Trinity as Highlighting Personhood Sentience

Trinity Sunday  June 15, 2025
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 Psalm 8/Canticle 13
Romans 5:1-5  John 16:12-15

Lectionary Link

As always, already language users, or those who are coded and mentored by language users as infants who do not yet have full language ability, we cite the obvious human condition:  We cannot help but put into language products what is not language, that is the everything, everywhere, and at all times.  The language products of speech, writing, and body choreography of our actions are continual funneling interpretations of what how we are responding to Ultimate Reality but mainly the very accessible local reality.

Ultimate reality, and accessible reality has to be parsed in bits and pieces through language products to provide the local meanings for our lives amid the morass of phenomena which we are always encountering.  While individual words might seem to be a basic unit; the grammar and syntax of stories is how we locate ourselves with local and regional meanings within the great ocean of possible meanings.

Ultimate Reality, God, is such an overwhelming vastness that it might come to us as a negative; that is, God is so much more than we can know, that we can only say, "God is not this or that or anything that we can say, because God is more."  This great via negativa may be the insight behind the holy name of God in the Hebrew religion and so worshipers do not dare to try to pronounce the four consonants, called the tetragrammaton.  God is so not like any thing that we can know or say, that in humble piety we should not presume to pronounce the holy name.

Life cannot be lived by negative theology, by perpetually saying that we cannot know God; the human thing to do is to reduce God to positive accessible features of our lives as language users.  As holy and as invisible as God must be, still we must find within the human sphere the divine effects and so we confess emanations, energies and divine effects which can be known under the analogies of the human superlative.  Whatever is humanly great, then God must be the perfection of such greatness.

And so through accepting our humanity as bearing the image effects of the divine, we use these image effects to bring us to confess the Divine, whose very definition as the greatest, must necessarily be our perfect better in all matters.  One way that we assume that we bear the divine and understand ourselves to be person, is to note the singularity of being language users.  Knowing ourselves to be language users, we note that the use of language parses and structures our entire human experience.  Having language is the source of communicative connection wherein lies the definition of personhood.  And if personhood is a great asset of us having language, the God who is the Greater than we are, must necessarily be the essence of relationship and connection; God is evocation or projection by us upon the divine self, the superior notion of personhood, a personhood that could be called the greatest dynamic relationship.

One could say that as long as language users have been around, they have known that they are not alone. They have known that they are with other people and within environments of creatures, plants, sea, land forms, rivers, and vast skies. And because they can know each other and can know their environments through interaction and manipulation, they know a conducting experience between their inner lives and their outer lives. They also know that in their experience, they cannot exhaust their environments; they know that beyond the oceans and into the skies there is always More. The More that they experience, is the divine they come to confess, even if it is but a mysterious negligible. But people do not just confess this great More, they also develop cults, rituals, to confess their relationship with the great More and to bring the great More into accessible experience for their personal and community life. Why do this? Language users forever know the great problems of living because it involves knowing that all die, knowing loss of health, painful wars and conflicts. It's like language users have felt that they are and must perform their lives before the greatness of what they cannot fully know, and they hope that Ultimate Greatness has an approachable personality, even more approachable than the kindest nurturing mother or father.

Accepting the Great Personhood behind the universe, language users have come to be performative children, seeking to act and speak in best and pleasing ways for this Great Person.

The biblical witness is about how it has come to our language tradition how to speak about the great Personhood of the universe.

On Trinity Sunday, we do not speak of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to brag about how we have a better understanding of God than people who do not speak of the Trinity. We can only thankfully confess the Trinity with humility as a wise adequate way for us appreciate the dynamic relationship in the connection of beings of life within a great Personal Container, the God within whom we live, and move and have our being.

Without arguing about all the forms of theism, or theologies, or ways of life, or wisdom traditions, or philosophies as to which is the best way to speak about human experience of what is the greatest, we can simply accept the language tradition of the Holy Trinity which a good many of us have inherited in our Christian tradition. There is no humility in holding and being held by one's highest persuasion by boasting that "my God is the best and greatest." Let us humbly ask ourselves on Trinity Sunday, "what is the wise adequacy in confessing God as Trinity for us?"

As language users, God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, has come into our language use to characterize our relationship with the divine. In wise adequacy, we can always confess the greatness from which we have derived, from which we have been born, from which we have been created into the becoming of our lives. And because we have known the blessing of being wanted and belonging, we confess and project a great Parent. In our quest to belong to our great Parent and in wanting to belong in the best way, we have discovered that our great Parent has given us examplars. The Bible includes many stories of significant examplars, but the chief Examplar for us has been God the Son, Jesus Christ. We confess that he did it best; he lived the life of love and justice as the coaxing sibling to lead us into better belonging relationship with our great Parent and with each other. But how can I know that I am with my Parent, with God the Son, or with anyone? How can I experience you and you experience me? I assume a dynamic personal conduit between us which conducts mutual experience, and this personal conduit is who we confess to be the invisible omnipresent ground the Holy Spirit.

The great mystery of the Trinity, probably involves the fact that up to now, God is the only one who has complete synchronicity with everything. You and I with language that unfolds in words which, unfold in sequential time. We who are so limited to the immediate occasion in sequential time cannot pierce total synchronicity, hence we confess the mystery that comes with the wise adequacy that we know the Trinity to be for us.

Today, in humility, we are thankful for the wise adequacy of what the understanding of God as Trinity means for us. We hope and pray for all to know the deep sense of belonging to a great Parent; we hope and pray that as Jesus represents God's intersection with human life, we too might find intersecting connections of the divine with our lives with serendipitous synchronies, of sensing that we are purposefully here. And yes, we desire personal mutual connection with everyone and everything; we seek that Holy Spirit invisible propitious connection with the events of our lives, knowing that sentience fills the entire world.

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.