Sermon: Trinity Sunday

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Trinity Sunday

By Charles Rush

June 5, 2005

day we come to the end of the high holy season in the Christian calendar. It begins at Christmas, continues through Epiphany, lent, Easter, Pentecost. This Sunday is called Trinity Sunday which sort of focuses the whole point of the season in case you might have missed the point in the past 6 months.

It reminds me of those highway signs we used to have in the country in the South. You would be driving along a country highway in Virginia and there would be a bill board that says ‘30 miles to Myrtle's Fireworks and Cheneel bedspreads'. A little while later another one would read ‘25 miles to Myrtle's Fireworks and Cheneel bedspreads'. Then 10 miles, then 5 miles, then 4,3,2,1, 800 ft., 400 ft., next right... and then the proverbial ‘You just passed Myrtle's Fireworks and Cheneel bedspreads.' You feel like you know ol' Myrtle by the time her tacky store appears on the horizon and you can't pass her by anymore than not visit your Aunt Louise if she were near by.

The Trinity is a complex subject. In fact, there is nothing very simple about theology. John puts the matter as plainly as possible when he says that ‘God is Love'. That means that God is fundamentally relational. Firstly, God is relational in Godself and secondly, God is relational with the world.

I can only speak to two parts of the Trinity this morning: God as our source, and God as our Scope (or telos, the goal towards which we are headed)

God is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; better yet, God is Source, Sustainer, Scope. We might make an analogy with the origin of the universe, the Big Bang. There is an inscrutable mystery to the origin of the universe. And there is an inscrutable mystery to God, the orignator.

As you probably know, the consensus opinion in physics at the present, is that there was an actual beginning to the universe. As you probably know, the consensus opinion in physics is that there is an end to the universe and a shape. It is thought to be spherical. Even in high school, these two axioms presented questions to a group of us. The first was, if there is a limit to the size of the universe, what is on the other side? The second was, if there is an origin to the universe, if matter is not eternal as Stephen Hawking had argued for many years, then what preceded the Big Bang? At the time, our Physics professor responded, "You can take those questions down to the philosophy department when you get to college."

Since there are limits to our ability to comprehend the universe, there is necessarily an inscrutable mystery to the cosmos. Now if we consider that God is continuous with the physical universe and transcends it as well, then there is a similar inscrutable mystery to God's essential being.

Sometimes I tell my Confirmands that when you conceive of God, it is helpful to primarily think of God as the force or the energy that pervades the world as we know it.

There is an unknowable dimension to God which is part of what we mean when theologians say that first that God is social in God self. At the origin of the universe, as we presently understand it, all the mass of the universe was concentrated in an area no bigger than a pinhead. As it exploded out, within the first milliseconds, it proceeded according to laws that are regular and predictable and make up the structure of the universe. Why these laws and not others? How is it that these laws are given in the structure of things at the beginning? Is time absolute in chronology-(in other words, did it come to be in the origin of the universe)-or, was there something before the beginning? These are cosmological questions that beg theological answers.

John gives the shortest theological answer to the question when he says ‘God is love'. That means that God does not need the world; our existence is not necessary. Theologians traditionally say that God is internal self-subsistent. But out of the freedom of God, God graciously creates the universe and God relates to the world in and through the structure of the universe. God is social, relational. God is the force that began existence; God upholds existence each second; God pulls existence towards its fulfillment. It is helpful to think of God as the "Evolutionary Life Force" that is shaping our world.

God our Source

There was once a missionary to Southeast Asia who was talking to a bushman about God. In the middle of this discussion the bushman turned to the missionary and asked him, ‘Who is this God that you worship?' Somewhat taken back, the missionary pulled out a small icon that had a picture of Jesus on a cross. The bushman looked at it, turned it all around, and said quite literally, ‘you worship a very small god'.

There is more truth to this than we like to admit. The world view of the Bible, essentially the same world view of ancient Greeks and Romans, thought of the heavens as above the clouds and hell as somewhere under the earth, deep under the earth in a cold, dark cave. That is the way Homer depicts the after life in the Odyssey. There is some sense in which this image lingers in the back of our mind even today, which is why we have a hard time thinking about God seriously.

