Dancing in the Trinity

A couple of weeks ago Jill and I were in Ireland. It was as green and beautiful as you might expect – and as wet! And in the gift shops and tourist places we saw lots of pictures of shamrocks. Legend has it that in the 5th century, St Patrick used the three-leafed shamrock to explain the Trinity. Although shamrock or clover has three leaves they form one leaf, just as the three persons of the Trinity together form one God.

Although this is a useful way of thinking about the One-in-three and Three-in-one it has its limitations because it is static - the three leaves never change their relationship to each other, they never move. But what we know about the Trinity is that Creator, Word and Spirit are in constant relationship to each other – it has been described as a dance. God is always in community with Godself, dancing together.

Today is Trinity Sunday, a day when we focus on the Triune nature of our God – one of the few days when we focus on a doctrine or a teaching of the church rather than on a teaching of Jesus or something from his life. You may have noticed that our readings were unusually short. There is no Scripture passage which described the Trinity, because it is an understanding developed by the church as they lived into the reality of Pentecost. As they became God with flesh on, they found that although they believed in one God, this one God showed up in different ways.

We can hear echoes of the Trinity in Jesus’ teaching. We often hear him talking about God as his Father and he also talks about the Spirit. But he never tied them together in a neat package because Jesus was not writing a systematic theology. It was up to later theologians and bishops to try to make sense of what he taught and what his life meant. We heard part of one explanation this morning in our second reading.  Paul, a very early theologian and teacher, told us that “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, and God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” This includes all the persons of the Trinity but doesn’t spell out that they are all the same God.

Scholars used to think that there was one true Christianity which was true from the very beginning and that heretics were people who diverged from that true understanding. But recent scholarship has shown that the situation was very different. Back in the first century there was no New Testament. As churches popped up like mushrooms they didn’t have the written gospels, some of them had gifted teachers and some had letters from gifted teachers like Paul, but each group of Christians learned different things and understood the Good News in a way which made sense to them. It was quite some time before there were agreed understandings.

The process of getting there was messy, as human affairs often are. There were arguments and excommunications. Some people left, others stayed. It took several centuries before the majority of Christians agreed that God is indeed three persons in one. One of the reasons that most Episcopal churches say the Nicene creed together every Sunday is to remind us that we stand in the same energy stream as our ancestors – we are a Trinitarian church.

But the Trinity is difficult for us to understand. God is far more complex than we are and so we cannot wrap our minds around him, or her, it or them.  Imagine if you were a single-celled amoeba, a little creature made of just one cell, you would not be able to comprehend the human bodies that we take for granted – how could there be creatures with so many cells? I think it’s the same for us, we cannot fully comprehend the greater complexity of the divine.

And our confusion is shown in the language we use. Jesus talked about God his Father, and some people think that if that’s what Jesus called the Creator God Father, so should we. But that elevates half of the human race and suggests that men are somehow more godlike. So there is a move to eliminate gender-based language for God in order to make it clear that women and men are equal and in fact there is no reason to suppose that God is either male or female. When Jesus talked about God the Father, he was using an analogy which made perfect sense to his disciples as the relationship between son and father was especially privileged in their society.

A quick sidebar here to recognize the fathers among us and all those who have been fathers to us and all those fathers who we love, our sons and grandsons, cousins and friends. Happy Father’s Day!

So… what does it matter? Regardless of the angst and arguments of our ancestors, do we today care whether God is one or God is three-in-one?

Personally, I find the idea of the Trinity enormously exciting. As I have already said, the three persons, Creator, Christ and Holy Spirit are in constant relationship to one another, just like the cells and the organs in our own bodies. And that relationship is infinitely creative. It is the nature of the Trinity to be love and to be creating. And from that love and creativity comes creation as we know it, not a process that God put in motion and walked away from, but an ongoing creative project of love.

And we, my friends, are made in God’s image. We are made to be in loving, creative relationship with one another and with God. And as we explore further how the three persons relate to one another in love and mutual submission, it gives us an exciting model of how we are to be with one another.

The goal of our spiritual path is to become one with God. To become a very small part of that amazing dance which is the Trinity at work and play. To become completely love.
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the Rev. Dr. Caroline Hall