June 3, 2007 - One in three and me

Trinity Sunday
3 June 2007
Proverbs 8.1-4, 22-31; Romans 5.1-5
One in three and me
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007

My oldest son Russell is 32; his daughter Chloe is 4. Russell was outside pulling weeds with Chloe a couple of weeks ago. The weeds had gotten tall, which meant that they had bloomed their little yellow flowers. Chloe was collecting the flowers.

“These are for my Warehams,” she was saying. Statistically, Wareham is the last name of most relatives Chloe sees, so her “Warehams” are the odd assortment of people related to her. She was picking flowers for Marcia, Blake and me, all Warehams, and also for her other grandmother Betty, whose last name is Wease, not Wareham, but who gets her flower, all the same, especially because she is already in heaven with God. The thought of heaven may have triggered Chloe’s next idea for flowers.

“And these flowers,” Chloe announced to her father, “are for God’s wife.”

“God’s wife?” Russell wondered out loud, and then collected his thoughts. “What is God’s wife’s name?”

“We call her Gloria,” she answered confidentally.

“What does God’s wife do?” Russell wanted to know.

“Same thing God does.” Of course.

“Well, what does God do?”

“Same thing God’s wife does.”

It is Chloe’s way to be nonchalant about the cosmic and fantastic. She knows what she knows, and what she doesn’t know doesn’t worry her. She knows that God is a husband and a wife. She does not know what either God or God’s wife do, but they both alike do it, which is enough to know, for now.

You may call all of this the clever product of a fertile imagination, but you might want to take care how easily you dismiss the contribution the imagination makes to understanding God. If you think you outgrow the need for your imagination in understanding God, how do you think, for instance, about the Trinity? How do you think of the three in the one and the one in the three without imagining it? You can’t take a picture of it. You can’t analyze it in a test tube. It doesn’t show up on an MRI. They haven’t found the Trinity with the Hubble space telescope, no matter how deeply they peer into the heavens. The Trinity isn’t out there in the universe to find. It’s down inside the heart of the believer to understand, and what the heart uses to understand the Trinity is the imagination.

So what you may find interesting to note is that Christians were officially allowed to use their imaginations, the way my granddaughter does, to understand God for about the first three centuries after Christ. People often imagined God as a Father and a Son and a Holy Spirit all those years, but no one ever said you had to, or that you couldn’t talk about God as a woman named Wisdom, as today’s reading from Proverbs did. The truth is, Christians were being persecuted by the Roman emperors most of that time, and church leaders were concentrating on pastoral concerns more than doctrine.

Then the Emperor Constantine turned up, whose mother, inconveniently for persecutors, was Christian, and in ad 313 he declared that the persecutors of Christians had to knock it off. Nobody knows just when it happened, but Constantine himself converted to Christianity somewhere along the line. It had to have been before ad 325, because that’s when he decided that all the bishops in Christendom, about a thousand of them, needed to come together in the city of Nicaea and decide how to write down what all Christians believe about god. Well, it wasn’t going to be what all Christians believed, because some Christians believed things about God that other Christians did not believe. What Constantine meant was that, once all the bishops voted, the majority report would become what all Christian were going to believe. That’s when we got the Nicene Creed.

You can look up the Nicene Creed every Sunday here at Park Presbyterian Church between ten and eleven o’clock. It’s on page 15 of the hymnal, and as you can see, the first paragraph is about God the Father, the second about God the Son, and the third about God the Holy Spirit. The Trinity. This happens because of what a Roman Emperor who had come out of the closet with his faith wanted to do to establish a unified faith for his empire, and the church has been very proud of it ever since.

It’s a good thing the Presbyterians weren’t handling it, because of the 1,000 or so bishops invited, only something between 270 and 313 actually turned up. (People didn’t agree on the actual number.) The point is, there wasn’t a Presbyterian quorum, but it didn’t matter, which was a lucky thing for the bishop Athanasius, because he was using dirty tricks to keep away other bishops, who disagreed with him about the Trinity. So it’s also lucky that there wasn’t a constitutional right to free speech then, either. (Whenever someone tries to tell you that faith and politics don’t mix, you can remind them that the main thing people believe about God in most churches came about from a political process, and a messy one.)

So why is the Trinity so important to the church through all the ages and all the way down to our lifetime, when we know how arbitrary and sometimes even unfair it was the way people came up with it? There a lot of reasons the Trinity is important, of course, not least being that it helped Constantine secure a unified society, and that it was the only way to talk about God as Christianity grew in enormous numbers.

But the Trinity has also been a very serviceable piece of teaching to believe in. If you mostly thought of God as a far deity, up and away and in charge, you could. That was one way to think of God the Father, as long as you allowed for at least two other ways to think of God.. If, though, you liked the experience of a God who is personal, like a wise and trusted friend, there was Jesus, the Son. Just remember there were a couple of options for other people. And then, for those who find meaning and excitement in immediate connection with whatever God is doing and saying right now in the stirrings of contemporary life, the Holy Spirit is the promised force of love, peace and strength that binds you not only with God but with all souls for all time. There are at least three ways to think about God in the Trinity, so the Trinity has been a sign, source and shield for diversity in the church.