It helps to reorient ourselves by encountering the profound depth of the world right around us, which ancient people undoubtedly did more fully than we do. I was at the Cliff dwellings at Bandaleer, just north of Santa Fe, New Mexico with an anthropologist who explained that Native American, hunting and gathering communities, migrated with the seasons and only had to work 2-3 days a week. Their needs were simple, as was their diet, and the food and game was relatively plentiful and accessible.

‘So how did they spend most of their time?' I asked.

‘They spent a lot of time in the evening looking at the sky.' Anyone who has ever been out there knows just how big the sky is, and how bright the stars are.

Our understanding of the depth and breadth of the universe is far more profound today. Just as it is difficult to actually take in the Universe as a concept, so the real Creator is actually much bigger and more majestic than our imagination can take in. The real God through a primary experience of our universe is fairly overpowering and almost always produces in people a sense of incredible awe where they immediately bend their knee and worship. Our text for this morning says that the disciples, upon seeing the resurrected Christ ‘worshipped him'. We don't know what happened to them but something way out of the ordinary happened to them and they were overwhelmed. When Moses came into the presence of God he had the immediate sense that the very ground was holy and he took off his shoes and knelt down. Isaiah had some experience of God that was so profound that he simply said ‘my lips are unclean' and refused to speak. There is an awareness of a great and profound presence. This is the experience of God our Source.

It is something real, direct, and profound. I think it must be something like the experience of the lead scout for Lewis and Clark. Imagine moving across uncharted America, sparsely inhabited with a strange people that you cannot communicate with at all. You are never quite sure what is up ahead. The group has been lurching forward through brush, up and down hills. Finally, you reach a plateau of desert tumbleweed you travel across for some days. One day make camp for the evening and while everyone else is setting up, you travel on ahead to get some idea of what tomorrow holds when you notice that in the distance the plateau falls off. Drawing near the edge, you look down and then out and out and out, peering for the first time into the vastness of the Grand Canyon. What is it? You have never seen anything like it. You have no words to describe. There is a hush for the moment. This is the hush of taking in full reality, not some facsimile, but reality without borders around the edge, reality which profoundly shapes you. Mircea Eliade used to call it the mysterium tremendum and it brings with it a certain reorientation of our lives. It is not only awe inspiring but we have a sense of ourselves and our place in the world.

This is the first thing about the significance of the Trinity. We are in awe before the mystery and the majesty of a God bigger than the universe and intimately woven in and through the universe who does reach out and make contact with us.

God our Scope

And the second thing is a slightly different recognition. It is an awe that is like unto fear. One of the principal elements of the Trinity is that it shows the inner consistency in the Godhead. God's acts correspond to God's being. God is love and God acts in a loving manner. God is consistent. We are not. And in the presence of God, this becomes manifestly evident.

Continually you read in the bible that people who have had a direct encounter with God, and not many people have such an encounter, and they all have a sharp and jarring change of perspective. They see themselves for who they really are, almost instantaneously, and it is alarming and very sobering at the same time.

I met a missionary once who worked in Zimbabwe. He told me of the experience of being out back of his house in the early evening, walking rather absent mindedly, when he heard a quiet, tremolos, low pitched roar. In the same instant his mind registered the overpowering scent of a Lion. Looking to his left, he saw crouched, rippling with taut muscles, a full grown Lion twenty feet from him.

His whole perspective on life changed in a instant. He realized just how incredibly slow he was, how truly weak he was, and how little control he really had over his destiny. Reality just shot right through him in an instant, qualitatively more profound than ever before.

We have allusions to this primordial experience of people reported in scripture, not only Moses and Isaiah, but also the women who visit Jesus tomb and see an angel or the disciples in our text. They are filled with an awesome fear. They are in the presence of a force that sees right through them, who sees them for what they really are.

