Colin Miller
Trinity Sunday 2009
Isaiah 6:1-8, Canticle 13, Romans 8:12-17, John 3:1-17
Today is Trinity Sunday. And “Trinity” is a word we use to describe God. So today is about God.
So my sermon will be about God. And I’m sure I will be exhaustive in my treatment.
We have already said and done lots of things today about God. We have blessed God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Perhaps you crossed yourself while you said that with three fingers held together to signify the one God who is three persons. In the Collect Rhonda proclaimed that we confessed God as eternal glorious Trinity, Father Son and Holy Spirit who lives and reigns forever and ever. The Gloria we often sing extols the Father and the Son and ends with a solemn bow at the praise of “Jesus Christ with the Holy Spirit in the glory of God the Father.” We will of course go on in the Creed to be most explicit about all of this. And then in the very heart of the Mass we will once again beg the Father to send his Holy Spirit upon bread and wine to make them the Body and Blood of Christ. The Eucharist itself is Trinitarian.
During the week we start each service of Morning and Evening Prayer by giving glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit as it was in the beginning is now and will be forever. We say the Apostle’s Creed: I believe in God, I believe in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, and I believe in the Holy Spirit. We often close by asking that the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all evermore. The officiant then bows and blows out the candles on the kneeler in front of a Trinitarian icon.
All this means that when we worship “God” we name thereby a very specific Divinity and therefore exclude many others. I give you three.
First, by “God” we do not name a perfect, all-powerful being who made everything, perhaps set it in good, scientific working order and sent it on its way to carry out its fated course, and whom it makes good sense to venerate in case he cares about things like that. Our God is not the biggest, abstract thing you can imagine, taking occasional interest in the world at really big events like wars and national elections, Duke-Carolina games. God is no more an old white man with a beard man than God is Morgan Freeman. That God is detached form the world, perhaps interested in strictly enforcing a moral code, or in meting out karma, or in condemning mean people or murderers or Hitler types.
And sometimes, even in churches that should know better, there is a variant on this which can look like the God we proclaim but is not. This is the second false god. For it rightly sets Jesus in some relation to God, but one which ends up simply making him a really good guy, or maybe even a special prophet God sent to give us an example of what it is to be moral, or loving, or who shows us once and for all that God love us, or who had a great social vision, or who really wanted to reform Judaism, or who just wanted to say that everyone is welcome, or that God’s nature is love after all. If this is all there is to Jesus, then we do not worship the Trinity.
Thirdly, but equally, to participate in Trinitarian worship is to deny that we all have a little spark of God within us which just needs the right care in order for us to reach our full potential. God is not a personal spirit or guardian angel that each one of us experiences differently, not the life-force which unites us all in a big bond of love and just wants us to tolerate each other. Oprah’s spirituality is not Trinitarian Orthodoxy.
You and I know that these gods and many others are on offer. But by coming to the Eucharist we proclaim that we belong to another.
Specifically, our God is one with a history of continuous and ongoing interaction with his creation. And to worship the Trinity is to claim that this interaction happened in a very specific, if peculiar, story that we tell, for instance, in the Eucharistic Prayer. Prayer B says that, as the culmination of his calling people of Israel and preaching through her prophets God the Father sent his Eternal Word, his Son Jesus, to be borne incarnate and to be the Savior of the world who delivered us from error, sin and death.
But just think for a moment about how strange that story is. God calls the tiny tiny people of Israel – a bunch of Egyptian serfs, preaches to them by his very strange prophets (we read a while back about Ezekiel laying on that brick for a year; you know –camel hair, wild locust, etc). The Father then sends something called his “Eternal Word.” First of all, why should God have an Eternal Word at all? What’s that? And this Word becomes human, without a biological father, by some poor 12 or 15 year old Jewish girl, and so thereafter is ever suspected of being a bastard. This Jesus guy was executed by the state, oh and by the way was also the savior of the world. The same prayer goes on to remind us that in this story the third actor, the Spirit, continually makes this same Jewish beggar present to us when we eat his flesh and drink his blood (no wonder the early Christians were accused of cannibalism). Moreover we hear that by such eating and drinking the Spirit makes the church into that same Jewish guy’s body: “living members of the body of the Son.”
This is the God we celebrate today.
What’s more, this God has this crazy story in spite of being in perfect harmonious communion of love among the Three Persons from all eternity. And what this takes us back to, actually, is that Trinitarian icon I mentioned earlier that seeks to display something of that eternal nature.
The Three Persons are gathered around a table. Table fellowship is at the very heart of God. The very divine nature has something to do with eating together. The eternal dynamism of that infinite power and love is displayed in nothing grander than a shared meal.
But then, if we draw our eyes back, and look at the gathering as a whole, we are struck by the fact that there appears to be space at the table for another. And this is where it is important that this icon actually portrays two moments at once. The name of the icon is the “Hospitality of Abraham”. At one and the same time it displays the Trinity and the story from Gen 18 of Abraham offering three strangers food, shelter and rest. And of course that this one image portrays these two things is anything but accidental. For to worship the Trinity is to worship a God who has provided hospitality for us and who even has left room at the table for us to commune with the divine nature.
And God does this by emptying himself and taking our nature. God has invited us in by assuming our very poverty, and by dying for us. The Trinity provides us hospitality by paying a high price. And of course, because God offers us such hospitality, St. Peter says that we become partakers of the divine nature.
And this means that we too will provide costly hospitality, for that is what the divine nature does. God has saved a place for us to commune with that divine nature that God is. But thereby God makes us hospitable. The Trinity takes on pain, poverty, sin, filth, and even death in order to fill an opening at the table. And we will do this because in it we will find the fulfillment of our deepest longing. In it we will find joy.
This means that St Rublev was right when he painted that icon that human nature most approaches the divine when it says with Abraham from Gen 18 “let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. And I shall bring a little food that you may refresh yourself.”
Thanks be to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
