Why does the Trinity matter to us?

RCL Year B, Trinity Sunday So it’s Trinity Sunday. I’m going to begin by saying that it really doesn’t matter to me whether you accept the doctrine of the Trinity or not. Christians can get really caught up on doctrine, even those of us in the squishy Episcopal Church who don’t think doctrine matters that […]

RCL Year B, Trinity Sunday

So it’s Trinity Sunday. I’m going to begin by saying that it really doesn’t matter to me whether you accept the doctrine of the Trinity or not. Christians can get really caught up on doctrine, even those of us in the squishy Episcopal Church who don’t think doctrine matters that much. We can put too much emphasis on which beliefs we intellectually agree with and which ones we think are nonsense – perhaps one legacy of the Enlightenment, that we tend to exist so much in our heads, even when it comes to faith. When Elizabeth I settled the English Reformation by creating the Anglican church we still live in today, she said in essence, ‘Let them believe what they like, as long as they worship together.’ To waste a lot of time dithering about which details of doctrine make sense to us and which do not, and to think that therein lies the essentials of our faith, is neither within our tradition nor, I think, what God wants from us. There’s my manifesto.

But despite that, I think we do need just a few words of background about the doctrine of the Trinity. First of all, ‘doctrine’ isn’t a word we use very often in the Episcopal Church.  It has a certain quality of ‘something you’ve got to believe, because the religious authorities tell you to,’ and we don’t like being told what to think. (Actually, that’s more the definition of ‘dogma’ – ‘doctrine’ simply means teaching, while ‘dogma’ means a teaching that you’ve really got to accept.) But if you’ve ever thumbed through the catechism at the back of the Prayer Book – perhaps during a sermon – you’ve seen fairly clear statements about what our church believes. And there one question asks, ‘What is the Trinity?’ and is answered, ‘The Trinity is one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.’ We get that formulation first from the Bible, from the end of Matthew’s gospel when Jesus says go out and make disciples, ‘baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.’ And then that was cemented and clarified by a series of councils and arguments in the 4th century, specifically the Council of Nicaea and the Council of Constantinople. Described in 4th century Greek metaphysical language, the main teaching became that God is one in essence, distinguished in three persons. Working this out was extremely important to those councils, because people were killing each other over terms like essence, substance, persons, etc. The councils essentially weighed in on what the Trinity is not:  the Trinity is not three gods, nor is it a pantheon of three godlike figures with different amounts of power; the Trinity is not one God wearing three different masks. This is the stuff seminarians still puzzle over now, trying to make sense of the difference between terms like homoousios and homoiousios, but no one has fought a war over it in quite some time.

And you’re wondering, how is this relevant to my life today?

The thing is, despite the abstractions, the doctrine of the Trinity is at the very heart of the Christian faith. Like everything else we’ve come up with to say about God and the world, the doctrine of the Trinity is really an expression of what people have experienced in their lives. The tangles of logic in the 4th century were attempts to put words to the sense people had of God – God in the Bible and God in the community that grew out of the stories in the Bible. God was experienced in different ways: as the creative force in the world, and so they called God Creator or Father – using a male term partly because it was believed that the male had more to do with creating life than the female. They experienced God in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, so they called God Son, the living God in human flesh. They experienced God as still active in the world and in their communities, so they called God Spirit, the breath of God amongst them. Even though none of this is clearly outlined in the Bible, the doctrine of the Trinity was a way, however inadequate, of summarizing what the Bible says about God – creative love incarnate in Jesus Christ and experienced in the community of faith…love lived out in relationship.

And that inadequate interpretation of experience is what we in the church have inherited as the Trinity – a doctrine so important that we give it a Sunday all to itself, because it says something fundamental about who God is and how God acts in the world. God is community – God is relationship. God is three in one – community is right there in the very essence of God. Who God is, is being in relationship, being in community with others – others who are already deeply and fundamentally part of the same.

But this is not just an interesting idea about God. Any doctrine about God ultimately comes back to us – if we say God is like this, then that tells us the way we are supposed to be ourselves: God is powerful, or loving, or good, and so we respond by trusting, by obeying, by loving as well. So when we say God is community, then that means that we’re supposed to live out our faith with other people. It’s more than just a set of ideas to chew over.

We get a good example in the story from Isaiah today. What we heard in the first reading is the story of Isaiah’s call, but really the passage is mostly about the powerful overwhelming experience Isaiah has of God’s presence. He sees the Lord seated upon his throne, he sees seraphim surrounding him, he hears voices singing Glory to God. He experiences God on all different levels all at the same time, and it is so overwhelming that he thinks he is doomed. But then the encounter ends with the simple question: who will be sent from God, who will go? And Isaiah responds, Here I am, send me. God has a job for Isaiah beyond just admiring and worshiping God. God wants Isaiah to be a prophet, another way for God’s voice to speak to human beings, and so he goes to do just that. It’s the same for us: we aren’t just invited to sit quietly and experience one-on-one relationship with God, two individuals together. We’re told to go out and interact with and be vulnerable to and take care for others, other people and others of all creation. God is community, and community is how we should respond.

If we as creatures of God are an outward expression of who God is – made in God’s image – then it is little wonder that this world is filled with all different sorts and conditions of people, myriad forms of life of all kinds, sharing the one essence of life, ruach – God’s breath, God’s spirit – among us. We aren’t created as autonomous creatures in pursuit of self-definition and fulfillment – despite what Western culture might teach us. We aren’t separate from the fate of others, their cares and their joys. We aren’t meant to be distinct from and indifferent to the good of creation as a whole. We are made instead to be at table with all – in the famous Rublev icon of the Trinity, God is depicted as three angelic figures seated around a table and sharing one cup – and we, as the viewers of the icon, are meant to make up the fourth side of that table. We are invited into the community at the heart of God.

So again, what relevance does this have for us in our lives? We don’t spill blood over the nuances of the doctrine of the Trinity the way they did in the 4th century. But we should be just as passionate as we think through how to vote or how to spend our money. It should matter just as much how we live in our families and relationships, and what work we pursue in our daily lives. It should be intensely important how we do community in church at ECA. Live out God’s loving community with every breath of our life? That chucks a lot of our standard American values out the window, I’m afraid. It does mean swimming against the current, and asking ourselves and others a lot of hard questions about our choices and our assumptions. We don’t very often live up to the way we were created to be. But it is a picture of where we want to be, the beloved community we long for, a picture that we describe as living at one with one another, living in community, living out, you could say, the doctrine of the Trinity. It’s an invitation I want to respond to, sitting at that table with the three. How about we all sit together?