It's a Mystery

 

It’s widely accepted that one of the least favourite Sundays of preachers far and wide is today – Trinity Sunday. Ask anyone who regularly preaches if they can remember the first time they had to preach on Trinity Sunday, and they won’t hesitate! If you’re wondering, mine was while at theological college in Cambridge, the year that Trinity Sunday fell the day after the May Ball – not a particularly glamorous or affluent ball, but one that nonetheless involved a survivors’ breakfast!) And most likely, those folk you ask to recall their first experience of preaching on Trinity Sunday will remember subsequent years too as they face the annual challenge: How to explain God this year – the God who is three-in-one and one-in-three? - Ice, water, steam (gas, liquid, solid)? Sun, light and heat? A three leafed clover? A piece of fruit – core, flesh and skin? The different roles one person plays – parent, child, sibling? In my title parish, one lady made a specific point of wishing me luck, saying that in forty years of churchgoing she had never heard anyone make sense of the Trinity!

 

So what is it that so many, myself included, find so challenging? Well, first, I should point out that Trinity Sunday is very much a construct of the Church, and in a sense pure doctrine. Trinity is not a word you’ll encounter anywhere in the Bible. The closest you’ll come is our New Testament reading from 2 Corinthians, when Paul – in a phrase now known as “The Grace”, talks of the “grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit“. Even here, this is not a theological concept, but simply Paul giving voice to his experience of God, based on first-hand encounter.

 

Trinity Sunday is the only Sunday in the church’s year that is based not on an event, not on a part of Jesus’ life or ministry, nor on a particular saint, but on a doctrine. It is based solely on human attempts to explain the nature of God. That explanation was thrashed out by the early church amidst much controversy and was the closest they could come to a shared understanding of the mystery they sought to define.

 

So, I’m afraid if you’re looking for explanations, you’ve come to the wrong place. , I don’t think our understanding God is part of the big design. I don’t think we’re meant to or ever can understand God, and I’m absolutely certain that we cannot explain God. What I believe is really important, what is at the heart of the matter when it comes to thinking about the Trinity, is not explanation, but experience.

 

In a wonderful book entitled “The Collage of God”, Mark Oakley - in a self-confessed sweeping generalisation - suggests that “religious people fall into two basic categories.” First, there are those who want to resolve the mystery of God, to teach and preach it clearly, to spell out the facts as they are believed, to behave like a reporting journalist (‘our God correspondent’) and relay information in black and white language to those not ‘in the know’. On the other hand, there are those who, instead of wanting to resolve the mystery, seek to deepen it. Such people are uneasy with such words as ‘simply’ or ‘easily’, they are willing to get tongue-tied, to say, ‘I don’t know’, to embrace the evocative multi-layered languages of poetry and music in their search for God. They have come to believe that truth is not the same thing as the elimination of ambiguity.”

 

My feet are firmly planted in this latter camp. I don’t want to explain the Trinity, because I enjoy the mystery, the otherness of God, the wonder of God. I revel in it.

 

However, I do want to offer some reflections upon the mystery of God, and to look more closely at how we experience and relate to God, because for me, that’s what the Trinity is all about – relating.

 

Today’s Old Testament reading points us not towards understanding or explanation, but towards experience. In the very beginning of Genesis we see, right from the foundation of the earth, the special relationship between God and humanity found in creation; in God desiring an ongoing relationship with humankind and giving humankind dominion over the earth – that dominion being of course, not power over, but a responsibility to care for the earth and its creatures. It’s a sad irony to reflect upon today when we look at the damage we are wrecking upon the environment and the number of wildlife species facing extinction.

 

"Then God said: 'Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness' . . . So God created humankind in God's image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them." When God speaks, this is not “the royal we”. Nor does God does not say “Let me - or one -  create humankind in my - or one’s - image”, but “Let us create humankind in our image.” God is already – always was and has been, three in one and one in three – co-existing in relationship with one another. We too are created for relationship and we can become whole only in relationship with God and with one another. God is omnipotent and has no need of our input as stewards of creation, and yet, in and because of God's love for us, God trusts creation to humankind. God wants to share that love and the outpouring and outworking of that love with us.

