Sunday: 1st Sunday after Pentecost
Reading: The Doctrine of the Trinity
Preacher: Peter C. Lane

The Trinity is a mystery, a mystery that can form us by describing and constraining us. This ancient and orthodox explanation of a God, one in substance but in three persons, is not finally reasonable. Our God has revealed herself in ways that confound human understanding. The Trinity is a victory of God's wisdom over human wisdom. (1) Not everyone agrees. The great 18th century Unitarian pastor and thinker William Ellery Channing said, "[T]he existence and veracity of God...are conclusions of reason, and must stand or fall with it." (2) I disagree. The existence and veracity of God are conclusions of revelation understood through reason and tradition. (3) The doctrine of the Trinity is just that. The bible suggests it, early Christians grappled with how to understand it and the church, guided by the Holy Spirit, came to teach something specific about it. If the Trinity is to form us we must not give in to the temptation to totally conform our beliefs to the sensibilities of the day. For God reveals Godself to us, A God merciful and mighty, a God in three persons, a blessed Trinity.

Let me tell you a little about where the doctrine of the Trinity came from and then suggest how it can form us. As many will point out, neither of the Trinitarian structured Apostles or Nicene Creeds is in the bible. (For that matter, neither is the Affirmation of Faith or the Sylvia Dunston's adaptation.) The historical Jesus certainly never uttered any of them. But the early church didn't pull the Trinity out of thin air. They had read today's Romans reading naming a "Spirit of God," a God as "Father" and a Christ. They had read 2nd Corinthians: "May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all." They had read Matthew 28: "Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." But perhaps most importantly the early Church had come to understand Jesus as somehow divine. In the New Testament, Jesus is called "the Son of God," the "Word" of God and the Savior who is "one with the Father." The challenge for the early church was to figure out what that meant considering the centrality of Israel's affirmation, "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one." (Deut. 6:4) The doctrine of the Trinity, a word given to us by Tertullian only in the late 2nd century, really came about as early Christians tried to understand the role and character of Jesus as he was revealed to them.

How is Jesus divine and human? It seemed that all the ideas that the great thinkers of the day came up with either shortchanged Jesus' humanity or his deity. The early church's struggle with this came to a head at the Council of Nicaea, called by the new-and newly Christian-Roman emperor Constantine. The council dealt most directly with the sensible proposal of a thoughtful, biblically astute priest from Alexandria named Arius. Arius was deeply interested in following through on the logic of a unified God. To keep that consistency Arius' Jesus came out looking like more than a human, but definitely less than a God. Arius said, "We acknowledge one God, who is alone ingenerate, alone eternal, alone without beginning, alone true, etc." The council, full of Eastern bishops and a couple representatives of the Bishop of Rome, disagreed with Arius. They said that Jesus was fully divine and that that did not harm the essential unity of God. How? They carefully picked out words (true God of true God and all the rest), but essentially they were saying that it is just the way it was. God revealed herself to have these different dimensions and so we're sticking with it. Mark Noll says, "Arius's appeal to what he considered the logic of monotheism illustrates a recurring tendency throughout Christian history to subject the facts of divine revelation to current conceptions of ‘the reasonable.'" (4) Nicaea did not give in and we were given the articulation of the Trinity that has held for 1700 years. It is such a human story-a church council being called by a powerful emperor and all! But I believe it is also a story of how the Holy Spirit can work in the Church.

For this is not just history, it is also formation. The doctrine of the Trinity can form us by its power to describe us and constrain us. It describes us as a people caught up in the overflowing love of God, a love that begins in the intimate relationships of the three persons of the Trinity. It is the reason it is important for me to say "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" as often as "Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier" or "Sun, Light, Burning Ray." Father and Son are personal names that suggest relationship not function. Using personal names shines light on God's communal, personal nature, a God who is only understood in relationship. It's also why I like to follow Julian of Norwich's lead and name God as Mother. Augustine explained this personal relationship by suggesting that the Holy Spirit was the bond of love between the Father and the Son. Well, God did not keep that love within the Trinity, but let it flow out into creation and let it draw creation back up into the divine life of love. That defines us; "I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." We are symbolically drowned in the waters of baptism and are reborn into the life of God-a life of powerful bonds of love. We are always receiving God. We must always give God. The Trinity forms us by describing us as a people caught up in God's love and sharing it with each other.

The doctrine of the Trinity also forms us by constraining us. We are most the people of God when we know our identity and live it out. We are most free when we are living into the reality of our createdness. And sometimes we need constraint. I refer you to the third verse of our opening hymn. "Holy, Holy, Holy. Though the darkness hide thee, though the sinful human eye thy glory may not see." We have a propensity to be turned in ourselves, building and buttressing a life that reflects merely our own desires. To guard against building a religion in our own image, the Church gives us a 1700-year-old doctrine against which to push. The Trinity is a worthy sparring partner. Speaking of Nicaea, Noll says, "Not only does it succinctly summarize the facts of biblical revelation, but it also stands as a bulwark against the persistent human tendency to prefer logical deductions concerning what God must be like and how he must act to the lived realities of God's self-disclosure." (5) To be God's people caught up in love also means to have limits. The Trinity forms us by constraining us.

This Trinity is a mystery. God is beyond all of our images, so our language must speak in approximations. The church decided many long years ago that the language of Trinity is a very good approximation. Allowing ourselves to be in the midst of mystery can transform us, opening the horizons, preparing us to be formed by the power of the Trinity. We are formed as a people straining with and against this most central doctrine of the church and so caught up in the love between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that we must share it with the world.
Amen.
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1 Mark Noll, Turning Points (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2000), 59.
2 As quoted in the Unitarian Universality Historical Society article on Channing. http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/williamellerychanning.html accessed on 6/4/09.
3 Richard Hooker said: "What Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that first place both of credit and obedience is due; the next whereunto is whatsoever any man can necessarily conclude by force of reason; after these the voice of the Church succeedeth. That which the Church by her ecclesiastical authority shall probably think and define to be true or good, must in congruity of reason over-rule all other inferior judgments whatsoever" ( Laws, Book V, 8:2; Folger Edition 2:39,8-14).
4 Noll, 54.
5 Noll, 59.