Not the Trinity!

Holy Trinity 6/7/09

John 3:8

Grace and peace to you from God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit—the Trinity!

An apple. A triangle. A three-leaf clover. But three of the many visual aids employed by good pastors and Sunday School teachers to “explain” the Holy Trinity to their charges. With varying levels of success. It helps a little—it would be better to have a model.

The problem being there is no real model for the Trinity—you can’t find it in nature, and you can’t glue some pieces of a kit together and there you have it. The Trinity. A model. Like the “Visible Man.” Remember that? It was a model of a man, but his skin was transparent, so you could see all the bones and innards. Very educational! Yup, too bad there’s no “Visible Trinity.” Make things a whole lot easier.

Because apples, triangles, and three-leaf clovers just can’t cut it. For the most part, these symbols are simply earthly signposts, pointing to a heavenly reality. At their very best, they’re good examples of how things can be three, and yet one. But at their very worst, they could lead one off into a skewed understanding of what the Trinity is. Heresy? Not really—more the misunderstanding of a concept that’s hard to pin down..

But there was a lot of accusations of heresy bandied about back in the day—as the concept of the Trinity was being extruded from biblical and philosophical raw materials, both rightly and wrongly, by the early church fathers and bishops, first appearing in about 180 AD. It was then wrangled over for several hundred years before being solidified into a doctrine in the deliberations of the great ecclesiastical councils of Nicaea (AD 325) and Constantinople (AD 381).

But enough church history! Let’s cut to the part where I explain the Trinity to you using some devilishly clever illustration of my own device. Un-uh. Nope. Not gonna do it. Because, even though I am quite clever, whatever I eventually came up with would still miss the mark and possibly send you careening off into Trinitarian No Man’s Land. There’s just no easy explanation of this doctrine, or teaching of the church.

So—what? Do we retreat in an orderly fashion to the place where I admit that I am in awe of the ineffability of the Trinity, and therefore defer to the wonder of God’s mysteriousness? Saying that some things are better left a mystery, that God has revealed all we need to know about the Trinity—we don’t need to know how it “works.” Well, that’s true—but the appeal of the utter mystery of God is short-lived for many of you, excepting those who really get into that contemplative, meditative type of spirituality (Good for you!).

Instead, for most of us, that supermarket checkout paper says it all—inquiring minds want to know! We want to know all there is to know about the Trinity because we are intrinsically curious beings. But also, at a very basic level, it’s because we don’t want to think of God as “out on the loose” (as Pastor Kelly Fryer, the keynote speaker at the Synod Assembly put it). We want God to be carefully defined, and safely boxed up so he’s there when we need to take him out. But a Triune God who defies explanation or codification is one who might do anything at any time—unpredictably, surprisingly, and definitely not according to our plan. How do we keep track of such a deity? How does it work?

In his clandestine conversation with Jesus, Nicodemus never asked Jesus about the Trinity. Too bad—would have made things considerably easier for us all. Instead he asks about being “born from above,” not being able to fit this concept into his first century religious world view. Jesus understands that Nicodemus has trouble with the mystery of God working in the world, so he says this: “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.”

In other words God does what God wants to—all other details are unavailable to us. But if we take notice of God, like when we take notice of the wind, see it move the trees, hear its sounds, feel the coolness of it on our skin, when we really look for God, then we will likewise see clues as to God’s triune presence—we taste the bread and wine, we hear the word proclaimed, we feel the hugs in time of need, we see the work being done in that name, and we catch a whiff of the Kingdom from the cups of coffee in the hands of those gathered together in Christian fellowship.

We can’t see God, any more than we can see the wind. But we can tell that God is loose in the world and can be expected in any place, at any time, in any situation. Even the most surprising! Even the most dreadful, too.

But that doesn’t help us understand the Trinity, or does it? It kind of hearkens back to Moses and the burning bush. When Moses asked whom he should say directs Pharaoh to let the Israelites go, God answers, “Tell him ‘I AM’ or better yet ‘I will be what I will be!’”

Now, that’s not helpful. Because if God is what God will be—then God could be anything. Realizing this, however, it may be possible, and even preferable to get at the Trinity from the perspective of negative logic. Or in other words—discovering what the Trinity is by looking at what we have come to agree upon that the Trinity is NOT. I know it sounds backwards. That’s because it is. But it will work—I promise. Let me show you how this negative logic works.

