Last Thanksgiving, I was out to dinner with a friend from High School whom I had not seen in quite sometime. At some point we discussed my decision to become clergy and he asked if this meant that I now had all of my questions answered. He is not particularly religious and so I am not sure what motivated the question - perhaps he had encountered some religious types who had claimed that they had cornered the market on truth. Anyway I told him that I certainly had not figured everything out and did not plan on doing so anytime in the near future. And while I don’t want to disparage those who claim to know everything, it would seem that not knowing is the more intellectually defensible position. That is admitting that there are lots of things which we will never fully understand. And if there were ever a Sunday on which to admit this Trinity Sunday would seem to be a very good candidate. But before we get into celebrating our ignorance, let’s take a moment and reflect on why today is Trinity Sunday.
Its origins go back to at least Thomas Becket when he served as Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1100’s. He was consecrated on this day (that is the Sunday after Pentecost) and he declared that this day should be a festival to the Holy Trinity. I am not sure why he did – there may be a good reason, but I don’t have access to a good library here so I am having to use the internet for most of my research, which is not always the most trustworthy of sources unless what you are looking for involves cat memes. So instead of relying on the Internet I will give you the reason I think it makes sense. The Church calendar begins in Advent. In that season we are introduced to God the Father. Then comes Christmas through Easter wherein we are introduced to God the Son. And last week we had the rush of the mighty wind and tongues as of fire, which heralded the introduction of God the Holy Spirit. So I am not sure if what I am about to say sounds crude, and if so I apologize, but here goes. If this were a cooking show this is the first Sunday where all of the ingredients necessary to make a Trinity have been assembled.
And now with that out of the way we can get back to not understanding the Trinity. There is an old, most likely apocryphal, story about St. Augustine, the great fifth century theologian not the city in Florida. It seems that after St. Augustine had finished his work, which was entitled “On the Trinity” he went for a walk on the beach. A little ways down the beach he happened upon a small boy who was digging a hole. He asked the boy what he was doing and the boy replied that he was digging a hole so as he could put the ocean into it. St. Augustine is reported to have laughed and told him there was no way that he would be able to dig a hole capable of holding the entire ocean. The boy replied that this might be true but that he had a better chance of accomplishing this than Augustine had of understanding the Trinity.
So what this tells us is that not understanding the Trinity is a very proud tradition within the Christian Church. So why is this? Why is there this lack of understanding? Well the Trinity at its most basic is pretty incomprehensible. It is three persons and one God. Or in the words of the Athanasian creed, “we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; Neither confounding the Persons; nor dividing the Essence. For there is one Person of the Father; another of the Son; and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one; the Glory equal, the Majesty coeternal.” It goes on for a while longer, but you get the idea. Three person and yet one God, distinct and yet one. If you think about it too long your head might hurt a little. And if you push it much further than that and start feeling like you are getting it you are probably committing a heresy. And so this brings up a further question that question is if the Trinity is incomprehensible why do people spend so much time writing about it and talking about it? Well, I think the answer to that question requires us to go in a few different directions, which may or may not be related. And since it is Trinity Sunday I will give you three reasons for why we should pay attention to the Trinity, which is also rather convenient because that is all I can think of off the top of my head and so that’s what you get.
First, just because we can’t fully explain the Trinity, it does not mean that we cannot explain any of it. Most of you have probably heard the Indian fable of the blind men and the elephant. The brief version goes like this: A number of blind men go out to interact with an elephant and each of them end up touching a different part of the Elephant. The first feels the trunk and declares that an elephant must be like a snake, while the second feels its ear and declares that an elephant must be like a large fan. This goes on with each man touching a different part of the elephant declaring the animal to be a certain different thing. And there are lots of conclusions one can reach from this story but the one I want to point out is that each man was right in his own limited capacity. None of them grasped the entirety of the creature, but that does not mean that they did not grasp some of it. We understand something of God the Father, something of God the Son and something of God the Holy Spirit. Certainly not all, but something. And so we should not allow the mystery to keep us from some knowledge.
Second, in explaining what the Trinity is we spend a lot of time explaining
what it isn’t which helps guard against heresy. This is a bit of a theological point and one that would take much more than a few sentences to properly flesh out, but many of the problems in Christian history have been when people understood the Trinity a little too well. That is when, in order to make it comprehensible they took some mental shortcuts and reduced much of the majesty of God as understood in the Trinity and gave us an inferior product.
Which leads us to the third point and that is the Trinity helps remind us, in its
incomprehensibility, something of the vastness of God. The fact of the matter is we need awe and wonder in our lives. We need to have something to reach up to. We can certainly be like the blind men and the elephant and stop with the little piece of God that we understand or we can keep longing, keep stretching striving to gaze on more of God. And while certainly the Trinity reminds us that this side of eternity we will never fully grasp or see God that is not a call to stop looking. The human heart without being called higher will deform and decay. I think our modern times could use a little more mystery. As we have explained more and more things it has made us grow somewhat suspicious of things we cannot understand, but some of the things that make us fully human we do not fully understand. Can anyone fully explain the love they have for their spouse or the beauty of a mountain stream? I would argue that there is something in the inability to fully describe that leads us further up to God. We cannot fully explain love because it comes from God, the same goes for beauty. Explanations and full understandings are fine when you need to fix the water heater, but when your focus is God it will not work because it is simply too much for our human minds to grasp. But God has given us more than reason with which to understand him. The heart strangely warmed as Wesley called it is a perfect and wonderful reaction to the mystery and beauty of the Trinity. We don’t always have to understand things intellectually because God has given us different ways to understand things.
So on this Sunday let’s give three cheers (get it) for the Trinity, that most wonderful and beautiful of mysteries which reveals the vastness and greatness of God so that we may be his both now and forevermore.