Sunday, June 3, 2012

The Holy Trinity, Mere Canon Law or Invitation to Mystery

Trinity Sunday  cycle b, Proper 4  June 3, 2012  
Isaiah 6:1-8  Psalm 29
Romans 8:12-17   John 3:1-17




   We live our lives by reducing large masses of experiences into words, into language.  And we might think that language can perfectly translate our inner and outer experience into what we call words.  The relationship between our experience of a tree and the sounded word “tree” and the written “t-r-e-e” is quite an arbitrary relationship.  The arbitrary sound and written symbols have been learned in a community and there are different sounded words and written words for “tree” in other languages.  Words are a translated reduction of human experience.  In human experience there are experiences of the holy and the sacred and these experiences are sublime in such a way to necessitate words to designate what seems to be extra-human, more than human.  So the word “God” or corresponding words for the sublime have entered our vocabulary.   People who limit human meaning only to empirical experience find the word God to be meaningless because the word “God” does not seem to have an empirical referent, even though God-experiences have been confessed by countless number of people for a very long time.
  People who use the word “God” do so in some rather unique ways.  The prophet Isaiah had a visionary experience of God and the experience of God was not like any other human experience.  He heard the words “holy, holy, holy.”  Unique, or special or completely other.   Yet sometimes religion makes God seem so ordinary.  We build churches and we have holy books and we have nice formulaic creeds to standardize the teaching about God for the masses.  However, with all of these “positive” presentations of God in religious institutions, the reality of God begins in the negative. God is not anything we can say or imagine.  And if God is not anything that we can say or imagine, how do we say anything positive about God?
  We do so by analogy, anthropomorphic projection or by analogical imagination.  Why?  We accept our limitations in our human experience and we admit that God must allow the experience of the extra-human to be stated in human words as a way of declaring the meaningful traces of the sublime in our lives. 
  One of the major results of anthropomorphic theology in Christian history is the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.  This doctrine became particularly enshrined in the Nicene Creed that derived from Church Council in the year 325.  The Emperor Constantine saw the success of the Christian movement but he also saw the religious division between different ways of expressing the relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  He did not want religious division to divide the Empire and so he had the bishops gather to set the “official” beliefs of Christianity.  So the bishops argued the finer points as they applied Greek philosophical concepts to the more Hebraic and Aramaic notions of Father, Son, and Spirit that are found in the Gospel narratives and other New Testament writings.  The Council of Nicaea truly located Christian thinking within Hellenistic thought forms away from the Hebraic foundations of the Jesus Movement.
  The Creed and positive theology bring about a human temptation; rather than seeing positive theology as a way of drawing us to negative theology when we simply drop our jaws in worship and are speechless before God’s sublime majesty, we can be tempted to make the statements of positive theology and creeds into idols or precise interpretations to define a religious party.  We offend the Trinitarian Names by presuming to understand them, rather than realizing that the whole point is to bring us to the point of mystery in not presuming to understand God as we accept that we are overwhelmed by God’s majesty. 
  It is not the precision of the words about the doctrine of the Trinity that magically bring us Christian unity, rather it is the way in which the words invite us to the mystery of God and bring us to the event of worship.  The Council of Nicaea did not unite the church; it took more time and more church councils to further consolidate Christian understanding.  If we view the Creed and our liturgy as presenting precisely fixed understandings of God then we have a right to be bored.  But if we understand the words to bring us to the place of awe or silence, then they have been successful in their purpose.  We cannot allow the Nicene Creed to be but a statement for crowd control in domesticating Christians to all understand God in only one way and in a repetitive way.  Such practice has the skeptics saying that the Nicene Creed is really about the political administration of God.  And so truth becomes administration, mere crowd control to keep all Christians in standardized meaning.  Truth in this practice becomes but canon law.
  Today, let us walk back to the implicit presentation of the Trinity in the life of Jesus.  The prayer and devotional life of Jesus is presented as his relationship with his immanent Guide, whom he addressed as his Father.  This parent aspect of his own personhood was an experience of personal relationship with his sublime Father.   And what was the legacy that he wanted to leave in this life?  He wanted all people to experience their own inner personal parent guide.  And how did he think that this would happen?  He believed that this Parent guide, his Father would send a Spirit, a Holy Spirit to create this parent-child relationship between his disciples and God.  So the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit were not really Greek philosophical concepts, they were/are personal modes of the inner experience of God between the particular Jesus in the historic human condition with his Father who was understood to be the ground and plentitude of everything.  And then there was the active personal energetic interchange between the two, the Holy Spirit.
  And where does all of this leave you and me today in relationship to the Trinity?  How can it have personal meaning for us?  Is it a useful metaphor for us to understand ourselves as daughters and sons of God?  And what could that mean?
  I would suggest that the experience of our Divine parentage is useful for us.  We can come to experience our selves as overly or totally determined by our environments, by imperfect people who have marked our lives and helped to form the range of habits and repetitions of our life, some useful and others not so useful.  How do we free ourselves from the sense of being totally determined by nurture or by the DNA codes of our own nature?   How do we come to know genuine personal freedom?  I believe it comes in an experience of the sublime, and one such experience is to know an experience of being loved by a sublime God as our Parent Guide.
  And if Jesus was fully human but also became the paradigm of the intersection the human life with the sublime divine, then it means giving acceptance to human experience as a valid way ever to be reaching beyond the horizons of human experience for another kind of freedom.  In our belief in Jesus as Son of God, we also accept as true and vital the particular ways in which you and I have come to know ourselves in our experience as sons and daughters of God.
  And finally we name the very condition to be in relationship with anyone and everything, the omni-presence of God’s Spirit.
  When we break up the Trinity in a chronological and linear way there seems to be three; but the oneness is known in the simultaneity and synchrony of God, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  And if the names of the Trinity persons do not work for you, there are many other biblical names and metaphors for God that may help you name your own encounters with the sublime.  The belief in God, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is not a limitation upon the metaphors for the sublime; they are in fact, an invitation to us to go beyond any particular metaphor of God into accepting the mystery of our experience with God.  Let us seek what the Trinity would invite us to in our experience of God.  Amen.

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