Way, way back in the old days—like the early nineteen-nineties—there was a television show called “Dinosaurs” which was a take off of a routine family situation comedy—the gimmick being all the actors were dressed in dinosaur costumes. Now, every sit com has its character with catch phrases, and this show had a baby dinosaur—cute as a scaly button, who instead of calling his father Da Da, gave this zinger – usually accompanied by hitting him on the head with anything within reach—he’d say, “Not the Mamma!” He defined his daddy, not by who he was, or by something about him, but by who he was not. He was “Not the Mamma.”

In the same way, we can look at what the Trinity is not, to affirm what it is instead. Get it? Good, but before we do that we have to answer an important question. And that is, “What difference does this make in my life?” Outwardly – not much. You’d look the same if you had no firm grasp on the Trinity. But acknowledging the three-in-one God as a basis for the grounding of your faith is something completely different. Because the triune God is all about relationship. And that makes a big difference in our faith—for as God relates Father, Son, and Spirit to each other—God relates to us as well. Us! But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The first NOT is this (and it’s a bigg’un): The doctrine of the Holy Trinity does not appear in chapter or verse of the Bible. Oh, there’s plenty mention of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But what the church believes and confesses in the great creeds is only implicitly present in scripture, rather than explicitly. As one author puts it, Trinitarian doctrine is human language trying to catch up with the reality of who God is.

What can we affirm then about the Trinity from this NOT? We affirm that God is triune, we don’t make it so with a doctrine. That’s important, because a god created by you and I could only be a false god. As it is we know that God, the Father, son and spirit existed before time (Genesis 1:1-2)

NOT number two. The persons of the Trinity are NOT subordinate to each other. The Father is not the King, Jesus is not the prince, and the Spirit is not the messenger pigeon. There is not a hierarchy in the Trinity. The Father, Son, and Spirit are what you could call “co’s.” Co-eternal and co-existent. The Son was not created, or adopted, he was, is and ever will be God.

Now, there’s some of you out there who might say, “Isn’t the relationship of son to father subordinate by default? Doesn’t Jesus’ obedience to the father reveal a chain of command? And doesn’t the Spirit’s being “sent” denote some form of hierarchical roles being played?

Well. Yes, no, and nice try. Yes, the relationship of son to father is subordinate—at least the earthly relationship is. But scripture makes it obvious that Jesus relates to his father in heaven in a much different way. Jesus said, “The Father and I are one.” (John 10:30) That’s way different.

Second objection—answer, no. Rather than taking orders to be obeyed, Jesus is simply affirming his participation in the plan for salvation that God created. His obedience is his commitment.

As for the last one—nice try with the sent spirit—it almost appears logical. But I send letters all the time, and I don’t have a power relationship with that letter. Or with the postal worker who delivers it, for that matter. Same with the Spirit. And there’s plenty of times in the bible when the Spirit just suddenly descends upon someone—without the formality of sending.

So all that aside, what does this NOT tell us about what the Trinity is? It reveals the unity of the Trinity. A three in one God could not be three in one if two of the persons were subservient to the third. It would be like putting a big blanket in the washer on one side, and two hand towels on the other. When that washer gets to “spin,” it is gonna clank and clunk and move all around the basement. Because it’s not in balance. The Trinity’s triunion is even more well-balanced—the Father, Son, and Spirit are one “being.”

A real quick one: The Trinity is NOT three distinct, separate Gods. We are not Tritheists, we are Monotheists. What we do have in the Trinity is three separate, distinct persons who are also, simultaneously one being—God. As the Athanasian creed puts it—there is Father, who is God, the Son, who is God, and the Spirit, who is also God—but there is only one God.

One last one for today—although there’s plenty more we could talk about. The NOT that may be the hardest to give up. The three persons of the Trinity do NOT act individually. They are infinitely relatable. The Trinity is the ultimate example of true relationship. The Father, Son, and Spirit are perfectly “in tune” with one another. Perfectly in time. Like our first hymn this morning suggested—the Trinity is a dance—and the Father never steps on the Son’s toes, and the Spirit doesn’t get voted off. Because they move, act, think as one. And that is what the creation is destined for: the circle dance that is the Trinity growing to include us klunky human beings, made into dancers by our relationship with God through Jesus Christ. When God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – is all in all, catching us up in their dance.

Hear the good news for today: God the Father who created you, God the Son, who enacted your death to sin, and God the Holy Spirit, who is your advocate and guide, are one God, which is drawing you ever nearer to perfect relationship.

That’s the Trinity! AMEN