Trinity Sunday cycle b, Proper 4 June 3, 2012
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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