How do we understand what it says? And then, How do we know it is true? Do we say, “The Bible says it, I believe it, and that’s the end of the discussion”? That usually means that the person saying it is asserting the infallibility of his opinion. Episcopalians in general do not work that way. In order to feel as if we understand Scripture correctly we want to integrate biblical knowledge into the rest of the things we know and see how it all goes together.
With regard to our knowledge of God, the test of the truth of what we say we have learned about the Father and the Son and the Spirit is not only that the ancient Church worked it out on the basis of Scripture and left it to us in the creeds, but that it most adequately accounts for the world we know and live in and the nature of our humanity and its loves and hopes. That is how we commend it to others and reassure ourselves that we have understood Scripture correctly. If what we believe about God seems to result in a diminishment of our humanity and an intolerance and violence towards others, we might well have gotten something wrong—that is not what Jesus was like. In the great sweep of human thinking about God, there is nothing that comes close to the richness and beauty of the Christian account of God that we call the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. The doctrine of God is not a liability but an asset to the contemporary Christian. To be sure, we do not find it stated in so many words in the New Testament, let alone in the Old Testament. There are places where St Paul comes close, where Jesus almost went so far as to say it. But the doctrine is a conclusion we base on Scripture, which accounts for the facts in the only adequate way. One of the ways of getting a little deeper into our understanding of God the Holy Trinity is through a perusal of our Scripture lessons this morning, which take us on a journey towards understanding the Holy Spirit.
The first lesson from Proverbs is one of my favorites: it is a depiction of Lady Wisdom. You have heard me say before that there was a lot of thinking in Old Testament times about how the most high God, Yahweh, the God of Israel, could have interacted with the world in creation and providence. The oversimplification of a long process is to say that poets and wise folk and prophets tended to settle on two groupings of ideas about this: God acted in this world through his Word and through his Wisdom. Over the centuries these two attributes of God tended to take on a life of their own. The word of God is what came to the prophets—it was powerful, active, sharper than a two-edged sword, being sent into the world and accomplishing its purpose without fail. The wisdom of God came to be thought of as almost a servant spirit, a character in its own right—or we should say, in her own right. Those wise men who meditated long on the meaning of the world and Israel’s traditions and scriptures came to think of wisdom as a glorious and beautiful woman, whose friendship with them was the inspiration that led them into understanding the mysterious ways of God. Sometimes Lady Wisdom is only a metaphor, but other times she seems almost to be an independent person, truly working at God’s right hand, ever since the beginning.
Her function was to take the things of God and, by dwelling in close company with those who loved her, to reveal to them the inner secrets of God’s intentions and purposes. She delighted in human companionship and yet was with God in creation. She knew all there was to know about the mind and heart of God so she could explain and reveal it to all those who were worthy of her efforts, who had prepared themselves to profit by her company by long study and careful thinking.
Some of the aspects of wisdom were taken over by New Testament writers to explain in more detail how Jesus was to be understood. Those glorious passages in Colossians and Ephesians about the role of the Son of God in creation, the section in John about Jesus as the bread of life—these are taken from some of the Old Testament descriptions of Lady Wisdom. But the controlling image for Jesus is the Word made flesh, from the prologue to the Gospel of John. When Jesus explains to his disciples that he is going to send to them the Spirit of Truth to lead them into the understanding of things that he cannot explain at the present time, he is drawing on the old wisdom tradition. Because the Spirit of Wisdom understands the heart and mind of God, she can take this knowledge and apply it to the minds and hearts of the followers of Jesus, who now have an intimate relationship with her through the act of bestowal by the Father at the request of Jesus.
