Trinity Sunday A June
15, 2014
Gen. 1:1-2:3
Ps.33
2 Cor. 13:5-10,11-14
Matt. 28:16-20
Today is Trinity Sunday
and a day to remember that the Trinity is our community’s formulation of what
we believe about God. The formulation of the Trinity has a history but
such is a cliché that could be used about everything. Every use of
language has a history and so history itself is about how words of meaning come
into being and how they get changed in their meanings and values.
If the Trinity has
a history in the history of words, it still has what is not yet history, namely
the future. The Trinity has a past, a present and the Trinity will have a
future in human usage.
Historians would
like to proclaim the Council of Nicaea as a high water mark in the formulation
of God as a Trinity of Persons. By the time of the Council of Nicaea in
325 of the Common Era, the Hellenization of Christian thinking had become quite
advanced. Alfred North Whitehead said that European philosophical
tradition is but a series of footnotes to
Plato. And Plato and Aristotle might as well have been at the Council of
Nicaea, because the influence in thinking evident at the Council of Nicaea made its documents seem like some of those repeating
foot notes. The foot note to Nicaea might have said, “See Plato and
Aristotle.” It is interesting that Pope Benedict XVI tried to reassert
the significance of such a Hellenistic footnote by requiring his flock now to
use “consubstantial” in the Nicene Creed.
Do you think it is
demeaning to the importance of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit to make
such a reference to Plato and Aristotle or Greek philosophical categories? The New Testament Writers
inherited both the Hebraic and the Hellenistic traditions. If one wanted
to say that someone new and marvelous had arrived upon the scene one could only
use the illustrious past to speak about the surpassing greatness of what is
newly revealed.
We are living in a
long tradition about God. This tradition about God has many tributaries
in the cultures of people within the world. We as Christians believe that
the tradition about God arrived at a new distinction in the life of Jesus
Christ.
But we know that more
has happened regarding the tradition of God after Jesus Christ than what
happened during the life and ministry of Jesus.
Humanity was given
this surpassing great person who manifested such a rareness of existence that
he has been remembered more than any person in history.
The life of Jesus
is proof that there is a mystery in how human values get determined.
After Jesus we have had to readjust human values. We have had to change
what we thought and believed about ourselves, the afterlife and about the life
of God.
The Holy Trinity is
an expression about how we have come to value God and how we have come to
express the meaning of God in our lives. The Holy Trinity is an
expression of relationship values. And while we may want to reduce
relationships to the precision of mathematical formula and philosophical
logical statements; relationships do not allow such precision or such
reductions.
The Nicene
confession about the Trinity is an effort to make philosophical statements
about our relationship with God. And it fails to do the relationship
justice even as it succeeds in stating our most important way of speaking about
God.
We can decry the
use of the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle to speak about the Trinitarian
relationship but we cannot dismiss the human motive to attempt always to find
the best possible explanations for the best in things in our life. If
Jesus and God the Father and the Holy Spirit are the best things in life, then
we cannot cease to find our best possible ways to speak about the best and
highest relationship of our lives.
And so some may say
we are Trinitarian because of Greek philosophy; I would beg to differ. I
would say that we are Trinitarian because of Jesus Christ. You cannot
artificially invent a person like Jesus. You can’t just develop such a
person with an advertisement or propaganda campaign. Jesus happened and
the people of his time had to deal with him. They dealt with him as
honestly as they could. They tried to keep the traditions of his life and
words alive in the ways in which they could.
Jesus came and he
re-valued how we have come to know, relate and speak about God. So we
need not blame the Trinity on Plato or Aristotle; we should credit the life of
Jesus as he lived it before his friends as the inspiration for the arriving at
the value of the Holy Trinity.
The followers of
Jesus believed that he taught us to call God our Father. The followers of
Jesus in the community of the writer of John’s Gospel believed that Jesus
stated his Oneness with God his Father. So how does one use the Greek
language or any language to deal with this expression: Jesus said, “The Father
and I are One.” The early church believed that Jesus told his followers
to pronounce the initiatory words at baptism: In the name of the Father, the
Son and the Holy Spirit. So the literature which derived from apostolic
times required that church deal with this Equality of Persons in understanding
the dynamic Unity of God. If we speak about the Trinity today, we can
blame it on Jesus and the traditions which derived from him.
It behooves us to
understand the relationship nature of the Trinity in our lives today. You
and I are not limited to the words of the creed or to the philosophy of
Aristotle or Plato to speak about God in our lives. We make a commitment
to use the very best that we can to tell this world about how worshipful God as
Father, Son and Holy Spirit are in our lives.
For me the meaning
of Jesus as the Son of God is both the incredible presumption of humanity and
the humility of God. It means that no one can have a non-human experience
of God; so any experience of God is funneled through human experience, otherwise
it could not be humanly understood. We are hopelessly anthropomorphic;
indeed it would seem that God seems to orbit around and within human experience
as we force upon God a humility to be reduced to our level to be understood by
us. We confess God to be Jesus the Son because we might be able to imagine
other kinds of beings but in our experience we have to assume human existence
as a valid way to come to know God.
Human experience forces upon God a humility by reducing God to human
understanding and language.
But that does not
mean we cannot appreciate greatness; we confess that we came from a
pre-existing plenitude and a plentitude will exist after we are gone. We believe that plenitude will retain the memory
of us having been here. We believe that
God's memory of us will be our resurrection and continuing life. We
confess God as Father because Jesus did and because as sons and daughter we
believe we came from someone and if a Father has known and loved us that Father
will also continue to know, love and remember us.
We also
believe that when Jesus confessed his Oneness with God as his Father, that
there was a transacting Spirit which was present in their relationship.
We confess a Spirit who is like copper wire for electricity. Copper wire
allows electricity to be carried and conducted between points. The Holy
Spirit is the very condition of mutual conductivity between beings with
different levels of consciousness. You and I do not live isolated and
unaware of our environment or the people and things of our environment.
The Holy Spirit is the omnipresence of God which is the very condition for
mutual consciousness of each other.
I believe that we
can embrace the Trinity as a meaningful way for us to understand our
relationship to the One defined by St. Anselm as the One that which none
greater can be conceived. And if one can conceive of such greatness, the
property of existence is but a basic requirement of the Greatest of All.
But we can move on
in faith from awareness of sheer existence of God to experience God as one who
is intimately friendly with us, even as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
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