 

The American theology professor and former priest Barbara Brown Taylor, whose writings have been one of my top discoveries of the last year, in some of her many reflections on preaching, says of Trinity Sunday, “I do not know why we hold ourselves responsible for explaining things that cannot be explained.” There is a story that Augustine of Hippo, the Christian bishop and theologian who lived in North Africa in the fourth and fifth century, was one day walking along the beach by the ocean and pondering the deep mystery of God the Holy Trinity. He met a boy there on the beach who had dug a hole in the sand and kept busy running back and forth from the hole to the ocean; collecting water and pouring it into the hole. Augustine was curious about this, so he asked the boy: “What are you doing?” The boy replied: “I’m going to pour the entire ocean into this hole.” Augustine then said: “That is impossible, the whole ocean will not fit into your hole.” And the boy answered Augustine: “Neither can the infinite God the Holy Trinity fit into your finite mind.”

 

Whether we choose to consider the Creation story as myth, allegory or history, we still cannot explain the conundrums and mystery surrounding the person or persons of God – indeed, I wonder if three is enough – for God is not just Creator, Christ and Spirit, but God is Light, Life, Liberation, Healing, Wisdom, Compassion, Presence, Peace and Love. You could argue that some of those are qualities rather than identities, but they are all essential parts of the being of God. Perhaps one of the positive aspects of Trinity Sunday is exactly that – that we are encouraged to focus on God in terms of being rather than doing – on who God is as opposed to what God does.

 

It was Augustine who wrote the famous prayer addressed to God: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.” My recent trip to New Zealand allowed me to spend a great deal of time outdoors in beautiful places with both time and opportunity to slow down and simply be – to soak up and contemplate the beauty and wonder of creation and in doing so, to revel in the mystery and the wonder of the Creator. For me, the vastness of the ocean never fails to help me regain a healthy sense of perspective, both in terms of my own existence and of the wonder of the sacred, so clearly visible in creation.

 

The wonder is not our need to connect with God, but God’s desire to connect with us – God’s desire for us to allow ourselves to be loved by God. As the Trinity, God is self-sufficient – read any work of theology on the Trinity and you will find descriptions and explanations of how the Trinity comprises three equal beings interwoven and self-sufficient in their relationship of mutuality. Many of the stories and wisdom surrounding Creation convey a Creator who is far from independent but rather delighting in relationship with others.

 

So the reality, the experience, is of a God who craves that relationship of mutuality with humankind. As James Kavanaugh points out, “Notice how “Creator, Sanctifier and Redeemer” – a phrase sometimes used today – portrays the Trinity only in terms of its function with respect to the created world. It misses the point that God’s actual being is relational. There is otherness in God’s oneness. God is the beholder and the beheld, the lover and the beloved.” Augustine went one step further in describing God as “the Lover, the Loved and the act of loving”.

 

Otherness – encountering others - is an essential component in our experiencing God. We may or may not be able to describe or articulate that moment when our faith became real; for some it may have been sudden, for others much more gradual, for some it may not yet have happened, but for each and every one of us, it is most likely to be through an experience of encounter: usually an encounter with a fellow traveller who in some way inspired us, through whom we were first given a glimpse of the divine and its potential in our lives, and then, as we journeyed on, an encounter with a being other than, or outside of ourselves, and yet, a being that at the same time, seems so much a part of us as to be inseparable, closer than our skin.

 

Today, if nothing else, let us use this strange feast to celebrate the many and myriad ways in which we encounter and experience God – in others and in the world around us. As Barbara Brown Taylor reflects:

 

Some days God comes as a judge, walking through our lives wearing white gloves and exposing all the messes we have made. Other days God comes to us as a shepherd, fending off our enemies and feeding us by hand. Some days God comes as a whirlwind who blows all our certainties away. Other days God comes as a brooding hen who hides us in the shelter of her wings. Some days God comes as a dazzling monarch and other days as a silent servant. If we were to name all the ways God comes to us, the list would go on forever: God the teacher, the challenger, the helper, the stranger; God the lover, the adversary, the yes, the no . . . The best any of us has ever been able to do is describe what that experience of God is like – how it sounds, how it feels, what it reminds us of. Whether the experience originates in the pages of Scripture or in the events of our own lives, the best any of us has ever been able to do is simply to confess what it is like when we are in the presence of God . . .

 

Let’s not get caught into the easy trap of Trinity, of trying to understand and explain, let us simply be still, reach out, revel in the sheer mystery and wonder and give thanks. The last line must go to the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins:

 

“. . . tho’ he is under the world’s splendour and wonder,

His mystery must be instressed, stressed;

For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.”

Amen.