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It has been suggested that theologians are people who are answering questions no one is asking. And it’s for these types, the theologians, that Trinity Sunday has been set aside in the Church calendar. “Who is God?” is the question for this major feast of the Church, and we dutifully respond with our catechism answer: God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one Substance, in three Persons. Our creedal response is like my friend John’s adolescent response. When he was sixteen years old, John says, he was moved to write down his definition of God on a 3x5 card. He says he doesn’t remember now exactly what it was he wrote, but he does recall that “it spoke of the ultimate power of the universe, in terms abstract and remote and grand,” and he says that having God written down on a card like that was somehow comforting to him at the time, because it explained some things. “It explained what lay behind my parish priest’s platitudes,” John says, ”and it explained why my parents made me put on flannel trousers and go to church.” We human beings like our 3x5 gods. Gods cut down to human proportions in definitions and doctrines can help explain the twists and turns of the ordinary day. But when we do that, when we write God down like that to reduce God to a formula or a favorite Bible verse, when we define God as some kind of answer, whether on a 3x5 card or in a creed, it’s usually not long before both God and religion become altogether uninteresting. God no longer calls to us mysteriously from before the beginning of time, or from some burning bush. At least that was the effect on my friend. “Life, as it lay open before a sixteen-year-old,” John found, ”was more in every way than this defined God.” Once God became something that John himself could write down, he soon tore up his 3x5 card and left Youth Group and the Church. How different the God of the Bible! How different the God who brought time and the world into existence! How different the God of Moses! This God, the God of the Bible, the God of Moses, not only creates us and speaks to us, but also summons us! The great God of the Bible is the holy God, awesome in power and the worker of wonders, the great God who expects great things from us. This God seems not to be a definition at all, but a living, breathing personal energy who responds to the great human questions, to the questions everyone is asking, and who sends us out to do great things. One persistent human question is, ”Where did we come from?” It is a question on the lips of every six-year-old. “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is another way of asking it. And no sooner do we ask the question than we realize that we were wrong about the theologians. Theologians are people who seek to answer questions that all of us are asking. And to these questions the Scriptures respond, “In the beginning, God. God created the heavens and the earth.” And modern physics tells us that it all actually happened as a Big Bang. “But in spite of the name ‘Big Bang,’” says Alan Guth of MIT, ”the Big Bang theory tells us very little about the Bang.” The Big Bang alone “doesn’t tell us what banged, why it banged, or what happened before it banged. The Big Bang theory really is...a theory of the aftermath of the bang.” But there is a derivative theory, inflation theory, that now “attempts to describe the bang itself. Inflation theory accounts for the origin of normal matter, the protons, neutrons, and electrons making up the visible world around us. [This is matter we have now seen, and it is an observation which] predicts the existence of exotic, not-yet-detected forms of ‘dark’ matter and ‘dark’ energy that now appear to dominate the universe.” It is, however, the “not-yet-detected” that is forever interesting to us human beings. The mystery of the nature of the source that lies beyond human detection is the reason for our question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” And from behind the source, Mystery answers: “God,” Mystery says, “Yahweh, the Undefinable One whose name is that he Was and Is and Always Will Be. In the beginning, this One created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty. Darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God hovered over the waters. And God said, ‘let there be light.’ And there was light.” And then the One who Was spoke, and the land was separated from the waters; and then the one who Is spoke again, and there were plants and seed of every kind; and then the One who Always Will Be spoke yet another time, and there were all kinds of living creatures, both in the water and on the land. “And then God said, ‘Let us make man in our own image, in our likeness,’”and man and woman were here. And thus was time born, and consciousness. And now, aware that we are, we find ourselves wondering how in the world it is that we are. And behold, this leads to a new question. “We accept that we are,” we say, ”but how are we to live?” And once again from the deep, from a bush that burns but is not consumed but as if from the depths of creation itself, once again Mystery speaks, this time to Moses: “Tell the people, Moses, that Yahweh, the Unpronounceable – the Unknown and Unknowable, the Undefinable, The One Who Always Is – has sent you to deliver them from darkness into light, from death into life. The people are not to live in slavery, Moses, because they are more than the result of a cosmic hiccup, more than slaves. So I am sending you, Moses, to lead them through the wilderness, out of slavery to freedom and life.” Now this is no 3x5 god who speaks, but a God of size; not a god cut to human expectations, but the great God, the God who expects greater things of us than we could ever dream up for ourselves. “Your God is too Small,” J. B. Phillips insisted to Christians half a century ago. And Peter Gomes, the chaplain at Harvard University, addresses this same concern in our own day. “We must remember,” Gomes says, “that the object of Christian theology is not to reduce the incomparable to our small size, but rather to [help] us grow up to the capacity of the subject.” And so, God, Mystery, speaks to Moses and tells him to grow up. “Moses,” God says, ”I am sending you to finish my work.” And Moses is terrified! Who wouldn’t be terrified? “Why me, Lord?” he pleads when he considers the holiness, the utter awesomeness, of both the Sender and the task. “I don’t know how to speak or what to do,” Moses objects. But Mystery will not let him off the hook. And we understand Moses’s awful fear, don’t we, because this is no chummy, palsy-walsy, 20th-century American feel-good-about-everything god who is calling us, but the great and holy God, who is a very large and holy God indeed and who asks large and holy things of us. God’s call to Moses is as if Mystery himself is calling us and sending us out with Moses. God’s call to Moses is Mystery calling us personally from the deep as well and sending us to be personally responsible for leading the people to freedom and to peace. “Peace in Iraq, Martha; and peace between Israeli and Palestinian, Betty and Ernest and Emily; and peace at home with those goofy Christians across town and around the diocese and the world – “and that’s your job,” says the God of the Bible, “my work which you are to complete.” How are we to live? The large and holy God of the Bible asks large and holy things of us, we find. And we are moved to take off our shoes and hold our tongues, not to turn up the amps and grab for the microphones. “But how are we to do it?” we ask. “How, in this world, can we finish your work, O Lord” We ask, because, like Moses, we don’t have a clue. So God sends One like a son of man to live among us to show us the way. “Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself,” he tells us. More mystery! Because “God knows we are none of us much good at it much of the time,” says Frederick Buechner in A Room Called Remember. “Loving each other is at least easier to talk about [than loving God], if not easier to do, because at least we can see each other with our eyes. We can see each other’s faces especially, and every once in a while, if we have our eyes open, we can see something of what is within those faces. Even with strangers sometimes – people we pass on the street, or find sitting across from us in a bus or a waiting room, even sometimes with people we know very well but seldom take the trouble really to look at – we see something that stops us in our tracks. We catch a glimpse of some unexpected beauty or pain or need in another’s face. Or maybe we just notice the tilt of an old man’s Agway cap, or the way a young woman rests her cheek on the palm of her hand, or the way a child looks out the window at the rain, and for a moment, then, our heart goes out to them in ways too deep for words.” Is it just matter itself that has created this consciousness? Is it just matter itself – protons and neutrons and electrons – that have banged themselves into realities of life like these? Can tenderness and mercy and compassion – can consciousness, the fact that we are aware that we love and are loved – arise from the banging and swirling of protons and neutrons and electrons alone? More mystery still! And from the depths of our awareness comes more response. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men.... And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” But his truth threatened us, threatened us terribly. He insisted that great love requires great sacrifice. So we killed him. He insisted that great love requires the sacrifice of self for others, so we killed him cruelly, by nailing him to a tree. Some soldiers killed him, actually, but we stood by and let it happen. And he died, and that was that. And so a dreadful question is now formed on our dry lips as we meet our fear face to face: “What will happen to us now?” we ask. “If great love requires great sacrifice, for what can we hope, we who sacrificed the Prince of Hope?” But once again there is a response from the deep, for when they went to his tomb, they did not find the Lord Jesus. God