Maybe you’re wondering, is there something big about today? Because that reading from Genesis was long, and dramatic. Today is Trinity Sunday, the only Sunday of our church year where we give our attention to a doctrine, rather than an event. It always heralds the beginning of the long season of Pentecost or “ordinary time,” which will take us through the summer, and fall, and all the way to Advent. Trinity Sunday.
The Trinity hardly needs its own feast day, it’s so central to our worship every single week. Our prayers end invoking it, each of the three sections of the Nicene Creed is devoted to the three persons of the Trinity, we bless in the name of the Trinity, dismiss in the name of the Trinity, sing songs to it. The hymn we opened with today, St. Patrick’s breastplate, perhaps the most famous of hymns for this day, is as hard to sing as the Trinity is to understand. It seems fitting somehow.
It sometimes surprises people to learn that, while the Trinity features so prominently in our worship and tradition, it hardly appears in Scripture at all. The early Christians had to get creative when it came to finding--as they wanted to do--a basis in the Bible for their emerging understanding of God as three persons in one being, or God working and manifesting in these three different ways.
In the New Testament, Paul mentions the Spirit, the Father and Jesus, and there are a couple scattered Gospel passages that you could say are pointing in the direction of an eventual Trinity. Some of those always make up our readings for this day. Today’s passage from the end of Matthew’s Gospel is regarded by most scholars to have been a later addition to the Gospels, since most agree Jesus himself never talked about God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
It was a normal practice for the earliest Christians to comb back through Jesus’ teachings but also the Hebrew Scriptures to look for evidence of the Trinity even if no one yet would have understood it in those terms.
And so, Genesis. “Let US make man, in OUR image,” says God in Genesis chapter 1 verse 26, the creation of humans. It’s not the Royal We. It’s probably a holdover from when Judaism--not yet called Judaism--was polytheistic, with its pantheon of gods like other faiths surrounding it.
But to first century Christians looking back on this, this “we” seemed Good evidence of a Trinity. With us from the very beginning, shaping creation, guiding our first ancestors as it guides, protects and supports us today. God the Father is bringing everything into being in companionship with the Son, who existed from before time, and the Holy Spirit.
It’s a lot to take in.
In the Episcopal tradition we say that prayer shapes belief. “Lex orandi, lex credendi.” The law (or rule) of prayer is the law of belief. If you want to know what we believe, you won't find it in books of doctrine or carefully worded confessions of faith. You’ll hear it professed in our worship. It’s why our worship is so beautiful--not just the music, but the language. Because so much depends on each and every word being as well placed and chosen as possible. This is important to us.What I love about this is that it elevates our beliefs to the level of mystery, or you could say, moves it down, from head to heart.
Even the Nicene Creed, which is the best distillation of faith we have, said weekly, even this we treat not as much a statement of belief to be cognitively grasped (thank goodness) but a hymn or a poem to be recited, together, a celebration of mystery more than an assertion of certainty.
If you think what matters most is that you intellectually grasp it (and anything we do here), then all this is hard to accept. But if you think what matters most are those things we express in mystery, and poetry, because they express truths that are greater, and bigger, than anything our minds will ever understand, then this Episcopal way of looking at things might come as some relief.
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You’ve gathered by now I will not be explaining the Trinity. :)
Today is a celebration of higher truths. Some might say it’s a celebration of the absurd, in the spirit of the Catholic monk and mystic Thomas Merton who said “Suddenly there is a point where religion becomes laughable. Then you decide that you are nevertheless religious.”
You have to push past that impulse that says, This has to make sense. It doesn’t. It won’t. That’s an admission of humility. At the heart of our faith lies a doctrine that I can’t explain, you can’t explain, Augustine of Hippo, St. Thomas Aquinas, no priest and no pope can explain. Which is another way of saying, at the heart of our faith lies a mandate to humility.
A couple weeks ago a group of us gathered after church with our elementary kids to talk about Communion in preparation for them joining me today at the altar. At one point in our instruction, one kid took the wafer, held it up, and almost defiantly said “explain to me how THIS becomes the flesh of Jesus.”
I said I couldn’t. There’s another mystery. I felt like then and there that child was entering the second stage of life where, for a while, reason holds sway. There’s a Zen saying for this--and pardon all the Buddhist references of late. It goes:
Before studying Zen men are men and mountains are mountains.
While studying Zen men are no longer men and mountains are no longer mountains.
After studying Zen, men are men and mountains are mountains.
It starts simple and it ends simple, but the middle, where reason attempts to prevail, is confusing. Most must pass through that stage, and should. But returning to the ease and comfort of childhood when it comes to hard things is truly a joy, when we get there. Or begin to.
So here we are on Trinity Sunday, celebrating the mystery of this doctrine and those higher truths we can’t understand, but that give our life so much meaning and--importantly--keep us mindful of our place.