Also, the Trinity has been useful in that, while on the one hand it seems to peg God down to a specific definition, on the other hand it’s the sort of definition that slips out of your hand when you try to grab it too hard. “God is one!” Well, good, we’re monotheists. But also, “God is three!” Oh, three Gods? “No, three persons.” (Gr. prosopon = L. persona = face/mask/person) Oh, so God sometimes just alternately puts on the mask of a Son, and other times the mask of a Father. They’re not really different. “No, they are distinct. The Son is not the Father, and neither are either one the Holy Spirit.” But they’re one. “Yes,” the Trinity says, You’ve got it!” It’s a conceptual game you can’t fully master, which may not be comforting in the sense of having mental control of God, but the inability to use the Trinity to pin God down to a definition is the perfect reminder that God is always beyond comprehension. That’s a good thing.

Finally, for now, the Trinity has the advantage of being both scriptural and contemporary, in the sense that there are oodles of texts in the Old and New Testaments where we can see Trinitarian concepts expressed, and in that it was in its time very contemporary in its incorporation of philosophical concepts. The ideas of substance and their natures, for instance, which were key to the debates and used in the language of the Nicene Creed, came from the teachings of secular philosophers in the western world.

Of course, it’s possible to get too much of a good thing, or at least to rely on a thing that is good so long that it becomes not the right thing at all, some of the time.

Suppose, for instance, my granddaughter said, “And these flowers are for God’s wife,” and her father said, “No, Chloe, God can’t have a wife. There’s only three parts of God, and one of them is not a wife. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That’s it.”

What if her father said that? Does anyone think it would be right? I don’t. It would dampen Chloe’s imagination for God at just the moment when she was growing in her care for God. All those bishops got to use their imagination for God—and remember, everyone got to use their imagination for God for about 300 years before the Council of Nicaea—so why would it be right to stop Chloe’s imagination for God now?

Here’s the problem. It’s one thing to have a doctrine, a teaching. It’s something entirely different to call something that’s not that doctrine a heresy. The problem is not that we sometimes need a doctrine. The problem is that some people need to brand other beliefs heresy. Offering believers a consistent explanation for God and reality is to offer them a doctrine. That is a gift. Telling believers who are not helped by the gift that they’re heretics is intolerance. That is a travesty. My granddaughter is not a heretic, not because she expresses a belief in God acceptable to hundreds of bishops, but because the dogmatic idea of heresy applied to her belief is irrelevant. And immoral.

But maybe you still want to be dogmatic, but you also want to be kind. You can say, you think, that she’s a child and that as she gets older, she’ll outgrow cute but wrongheaded notions of God. But is that the case? Or is it the case that other people get older and outgrow their ability to care for God through their own imaginations? Or are they afraid what will happen if too many people start disagreeing with them about God? Or are they afraid that if other people start to become secure in fresh and exciting expressions for God, they’ll start to feel insecure about their stale and tedious expression for God? I don’t know what they’re thinking. I can’t read their minds, but whatever they’re thinking, it isn’t good for imaginative believers or for the church. When people start suppressing the authentic, imaginative engagement others have with God, they cut those others off from a nurturing heritage and the communion of the people of faith, and they cut the church off from a future of vibrancy and relevance.

Several years ago, a group of Presbyterians who wanted to think about God in the way our passage today from Proverbs thinks about God were attacked, derided and condemned by self-appointed protectors of the faith. The group wanted to talk about God as Wisdom—Heb. chokmah; Gr. sophia—a distinctively feminine representation of God. The representation was biblical, which also made it traditional, but it did not fit in with the rigid notions of doctrine held by their detractors, who did not fail to call these renegades heretical. It became an enormous controversy, which, for reasons that still elude me, came to be seen as the fault of the imaginative group that were just being open, responsive and non-coercive.

Something happens in the church at certain times that certain people take as permission to inflict their personal rigidity onto everyone else. In such times, they get to project their own constrained beliefs onto the whole church. A few Southern Baptists, several years back, cleaned house at Southern Baptist seminaries of numerous professors deemed too open minded, and they reversed years of restorative work to include women in church leadership—this, in a denomination with a core conviction that there be no fixed creeds or formal doctrines. Because of this, Jimmy Carter, the world’s most famous Southern Baptist, announced in October of 2000 that he could no longer be part of all that. In Afghanistan, the Taliban have likewise taken over the spiritual environment with their truly brutal intolerance, especially toward women. Intolerance is a human failing in every religion, never a spiritual gift. There are people in every religion that know how to be intolerant.

But the Trinity is not for intolerance. The Trinity is for faith. As far as you can even call something so conceptually elusive as the Trinity a doctrine, it is a doctrine that requires a supple mind and an ability to anchor faith in a belief that was influenced by the shifting sands of history and the changing tide of human thought. The Trinity, as a doctrine, is a work of faith when it is liberating, open to question, answerable to doubt and resistant to fear.

The Trinity is a work of faith when it encourages imagination and engages people with one another in trust and hope. When I think of the Trinity, in other words, I do not think of God as out there in some triangular closed system. I think of God and community and my life: one in three and me. The Trinity, like the Sabbath, is made for us, not us for the Trinity. The Trinity is the theological servant of a hopeful, imaginative church.

And the Trinity would like the idea that God’s wife occasionally gets flowers. Amen.