Trinity Sunday
May 31, 2021 Monroe, NC
Introduction
It is said that more heresy preached on this day than on any other. I don't know about that, but the saying itself gives a clue about this day -- Trinity Sunday -- that the church observes on the first Sunday following Pentecost.
I viewed last week's Morning Prayer on Youtube ® and I have to tell you that I was really impressed. Between Jo's reading and Charlotte's preaching I thought, "Whoa, I'm not sure it's a good idea to follow on that!"
I was a little intimidated. I guess I've felt that way just about every Trinity sermon I've ever preached.
When I was young I was genuinely concerned about heresy and orthodoxy and I knew enough to know that indeed the concept of the Trinity was one of the basic test-cases about whether one was orthodox or not.
At some point I had come to a simplified definition of heresy as an over-emphasis on one of the three persons of the Trinity: the Father, the Son, or the Spirit. I wanted to be careful, then, not to over-empasize one over the other.
But as the years compounded, and year after year I was confronted with the possibility that I might be preaching heresy, I became a little less intimidated. It seemed more and more that the words "heresy" and "orthodoxy" were more about deciding Who is in and who is out and less about what was really important. I mean really as in "in the light of eternity" -- as in what God is doing with us and with everything.
In an effort to try to focus words today less on the less important and more on the more important, I asked folks the last 2 weeks: "What does the Trinity mean to you?" It was actually kind of fun as we were having conversations with family members in Indiana and Ohio, I looked for just the right moment to shift the conversation. You know, like in the middle of "whether or not men's basketball was better than women's basketball" I just plopped down the question: "What do you think about the Trinity?"
My Research seemed to give me:
- Irrelevant
- a mystery
- reflected in Genesis? and other places in the Bible? (That in response to my statement that it doesn't appear anywhere in the Bible)
- So many killed over the centuries in the name of ...
- Mystery – paradox, —> quantum mechanics
Several of the folks for whom I have a great deal of respect, not least for the seriousness and faithfulness of their faith, were sensitive to the criticism of some that the Trinity can be seen as a threat to the belief in One God. I heard the phrase, "Of course Christianity is Monotheism, but the Trinity is a mystery".
I resonate with the concept of mystery. Like paradox it's not easy to point at mystery and say, "That's it." As soon as you do that it's gone.
I associate several things myself with "The Trinity". They include:
- It's about relationship and not about "things"
- It's not something that's very easy to talk about after you move past the surface level "it's 3 but it's 1"
So, as in with many things for me, I am much more focused on asking the questions than on getting the right answers.
It's about relationships
You heard me say last year that I took a course on the Trinity when I was a graduate student at Notre Dame. I admitted then, that it was the most difficult class I ever took.
The teacher was a woman, Catherine Mowry LaCugna, who in her all-too-short lifetime became one of the world's most influential teachers on the Trinity.
It was she, I think, who gave me the first beginnings of my sense today that the Trinity is more about relationships that it is about distinct persons.
Her Wikipedia page says of her that, "[her] passion was to make the doctrine of the Trinity relevant to the everyday life of modern Christians." And that "She rejected modern individualist notions of personhood and emphasised the self-communication of God."
I'm not even going to try to unpack those brief quotations from Wikipedia and even less the seriousness of her theology. But it does seem clear to me that the idea of God -- the God of the universe and of the history of history and of time itself -- that God trying to communicate with us, with me and you, is one of the important things.
One of the things it seems to me that God is communicating to us is that it's all about relationships, the energy between the various parts of the creation. e=mc2.
(github)
That equation may remind us of a simple-minded equation for the Trinity: 3=1. But the meaning of e=mc2 is that everything is a form of energy. Everything we see and measure in all of creation is but a form of energy. That sounds to me like a variation of the statement that "everything is God" or "everything comes from God."
The doctrine, the mystery, the paradox of the Trinity, then, is not a mathematical concept but a journey in uncovering a relationship with God.
Perhaps the most basic element of the journey is that we are not alone in this world of divine energy.
MEDITATION XVII Devotions upon Emergent Occasions John Donne
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
For me, the last year has been a poignant and powerful lesson in how interrelated we are. An imposed isolation has the opposite effect of emphasizing our connectedness.
When I say, "In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit", making the sign of the cross over it all, I'm putting myself into that set of relationships.
Father related in love to the Son. Father and Son bound together in Love. God in relation to the creation. God loving an individual person like myself.
Quantum physics
Our history as Christians, indeed as human beings, demonstrates that it is all-too-easy to focus on the less important and miss the most important.
There is a widely circulated quotation that gets at that tendency. "Calculators only give answers." Looking up the history of the quote I learned that it apparently originated with several artists, Picasso, a poet named Zukofsky. background of quote The lesson is for all of us, learned and not-so-learned, old and young, ... since we are all in this together. If the focus is discrete things (or persons) we miss the big picture.
The Trinity is not about 3 things. It is about the divine web that weaves together the whole world, the whole cosmos. It's not about the answers that we can now "google" from our phones, it's about the relationships we can enter into with a simple gesture or the words, "I love you."
One of the great ironies for me in the current political environment that distrusts "science", is that the current state of science is in fact more like religious spirituality than anything that can easily be "googled."
If you "google" "Zen and Quantum Physics" you will get quite a long list. You might want to try it.1
A quick illustration of how Zen and Quantum mechanics bear similarities, consider this parable: 2
Two monks are arguing. One says, “The flag is moving.”
The other says, “No, the wind is moving.”
A master, passing by, admonishes them both: “The flag is not moving; the wind is not moving. Your mind is moving.” citation
One writer said this about modern science and quantum physics in particular: 3
Our comfortable ideas of a universe made up of solid little bits of matter behaving in logical ways have been exploded. A particle is not a separate entity but a set of relationships. The world is an interconnected tissue of events, a dynamic unbroken whole.
To me that sounds very much like what Catherine Lacugna said about the Trinity. When we are comfortable with the Trinity as an equation of entities, a mystery we can apprehend with a breath or two, we are in danger of missing the divine relationship that is at the beating heart of the universe.
Closing
The Trinity, for which we give thanks today, points not so much to a doctrine as to the sacred reality that binds us all together.
It's not for dividing between orthodoxy and heresy -- though it has been used that way through almost 2 millenia, but it is lighthouse on a promontory, looking out over the ocean of God's creation. It calls us to a safe harbor.
The Trinity is our proclamation that we are all one. We are not a museum of separate individuals, competing for scarce nutrients, but an intricate mosaic, made up of broken pieces that combined create a beautiful image for all to wonder at.
There is an old Jewish saying that goes:
God made all humans from just one man so that no man can claim, "My father is better than your father."
The Trinity has nothing to do with, "My God is better than your God." It has more to do with, "Praise God for the sacred which binds us all together."
Today, let us give thanks, together, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
♱
For a sceptical take on my claim cf. also latimes and realitysandwich.↩
The following is excerpted from The Everything Answer Book: How Quantum Science Explains Love, Death, and the Meaning of Life by Amit Goswami PhD, published by Hampton Roads Publishing.↩
Gary Zukov, The Dancing Wu-Li Masters.↩
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