Trinity
Sunday May 26, 2013
Proverbs
8:1-4, 22-31 Psalm 8/Canticle 13
Romans
5:1-5 John 16:12-15
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.
