Bill Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley

Trinity Sunday, May 26, 2024

Year B: Isaiah 6:1-8; Psalm 29; Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17

Today, we’re at the midpoint of the church year. The first half, starting back in December, on Advent Sunday, took us through the great events of Jesus’ birth, ministry, death, and resurrection and on to the descent of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. Next Sunday, we’ll plunge into the long green season we call “Ordinary Time.” And, today, for some reason, we observe the Feast of the Holy Trinity, the only day in the whole church calendar that celebrates, not an event, but a dogma. 

And I’d guess that most of us, if we think about the Holy Trinity at all, wind up shaking our heads and saying, “I can’t make much of it” or, maybe even, “It doesn’t make any sense.” And what I want to say this morning is just, “That’s right.” It was never intended to make logical sense out of God. Why would we even expect that we could do that. The nature of God is always going to be a mystery to us human beings. God isn’t something we can measure or weigh or take photographs of—not something we can pin down and do comparative studies on—not something we can even form absolutely reliable statements about. All talk about God is fundamentally metaphorical. We gesture toward what we can barely glimpse. We try to give at least a hint of what draws us in God’s direction.

There’s an old Latin creed that showed up in old versions of the Book of Common Prayer, called the Athanasian Creed. We don’t use it anymore because, for one thing, it’s far too long to be used in a service and, more importantly, it’s got a slew of anathemas at the beginning and end—and those just don’t have any business in a creed. But a lot of it is devoted to the Holy Trinity, and that part is beautiful in its own strange way. It doesn’t explain anything. It just turns it into a kind of incantation. Here’s just a fragment of it:

. . . we worship one god in Trinity, and Trinity in unity;

Neither confounding the persons : nor dividing the substance.

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 co-eternal.

Such as the Father is, such is the Son : and such is the Holy Ghost.

The Father uncreated, the Son uncreated : and the Holy Ghost uncreated.

The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible : and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible.

The Father eternal, the Son eternal : and the Holy Ghost eternal.

And yet they are not three eternals : but one eternal.

As also there be not three incomprehensibles, nor three uncreated, but one uncreated, and one incomprehensible.

Some modern wag is reported to have summed it up this way: “The Father is incomprehensible, the Son is incomprehensible, the Holy Ghost is incomprehensible : and the whole Athanasian Creed is incomprehensible.” But that’s kind of a riddle in itself, because it uses the word “incomprehensible” in two different senses. (If you’re curious about that, ask me after church. I’ve probably gone too far already toward turning this sermon into a lecture.)

But the real point of this feast day, I think, comes through in our first reading this morning—Isaiah’s great vision in the Temple—God is always beyond our human grasp.. Isaiah’s vision is a bit like in impressionist painting: there’s the suggestion of a vast figure, vaguely human-like but vastly greater, leaving almost no room in the temple for the observer. There are other supernatural figures, too, the Seraphim—far above us, though infinitely less than like God’s own self. Even as they sing “Holy, holy, holy,” they have to cover their nakedness with one pair of wings and their eyes with another, leaving them only two wings to fly. And the one thing Isaiah is quite clear about is that he’s completely out of place. He doesn’t belong here at all: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”

Has anyone ever tried painting that scene? I can’t recall ever seeing such a painting. And if the artist tried to be too literal, the scene would lose its power. Better just to have Isaiah’s account. You can almost hear him stammering as he tells us the story. Such is his shock that he can barely catch his breath. What he knows for sure about God is that God is completely Other, immeasurably greater than us. 

Our Psalm this morning gave us another way of talking about encountering God—it’s an encounter with sheer power: thunder, earthquake, lightning, tornado winds, even as God sits serenely “enthroned above the flood,” while in the temple “all are crying, ‘Glory!'” It’s not just a physical storm the Psalmist is talking about. It’s the upheaval of encountering what we can’t possibly control. 

Then, in our reading from Romans, Paul takes a completely different tack. Paul says that we know we have been visited by God because of the gift we receive. We let go of the spirit of slavery, the fear that we are mere objects in this world, beaten and shoved around by the various forces around us—and receive the spirit of adoption, the sense that we are actually God’s beloved children, even when the world around us may try to convince us otherwise.

And Jesus, in our gospel reading, tells Nathanael something similar: that the Spirit of God is prepared to visit him with a gift of rebirth, of new life that has meaning even beyond death. Nathanael is as perplexed as Isaiah was. But he knows he is in the presence of the divine.

None of this suggests a God who can be reduced to simple, testable, logical categories. Just the opposite, we come to know God through the awe, the astonishment, the new freedom, the new sense of life that visit us in God’s presence. And, you know something? that’s very difficult to talk about clearly or definitively. 

So, is there anything left that I can say about the Mystery of the Trinity? If God is one, why three at the same time? What I find myself falling back on is a passage from another book of scripture, the First Letter of John: God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them (4:16b). If God is truly love, then God is a Lover. And if God is complete in Godself, then God is also a Beloved. And the power that makes the two one is the Love that unites them. The idea is not mine. It comes from St. Augustine’s ancient treatise on the doctrine of the Trinity. And it’s the source of the phrase we so often use here at Good Shepherd: God the Lover, the Beloved, and the Love Overflowing—”overflowing” because this love not only unites the divine Three, but spills eternally over in the creation of the world and God’s continuing care for all God’s creatures. 

And that, I dare say, is the mystery that we’re celebrating on this Feast of the Holy Trinity.

[And the problem about the word “incomprehensible” is that the old, theological meaning is “incapable of being contained” (i.e. “infinite”), vs. the modern meaning of “iimpossible to understand.”]