The Trinity: Affirming Dynamic Personalism

Trinity Sunday  May 26, 2013

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 Psalm 8/Canticle 13

Romans 5:1-5  John 16:12-15

Lectionary Link 

  For most of my preaching life I have begun my sermons with the rather presumptuous invocation, “In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Please be seated.”  I say “please be seated” since a child once quoted back to me my introduction with also the “Please be seated” which I found humorous; kind of like when one is reading a play script and one reads the stage directions which are written in parenthesis or italics as though it were part of the script.

  It is rather presumptuous to invoke the Trinity upon my little talks, as if, what I had to offer was worthy of such.  But just regard it in this way; if God abandons the  meanings of my sermons in the mind of the listeners, there is no hope for my sermons at all.

  Since this is Trinity Sunday and not Angels Dancing on a Pinhead Sunday, my sermon topic is assigned to be on the former not the latter, even though the Trinity may be as arcane and mysterious as that other proverbial topic of angelology.

  I think that I should begin by polling you my listeners about the state of your Trinitarian thinking.  America is a place of polls; we take polls for everything because it is related to what we want to sell to people and we want to have an indication what they might be buying before we go into full-scale production.

  When you pray, to whom do you pray?  God the Father?  God the Son?  Or God the Holy Spirit?  Or do you just pray to God?  And when you pray to God are you thinking about God the Father or all three Persons of the Trinity?  Or perhaps you are not consciously addressing any particular member of the Trinity?  Do you spread out the prayer attention that you give to each person of the Trinity?  Or do you assume that you are praying to God the Father, in the name of Jesus and through the power of the Holy Spirit?  What is the nature of your Trinitarian prayers?

  Do you pray differently with regard to the Trinity because you’re attending the Episcopal Church?  Would it not seem that Pentecostal churches perhaps give more attention to the Holy Spirit than do other churches?

  How come when people cuss and swear they generally just use the name God and are more likely to use some form of Jesus Christ as their scatological expletive?  It seems as though the Holy Spirit does not get mentioned in most scatological references and why is that?  Is it because the Holy Spirit is lesser known or is it because Jesus said that to blaspheme the Holy Spirit is the unforgivable sin?

  Are you or people you know more likely to pray to the Blessed Virgin Mary or to a favorite or designated saint than to God?  Or to a saintly departed grandparent?

  If it took more than four centuries of church history for the Trinity to become established as normative for most of Christianity, what are the roots of the Trinity and why did it become important for Christian identity?

  The Christ communities of the first four centuries were finding their identity in the ways in which they came to speak and teach about God.  There were other teachings about God and gods.  The followers of Jesus at first were another sect within Judaism.  Judaism is what we call a radical monotheistic religion; that God is One was crucial to the distinctive identity of the Jews in ancient Canaan which had people who had other gods and goddesses.  One of the main criticisms of the prophets against Israel was that they often were drawn to the polytheistic practices of their neighbors.   In Judaism there was the notion of a divinized human figure known as the Messiah or God’s anointed.  The most famous messiah was King David.  David was not a divine being but he was assumed as God’s chosen one to a special divine work.  Many ancient cultures had emperor cults and the monarchs used association with gods and goddesses as a way to perpetuate their divine right of rule.  The gods, as it were, “ordained the rule of the emperor” and so one should not oppose the will of the gods. 

  The notion of a messiah king for Israel was something of a copying of the way other kings in the region used divine selection as a way of legitimizing the right to rule.

  The early Christ communities inherited the notion of a messiah as a divinely designated figure.  For many Jews, the proof of the Messiah would be in his power like King David to restore Israel to freedom and success.  Jesus could not be such a figure; he would be a secret messiah, one who suffered and one who would be a king only to those who had his risen presence made known to them.  It would be true to say that Christians came to understand Jesus as not just a selected messiah like David; rather Jesus was one who was a pre-existing God, known as the Word from the beginning.  Christians re-interpreted the Royal Psalms as a way to speak about Jesus as God’s Son.  “The Lord said to my Lord, you are my Son; today I have begotten you.”  This language from the Psalm gave the followers of Jesus the language for them to present their claim that Jesus was God’s only begotten Son.

  Remember too, that the Roman Emperors even after the famous Christian Emperor Constantine were still designated as Augustus or as divine beings by the Roman senate.  So Roman Emperors were gods and sons of god; one can see where a “son of god” vocabulary was accessible and prevalent in understanding the nature of Jesus and how he would be presented within the Christian communities.

  The amazing thing is that Christianity was so successful in the first four centuries in the Roman Empire that the Emperors lost their significant “cultic role” as gods and sons of a god, and for political purposes began to play second fiddle to Jesus, Son of God.  They began with Constantine to see their role as the regents of Christ on earth, as Christian monarchs.  So after noticing the success of Christianity, Constantine the Great noticed that the Empire consisted of some significant metropolitan Christian centers; Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Rome.  But these centers had Christian religious disagreement within their regions and among themselves.  No particular bishop was exercising or had authority throughout all of the church.  And so Constantine called the bishops together in 325 in Nicaea.

  The Nicaea Council was a watershed event in the history of the church in establishing a worldwide collaborative practice to set an official language as how to talk about the Christian understanding of God.

  Essentially, the Council of Nicaea established what was regarded to be important in the Gospel narrative in the life of Jesus.  Jesus addressed God as his Father and so Jesus was his Son and equal with God.  Jesus spoke of sending of the Holy Spirit who is also God.  The Council of Nicaea really confused things for philosophers who were baffled by the saying that three Persons are still one God with all three still being equal.

  The big elephant in the room for us and for the bishops at Nicaea is and was  that we must use language.  Language is used for things and beings for which we have no empirical references and so when dealing with invisible things like love, hope, and God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, their meaning and truth for us does not mean being able to point to them like we point to a particular tree.

  The Trinity is an agreement by the church about the language that we use about God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  The agreement was put in the form of a creed for teaching purposes and to organize an expanding community.  The agreement about the Trinity was the result of trying to reduce the narrative form of the Gospels into abbreviated teaching points for Christian initiation and identity.  The problem is that because a group of people decide about how to use language at a certain time in history, it does not guarantee that the very same meanings of the language will be grasped in the same way at a different time.

  What is meaningful is that the language of the Trinity has remained as a part of our Christian identity and that it still invites us to seek interpretation of knowing God as primarily a relational God, not an aloof God, because we believe that personhood in humanity is what makes us unique and so personhood as dynamic relationship must also exist as a reality of God.

  If personhood is definitive as something that is superior in human beings; surely it must derive from some super-dynamic personhood community.  And so we confess God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, not to limit metaphors for God but to celebrate the notion of “person” as crucial in our own self-definition and self-knowing and this finds its parallel in our assignment of these important words to our confession of what we regard to be greatest, namely, God, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.