Sunday, June 12, 2022
/Trinity Sunday
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15; Psalm 8
The Rev. Clint Brown
The doctrine of the Trinity is like the phenomenon of Time. If I were to stop you on the street and say, “Excuse me, what time is it?” what would you do? You would probably take out your watch and say, “Well, my good man, it’s a quarter to one,” and feel confident that you had satisfactorily answered my question. But if I were to stop you and say the same words but in a different order, “Excuse me. Time, what is it?” you would probably stare back blankly for a moment and think, well gosh, I want to give you an answer, but I don’t know how. It is the same with the doctrine of the Trinity – it is in that class of ideas that are easy to name but surprisingly difficult to explain. It is for this reason that there is always some good-natured ribbing among clergy about who gets to preach on Trinity Sunday. (Yes, that’s me.) But how does one take what, in many ways, is an intellectual abstraction, and speak something helpful out of it?
One way to begin is with an observation made by the great Thomas Aquinas who pointed out that the Trinity is actually no more difficult or mysterious a concept than God. Reason has already broken down just as soon as we use the word “God.” How do we really know exactly what we’re talking about when we say the word “God.” And yet, we know that we can say some things about God and I feel confident that if I say the word “God” there will be enough correspondence between what I’m thinking and what you’re thinking to speak intelligibly. So we can proceed to talk about the Trinity if for no other reason we are all adrift alike. All we are ever doing when theologizing about the Trinity is making our best stab at it.
So then let us proceed to a working definition. The doctrine of the Trinity: it is the belief that God, though one, is also somehow three. It is an idea that did not come down to us fully formed from heaven, although it is implicit in Scripture; rather, it is something we have worked out based on our experience. And it is important to note that God did not suddenly become a Trinity just because we said so. The Trinity is simply our best attempt to describe what is and has been eternally true of God. Its seeds lay in a significant problem for the first Christians, in that how could they, as good Jews, know in their bones that Jesus was God yet remain committed to their monotheism. And then, as if that wasn’t enough, how were they to make room for the Holy Spirit, whom Christ himself suggested co-equality with when he commanded the apostles to baptize “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). While the details are utterly fascinating, this will not be a sermon about how all that got worked out, but, as promised, what I will do is suggest two ways that the doctrine of the Trinity actually matters to you.
And the first is an idea latent in a lot of thinking about the Trinity but really only brought to full form by the Lutheran Robert Jenson. “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” he writes, is the name of the Christian God, what we might call the proper name of God. We may say, “Mary is coming to dinner,” and be answered with, “Who is Mary?” to which we must say something like, “Mary is the one who lives in apartment 2C, and is always so cheerful.” In general, proper names, Jenson writes, need these kinds of identifying descriptions so we can be sure we are talking about the same thing. “Yahweh,” the God of Israel, was the one who rescued Israel from Egypt, and the Christian God, “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” is the God revealed through the incarnation of Jesus Christ. “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” is the Christian name for God, just as “Yahweh” is for Jews, “Allah” is for Muslims, and the “Cosmic Power” or “life force” is for the spiritual but not religious. The Trinity matters to us because, in Jenson’s words, it “summarizes faith’s apprehension of God”[1] and stands as a kind of condensed narrative of our history with God. We invoke the Trinity in our liturgy and our prayers so often because this is the name for the God “with whom we have found ourselves involved.”[2]
Secondly, the doctrine of the Trinity does something quite marvelous when it reminds us not only the God has a personal name, but also that God if personally disposed towards us. In other words, God’s very name underscores the primacy of relationship. It tells us that, remarkably, there is within the very life of God a relationship that has been carrying on like a dance from all eternity. In the beginning was the Relationship, and now that Relationship has reached out in love – for its essential nature is love – to relate to a cosmos of which you and I are a part. The Trinity is, therefore, a model for all relationships and of the importance of relationships, and especially that what happens in a relationship happens to each member of it. For the Trinity is the great bulwark that protects the doctrine of atonement, of how Christ’s death on the Cross makes possible our salvation. The doctrine of the Trinity tells us that whatever Christ has suffered has been brought into the very life of God and that Christ took with him into the experience of the Godhead the human experience of pain and death. The Trinity witnesses to the truth that God and the world are connected. God has and continues to be right down in and among us.
And so, to conclude, the doctrine of the Trinity answers both the questions “Who?” and “How?” To the question, “Who?” the Christian answers “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” And to the question “How?” the Christian answers, “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” That is all we might ever be able to say, but that is enough.
[1] Robert W. Jenson, The Triune Identity: God According to the Gospel (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1982), 12-13.
[2] Jenson, Triune Identity, 13.