Now I may confuse you by continuing to use the feminine “she” with regard to the Spirit. Our Bible uses “he” and I am not trying to be politically correct. In Greek the word “Spirit” is neuter in gender—neither masculine nor feminine—so the ancient default English translation was “he.” But I have often wondered about the connections between ancient thinking about Lady Wisdom and New Testament teaching about the Spirit. In Romans 8 Paul himself seems to cast the role of the Spirit in very womanly terms—groaning in the process of bringing to birth the new age of the world. There are a couple of other pieces to this puzzle as well. In the tradition of thinking about Mary, to her are often attributed some of the characteristics of Lady Wisdom, so that Mary becomes a kind of icon of Holy Wisdom. Then again, the imagery of the Church is feminine—the bride of Christ. Many of the old Fathers thought of the Church in glory as finally producing an image of the Spirit. The Son, of course, was the image of the Father. The Spirit’s work is to “image” the Son, that is, reproduce Him in the lives of believers. But the image of the Spirit will not be seen until the end, when the Church herself will provide that image. Now you may think this is a little far-fetched—perhaps so. It pleases me, somehow, to think of the Spirit in feminine terms: as Lady Wisdom, as typified in Mary, as my sister, in the same way we think of Jesus as our brother, as well as our Saviour. It pleases me to think that somehow within the life of God there is a masculine and feminine and that what is so obviously a part of our life in this world—male and female—is also represented in God without the need to revive all of that ancient fertility religion. But perhaps I digress.
The role of the Spirit, according to Jesus, is to take what is his and make sure we get it. The Spirit understands the mind of Christ, understands the mind of the Father, and comes right along side us, mingling her Spirit with our spirit, in order to open our hearts and minds to the truth of Christ. This is not just metaphor. It is about real indwelling, the power of new creation, new life. As the Spirit delighted to work with the Creator in creation, so she delights to work in the new creation—making us new from the inside out in order to be able to participate in it. This is the hope we have, the hope of eternal glory, based upon the Spirit’s work of pouring the love of God into our hearts, as Paul says in the Epistle. And what is the love of God, but the actual life of God? What is the glory of God but God himself? Our hope is to share his life, the very life of God, and in that way to share his glory. This is what our Lord Jesus has achieved for us by his defeat of sin and death. Through that work we have been justified, made right with God, and given the Spirit to help us fulfill our calling, to witness to the new age, the new world, by being new people.
The more you ponder how our salvation works, how creation works, how the new creation works, you are led more and more into the awareness that the reality of God is a communal reality. We are brought into a shared life with God, a life that God already has eternally shared within the divine life itself. Sharing and loving is nothing new—God has been a loving and sharing God for all eternity. But now through the work of the Son and the Spirit, we are being brought into that eternal life in a new way. “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”
The picture we are led to in our minds is of normal, daily life, being renewed and transformed bit by bit as we, who have been justified by our faith in our Lord Jesus, are living in intimacy with the blessed Spirit by whose activity within us, the life of God the Father is permeating us, so that sufferings turn into endurance instead of bitterness, and endurance turns into character instead of resentment, and character solidifies our hope, since we are aware that our dear friend, the Spirit, has her loving arms around us, gently leading us to reproduce the love of God in our lives. In this way the eternal, communal, family-like love and life of the Holy Trinity becomes rooted in us, and creates the hope of glory, a hope that will not disappoint us.
My poor words are hardly adequate to begin to offer an explanation of Trinitarian theology, but I hope they are enough to show that our doctrine is not some stuffy thing we have to subscribe to, but which has no practical effect. Indeed, the doctrine of the Trinity is the most practical thing we believe, because from it we can discover virtually everything we need to know about ourselves and our world and our future. The world was created to be a place which would reflect the harmony and self-giving love that characterized God’s own internal life. The Kingdom which is coming will actually restore to this world that original creational intention, raised now to the level of actual participation in the very divine life. When we see what the world was meant to be, by understanding who God is, we are even more repulsed and saddened by the inharmonious and selfish mess we have made of it. But we can also take heart by the knowledge that the God who was mighty and loving enough to make the world in the first place, to send his Son to redeem it, is also strong enough in the end to bring it to its glorious triumph in the Kingdom of God. And that gives us our vocation: to witness by our life and by our words to the reality of that divine life now made available through Christ by the power of the Spirit.