Sermon preached by The Rev’d Neil Fernyhough at St. John’s Anglican Church, Sardis, BC, Trinity Sunday (May 18, 2008 )
Readings: Gen 1:1–2:4a; Ps 8; 2 Cor 13:11-13; Mt 28:16-20
“God saw everything he had made, and indeed it was very good.” - Gen 1:31
I have a friend who pushes my buttons by bringing up the subject of the Trinity. Now, Shaun’s Jewish, and for him monotheism – the belief in one God – is nothing if not uncomplicated. A while back he decided to needle me about this as we drove by the Unitarian church at 49th and Oak. “Those people make sense,” he said. “But you,” poking me in the ribs, “How can you claim to be a monotheist and yet believe in three gods?” “So what movie do you want to see tonight?” I replied, and to my great relief he laughed and dropped the subject.
But here today none of us can let the subject drop. This doctrine, which we confess in our creeds and formularies, is conveniently ignored fifty-one Sundays of the year. But this Sunday, the Trinity is in our face. And how can we respond to the question Shaun asks – for it is, I suppose, one we all ask ourselves from time to time.
When I was in seminary I took an elective course in the Trinity. Sadly, or perhaps happily, I seem to have destroyed my notes. But the memory of the jargon remains with me. It’s the sort one might find in a science textbook: ousia and hypostases, divine economy versus divine monarchy – and the many heresies: Modalism, Sabellianism, Noetianism, Homoiousianism, Monophystism. Now, I don’t recall what all these heresies actually professed; I just remember that they all seemed to be sort of the same as one another and pretty reasonable, actually. Nowadays, we forget that people clashed in the streets over questions about Trinitarian doctrine. Indeed, the dispute about whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone or from the Father and the Son precipitated the first major schism in the Church, between the East and the West, one which persists to this day.
To understand the Trinity, we need to put aside the dogmatic controversies of the primitive Church, and return to Scripture. The Bible is, after all, a story about God; specifically, a story about the relationship between God and the creature fashioned in God’s image. And our life as people of faith is spent in working out the nature of this relationship. Thus, it is fitting that Trinity Sunday should stand at the head of the long, six-month season after Pentecost, a season in which we are encouraged to grow in the faith. For it is a day that fixes our gaze upon the subject of our belief – God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Today’s readings, with their different snapshots of God interacting with human beings invite us into the book which is both the guide of our faith, and a story of the relationship between God and God’s people.
Our interactions with one another as Christians are marked by a desire to be in right relationship with God, and to right the relationship between God and all creation. To be in relationship requires mutual understanding and empathy. I need to know with whom it is that I’m getting into a relationship. And when we perceive that a relationship is an unequal one, the one who believes they have less power (us) really wants to know what the one with more power (God) wants and expects. But this is a misperception of the relationship between us and God, and it forms the basis for the power games which Christians are prone to play with one another, and with society. Relationships based on power are, in fact, relationships based on fear, or at least quiescence. But I ask you, how can this be the nature of our relationship with God, when scripture teaches that the divine qualities are ones of grace, love, and communion?
Grace, love, and communion: Reading the creation story, one can’t help but see all three qualities of God at play. We are offered no reason why God created. God just does it out of sheer love, in order that the One might be in communion with the many. However, the mystery and the simplicity of this often fails to satisfy. And so we indulge in power games by attempting to define the parameters of God’s creation. We think that if we can define God, we can control God—or, at least, control our understanding of God. But these efforts – not unlike my class on Trinitarian doctrine – accord power to the abstract intellect over concrete experience and spiritual transformation. After all, our society values reason, while viewing the senses as unreliable, and the spiritual renewal of which Jesus spoke as flaky New Ageism.
Now, this prompts another seminary memory (preaching is sort of like regression therapy) – a memory of a poem by Gary Snyder with which I prefaced my ministry position paper in my final year. Using political movements as an analogy to spiritual awakening, Snyder wrote, “If the abstract rational intellect is the exploiter, the masses is the unconscious and the party is the yogins” – (yogins are those who train their consciousness toward spiritual insight and tranquility) – “and power,” Snyder goes on, “comes out of the seed-syllables of mantras,” (that is, prayer).
What rings true for Snyder, a Buddhist, also rings true for me as a Christian. I have never felt closer to God than when I am on a trail by the ocean, seeing seals playing in the shallows, or turkey vultures circling almost out of sight. Or when someone is honouring me by sharing his or her innermost hopes and fears. Or when I have sat alone in my room or in church, pursuing a passage to God through the seed-syllables of prayer. Real power flows from encounters such as these, and the power cannot be possessed.
It is through prayer that we come to know God, and realise the depth of God’s knowledge of us. Such everyday encounters allow us to see the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit. Seeking the heart of God in Creation, Scripture, prayer, and relationship is the most effective doctrine of the Holy Trinity imaginable. We needn’t make it out to be more complex than it is.
The three distinct manifestations of God are eloquently expressed in today’s long reading from Genesis: the story of Creation. From it we learn that the Father caused to come into being all that is through the Word of God, the Logos, Wisdom, later manifested in Jesus; thus establishing an eternal relationship between being and God. We read of the Spirit, “a wind from God [sweeping] over the waters” filling all that has been made with divine energy, enlivening and sanctifying it. Creation, redemption, sanctification: It is enough to get us started on a journey of inquiry into the depths of God. But we also know that this is a journey that will not end until we come to meet God face to face. If we choose to unburden ourselves of the prideful need to master God, to domesticate and put God in a box or a cage, then we can repose with tranquility in the mysterious communion, the three Persons in one God.
Ambiguity about the nature of the interaction between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is not the same as uncertainty. Rather, God models for us, within God’s very being, the mystic, sweet communion for which we should all strive. God models for us the mystery of absolute unity in diversity, which forms the pattern for Creation, and is the only hope for us, the creature God fashioned from clay. May each of us accept the grace, love, and communion of God to love the many within the One. Amen.
© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2008.