And the reaction of the people has a remarkable similarity to it. They are afraid with shame. Why? They are in the presence of the Spirit of fundamental goodness. And in that moment they become aware of their own inadequacy. They are in the presence of the Spirit of integrity and consistency and they become aware of their own hypocrisy and duplicity.

This is why the Bible records the acts of God. Since God is consistent, Gods acts illustrate the being of God. In the Exodus, God delivers people out of bondage and points them towards a promised land. And through Jesus we see the embodiment of the meaning of God's love and mercy for us. Whatever else God is, God is not different from this.

Jesus tells us repeatedly that we are accepted by God, that we are forgiven, that we need not be afraid because we are loved by God. And we need to be told this quite a few times because we know that we are inadequate. And we know that we put up these fronts for other people to hide our inadequacies from other people, even from ourselves. In a fully spiritual moment, in the presence of God, this all becomes transparent and we do not really believe that we are acceptable as we are. Jesus has to tell us that we are becoming the children of God.

The other teaching about the Trinity is that God is our Scope. God, so to speak, is pulling us in a direction. Jesus described it as the coming Kingdom of God. Those were the spiritual qualities towards which we are evolving.

Again, we can make an analogy from the structure of the universe. There is a direction to the course of the evolution of the physical universe. We have evolved on earth from the inorganic to the organic, to ever higher forms of biological existence, to consciousness, to higher form of consciousness (in animals), and finally to self-consciousness in humans.

This physical evolution towards complexity has a corresponding spiritual evolution towards a more concentrated interior life. As you move up the chain of complexity, we become more self-directed, more self-consciousness. Humans are still driven by hormones, by the changing of the seasons, but we can over ride those forces by force of will if we choose to. Our self-directed rational faculties, our moral judgments can override instinct and define what we characteristically think of as our human freedom. In our generation, this spiritual interiority has made a definitive leap in terms of world evolutionary development. Only in the past 60 years have we developed the capacity to destroy the earth completely with the advent of the nuclear bomb. And only in the past 10 years have we developed the capacity to materially alter our own course of evolution through genetic engineering. We have finally reached a genuinely Promethean moment, a coming of Age from which we have much graver responsibility and from which we cannot escape. There is no going back.

God is our scope, pulling us towards higher consciousness or spiritual being, the Kingdom of God. There is direction towards which we are headed and this is the Spirit that pulls through the universe.

Charles Darwin pointed out numerous examples in the plant and animal kingdom of the ethic of competition in the lower forms of evolutionary development. The goal is being able to reproduce and so animals favor the virtues of aggression, strength, quickness, cunning, lethal violence, developing an advantage, deploying effective deception. And to a certain extent, humans still utilize these.

But we also recognize that as we develop socially and spiritually, that competition becomes displaced by the virtues of cooperation. When we look at our really great achievements, like putting a man on the moon, what made them great was the vast team of people working in a coordinated fashion that achieved more by a geometric factor than the sum total of the individuals would be able to.

Jesus pointed us towards those higher virtues that make for the cooperative spirit. He taught us the value of understanding, of inclusion, of forgiveness, of empathy and compassion. He showed us that the fuller spiritual life thinks about reconciliation and the things that make for peace. Jesus taught us the way of love. These constitute the Good life, the deeper moral life, a life of community. Jesus taught us that this is where God is pulling us, towards the Kingdom of God.

And as that life of cooperation manifests itself, as community develops, the world around us blooms in beauty. Immanuel Kant used to say that the aesthetic life, the life of beauty is but another dimension of goodness and truth. We create a garden for ourselves, a temple.

This is what we mean when we say that God is our Source, our Sustainence, our Scope: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. I recognize that this is a bit more intellectual than usual on a Sunday. But, I wanted briefly to think out loud with you combining the values that we learn from scripture with our understanding of the world to re-conceptualize what we mean by God, so that at a minimum, God makes more sense of our world than not. I know that for me, and I trust for you too, that reflecting on the Source, the Structure and the end of the universe carries with it an inherent awe and wonder that leads quite naturally to worship. This God is a marvel. Amen.