Dealing with love isn’t just for weddings: it gets to the very nature of God. From the Presiding Bishop’s sermon at the royal wedding last week to the Pentecost itself, we’re finding the very nature of God isn’t out there and other, but right here among, in, the very binding of us together.
What actually matters about the Trinity
Trinity Sunday | John 3:1-17
The joke I heard in seminary is that more heresies will be preached this morning than any other day of the year. It’s also famously the Sunday rectors make curates preach right out of seminary. Coincidence?
Actually no, quite the opposite, really.
The problem is it’s the one day we celebrate a theological concept still unsettled after 2000 years. So really, we’re bound to break some eggs. Not because we’re making an omelet, but for some reason, the egg carton is precariously balancing on a milk carton and a platter of macarons is balancing on it while our hands are already full. So those eggs are gonna fall.
People try to explain how God can be one and three at the same time and fail miserably. Most of the expectations have been used before and resemble things the church have called heresies. Ice/water/steam for example. Modalism.
Some don’t care and try to find relevant examples. Last year, everybody seemed to preach on fidget spinners.
So trust me when I tell you, the reason you don’t really want a sermon about that stuff is the same reason I don’t want to preach it. It’s not going to satisfy our needs. We’re hungry for something deeper than a ten-minute explanation of a theological concept we can only make sense of by deploying Latin.
Different Wavelengths
I’m not bagging on those who try. But this is all a bit of missing the boat. All this floundering for a technical answer to a holy mystery is a lot like Nicodemus showing up in the middle of the night and then thinking Jesus is actually suggesting he find a way to sneak inside his Momma’s body again. I’m gonna need a shrink ray…
And let’s be honest, Jesus is talking another language here. It sounds like the same language Nicodemus is using, but they’re on totally different wavelengths.
It’s like when we’re talking with someone about a common subject and we realize they think there’s only one track with two trains coming at each other and we’re like, dude, we’re not actually on the same track. Different tracks with different directions and destinations. Not opposing opinions, different opinions.
And Jesus is trying to separate the body and the spirit and I know there are people who will latch onto that and concoct a whole new idea based on those words.
So if we see our jobs as untangling all of this mess into some consistent, simple, universal framework for understanding the relationship of God to Jesus to the Holy Spirit, we’re done. I’d rather talk about something easy, like guns or the opioid crisis. Something simple. A simple crisis.
The Shape of God
I think it’s really instructive to see the difference in how the western and eastern churches discuss the Trinity. A big part of the fight between the two involves the sending of the Holy Spirit, but that’s kind of a dead end. Better is how we actually talk about, paint, or sculpt the Trinity. How do we concept God.
In the West, we are keen to get the pieces right, so we imagine the trinity as a triangle—three sides for three persons in one shape. And we like the power in the image because triangles are great for weight-bearing functions: like holding up the roof.
In the East, the symbol is a circle because there is no separation in the Godhead. All are one. Its power is in its unity and community. The persons don’t represent a difference, but an unbroken whole.
The old Greek term for this is perichoresis, which speaks to the eternal dance of love within the Godhead.
It seems like the West and East are on different tracks at the same time. The West is trying to explain the unexplainable using finite terms to describe the infinite. While the East is trying to name the embodied relationship of the Triune God in a symbolic way. And often symbols speak what complex theories can’t.
The Pentecost Remix
I usually rebel against a Trinity sermon for Trinity Sunday, but this year it seemed like a logical next step from the Easter season to Pentecost; then Trinity Sunday.
We’ve been talking about digging deeper and seeing past the distractions for weeks and then we get Pentecost and a story that seems like one big invitation to stick with that program. With all the fire and languages, the big spectacle of it all, we might miss the point: God’s message of a powerful love embodied by the apostles.
I was so excited, I wrote a sermon, forgetting I wouldn’t get a chance to preach it! I was ready, fired up! Then I heard our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry preach his Pentecost sermon a day early, because I guess the Queen gets to be first. He preached about love and fire and how that irrepressible love of God is made known in us and I was like there it is!
That’s the Pentecost in a nutshell!
And I don’t mean the words or the style, but the fusion of the body and the spirit, the message and the medium. Bishop Curry became a Pentecost event and he was proclaiming the power of God.
“There’s power in love.” He said.
Because central to the Pentecost event is that the message and the medium combine to reveal God’s presence.
It’s not the intellectual abstraction of a profound truth from which we can ponder with our scotch while stroking our chins in contemplation.
And it’s not that some dudes got full of the Spirit and were all speaking in tongues and saying guys, I’m totally NOT drunk.
Nor is it the ridiculous idea that God cares more for the particular formulation of words we say or the personal passion residing in our individual hearts.
The power of Pentecost is that it reveals the very nature of God’s mission: that God is already manifest in holy moments of togetherness and then God reveals this truth to us through one another.
Bishop Curry preached a Pentecost sermon for the Royal Wedding and William Morris preached our Pentecost sermon with his own powerful witness of love and community.
They also preached the Trinity.
Because the Trinity, in its most basic sense, is a community. And in the Pentecost, God brings us into that community. There’s power in love.
In the Pentecost, the disciples stop mimicking Jesus and become Jesus. They become part of God manifest in the world. We can become diners at the common table, dancers in a divine dance, members of God’s blessed community. We become one.
The manner and the particularities start to break apart and fall away because we’re talking about being part of this God thing. We’re talking about love and the power of God’s love to change the world.
And all these divisions and artificial containers for our faith crack and shatter against the floor because love can’t be contained! Love can’t be measured or defined. We can’t systematize or rule each other in love.
Love busts through those rigid boundaries, the walls and fortifications we raise to avoid God’s love, to avoid being wrecked by love, made vulnerable by love, opening ourselves up to the transforming power of God’s love. There is power in love. And it messes with our precious plans.
But here’s what we keep forgetting: that power is in us already. We just keep searching out there for what’s already in here. Tearing down our walls, the barbed wire fences around our hearts; the hearts God has made perfect mirrors for love. Solar panels harnessing the nuclear fire of love.
God made our hearts for love.
Not only to receive that love but use it and share it, embodying that love, becoming one in love.
Hearts made to pump blood through our bodies, to move them to a sacred rhythm, a divine dance, continuous since the beginning of time. We are children of love made for love in concert with the one whose identity is love. All of us, ever closer to becoming one.