has raised him, the women were told. The women insisted that it was true, but we did not dare believe them. But the women told us what Jesus had said – that we were to go to Galilee, where we would see him. And we did. We saw him there and, once again, he has sent us out to do large and holy things in the world, just as the Lord once sent Moses himself. And he assured us that he will be with us always, even to the very end of the age. It is all God’s doing, this experience of love and responsibility we call life. The creation, the living, the hoping – it’s all the doing of Mystery. That’s what our 3x5 formula, ”The Holy Trinity,” means. At least it’s something like that. God – God the Father, God the One who has made us; and God the Son, God the One who guides us along our way; and God the Holy Spirit, God the One who comforts and strengthens us even to the end of the age are all the same God, the God who responds to the very deepest questions of our lives: Who are we? Where did we come from? How are we to live? Where are we going? Why are we? Why is there something rather than nothing? How are we to live our lives so that they have meaning? In what or whom may we hope? All the great questions of life proceed from Mystery and are wrapped up in Mystery and are encompassed and blessed and enriched by Mystery, by the One who makes life possible and challenging and meaningful, and without whom nothing is possible or challenging or meaningful. It is more than a cosmic hiccup. It is the personal quest of hide and seek that resides deep in the heart of every six-year-old, and of every other human person. Ours is but to seek him, to seek the One our Jewish brothers and sisters speak of as Master of the Universe, and, in seeking him, to enjoy him forever. Blessed be He. In a moment we are going to recite our creed. But as we do so, friends, remember that the creed is not a definition of God. We cannot capture God on a page in the Prayer Book, anymore than we can put God down on a 3x5 card. We cannot capture God in Church, not even in a sermon on “The Holy Trinity,” anymore than Moses could capture and control the flame in the bush, or in a name. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is not a definition of God that we can hold in our heads or in our hands, and therefore somehow “have” or “possess” God, as if to pass a test. The creed, like this sermon, is not an answer, but a response to God; it is our acknowledgment of the in-finite mystery of the One Who Everywhere Is and Always Is. God is mystery. At least any God worth serving is mystery, the mystery whom the spirit of our age and the Church of our day does its best to try to extinguish. God is mystery, just as life is mystery. Both God and life are mysteries that cannot be captured, cannot be tamed, but that can be experienced. And we can experience The One Who Always Is only as we pass through the experience of time and space in our day in this great mystery we call life. Life is an experience in which we have never had all our stuff together in this world of time and space, and never will, because having all our stuff together is not what this world of coming into being and passing away is about. Life in this world of coming into being and passing away is an experience of mystery, an experience of The One Who Always Is and Everywhere Is as we ourselves pass through the mystery of continuously coming into being and passing away – a mystery that brings its share of pain, to be sure, but that also brings an ample share of joy; a mystery that we sometimes fear, but that also brings the reality of the redemptive possibility of love; a mystery that is often missed in the tedium of day-to-day-ness, but that also brings the reality of the possibility of greatness of soul and spirit. Trinity Sunday is a day to celebrate the mystery, the mystery of God, the mystery of the life of the One behind and beyond all matter, who nonetheless came to live in this world of matter and time and space, and who lives in it still, but behind the veil, the holy mystery of the One Who Always Is and Everywhere Is, and from whom, though himself unseen, comes everything that is seen. By faith, we say that he is One God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” is our response to the Creator and Master of the Universe. It is our way of saying that we are matter, but that we know that we are more than matter, our way of saying that we know that we matter, and that how we live is of cosmic significance. It is our way of acknowledging that we are more than 15 billion years of the cosmic hiccups of mass, multiplied by the speed of light squared, because we matter. It is our way of acknowledging that Creation and the Creator are personal. We are loved, and we can love, because of the One who first loved us. Because of the One who spoke us into being from beyond being, the same One who lived and died for us in time and space, and the same One who walks beside us in our time and in our space, even to the end of the age. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |