Trinity Sunday, Year C
In the name of God: One,
Holy, and Living. Amen.
Earlier this week I was
rereading an article in the New York Times from several years ago about what it
calls, “Our Fix-it Faith”. It explores the
prevailing belief that technology can fix any problem we throw at it. That somehow, knowledge and its applications will
always be enough to triumph over the effects of ignorance and hubris.
The article was written
in the context of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but every day, it
seems, we hear of more problems that simply need to be “fixed” or that should
have been “fixed” before they became problems.
The guiding principle in
our culture seems to be that perfection and ease of living and freedom from
troubles is the standard - the baseline.
And anything that falls short of that high bar challenges our faith in
ourselves and our faith in our leaders.
Through our knowledge and
our intelligence, no problem that we ever face should ever get out of
hand. If it does, it shakes our faith.
But this faith-shaking
seems to happen almost every day. Our
faith is shaken by acts of terrorism.
Our faith is shaken by bullying and violence in our children’s
schools. Our faith is shaken by the
still-struggling economy. Our faith is
shaken by natural disasters. All of
this, of course, intermingles with our own unrelenting cycles of challenges and
tragedies that don’t make the news or enter the national consciousness every
day.
We live in an age when we
expect everyone to know everything right now.
And when it’s proven that they don’t, it shakes our faith. And when our faith is shaken, we look for
people to blame.
Even so, our quest for
stability and control fails again and again.
Perhaps this is part of why
the church is more countercultural now than it has been since before
Constantine. For, perhaps, the first
time since the fourth century, our teachings are actively in contrast with the
pervasive teachings of the dominant culture.
Where our culture insists that technology, and progress, and knowledge
will be our salvation, the church persists in teaching that our salvation is in
Christ alone. Where our culture teaches
that all shall be well through greater knowing, we hear Jesus say, “I still
have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”
There is still truth to
be revealed. There are still things we
don’t know. And that’s okay.
That’s a bold
proclamation for our time. To a people
consumed with zeal for answers and understanding, our Christ says, “All in
time. Take a breath. Not yet.”
On Trinity Sunday the
church is particularly susceptible to attempting to give in to the demands of
the culture. When faced with the
occasion of celebrating the Holy Trinity, we can find ourselves tempted to
explain or define the Holy Trinity – the ineffable truth of one God in three
persons.
I have, over the years,
uncovered a few metaphors that help me to wrap my mind around the concept of
the Trinity. I have understood the
Trinity to be expressive of the diversity of God.
As I survey the diversity
of creation, it makes sense to me that God is One who is best known through
diversity. When considering the God who
made the birds of the air and the beasts of the fields and the fish of the sea
– not to mention the air and the fields and the seas, themselves; as well as
all of us in all of our diversity – it seems unfair to try to contain that God
in simple, human terms. That God cannot
be expressed in any linear, two-dimensional fashion. That God needs a Trinity – built-in diversity
to accommodate the diversity represented by it.
Or, I have thought of the
Trinity as the method by which we, in our own complexity, commune with a God of
infinite complexity. Our bodies – our
sensations and experiences and interactions – connect us with Christ, God in
human form. Our creativity connects us
with the Parent, the Ultimate Creator of all that is or was or ever will
be. Our wisdom, both innate and
acquired, connects with the Holy Spirit – writhing through our experiences and
understandings to reveal the Divine where it had before been elusive.
These three live in us,
as individuals and in our communities, as aberrations from our humble humanity
to reveal the one God.
But even the best
metaphors are just that: metaphors. They
are not knowledge. Despite whatever poetic
thinking we may impose on the Trinity, we don’t really know it any more than we did before.
And that’s okay.
The church, like any
great teacher, is at its best when it finds the point of transition between
filling us with answers and information, and leading us to wrestle with the
deeper questions. It’s the shift from
acquiring knowledge to cultivating wisdom.
It’s not easy. And it is countercultural. The world begs us to fill it with
answers. But life in this world is not a
short-answer question.
Jesus, our teacher, knew
this. He knew that knowledge would not
give us the answers that our quest for understanding would.
“I still have many things
to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.
When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth…”
All in time. Take a breath. Not yet.
We keep seeing, right now
and in the physical world, what happens when our faith is misplaced: when we
trust in ourselves and our own creations as our own, personal saviors. We are seeing what happens when we abandon
the lessons of the Trinity and ignore the interconnectedness between the
Creator and all that is created.
Simple answers are never
answers enough for the complex realities of life.
We have seen it before
and we will see it again.
But the Spirit of truth
is guiding us into all truth. There are
no easy answers. But there is Wisdom:
rejoicing before God always; Wisdom, rejoicing in the inhabited world and delighting
in the human race.
For that, I give
thanks. Amen.
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