The Divine Genogram

A sermon preached at Faith Episcopal Church on Trinity Sunday, June 11, 1006.

Dan Brown’ DaVinci Code has certainly done more for theological pondering than any mainstream theologian in recent memory. Particularly around subject of Jesus’ humanity and divinity - subjects that haven’t been given this much thought in over 1500 years. This is Trinity Sunday and the only time during the year that we are called to stop and ponder the relationships of the three-in-one God. All of the controversies about who Jesus was were and are really controversies about the nature of God.

From the 2^nd century on, theologians struggled with the implications of Jesus’ divinity. It caused all kinds of questions to be asked. “Well if Jesus is divine then which one is God?” A big problem for many answer seekers was the prevailing concept of God as unchangeable and incapable of suffering. How then could God have been fully present in Jesus as he suffered? I find that to be an intriguing and helpful question. Does God suffer? I believe that we make God suffer all the time but our treatment of one another and the rest of creation. Along these same lines, if we ask “does God suffer” shouldn’t we also ask, does God experience joy? The whole idea of the incarnation is God’s willingness to encounter humanity in the best way, to experience human suffering but also to experience human joy.

In my first year in seminary, we had to create a genogram. A genogram is a diagram of your family and relationships – kind of like a family tree but with description. Relationships are identified by connecting lines of different types that indicate strength and importance. Now in my biological family, I have my parents and their families and my sister. I also have a half sister from my mother’s second marriage, four step brothers and sisters from my father’s second marriage a half sister and brother from my father’s third marriage. My step-mother’s family provided an important grandmother figure as well as cousins and aunts and uncles. Then you add my in-laws family and their cousins that became important parts of my life and my children. We wereonly given an 8.5x14” piece of paper to do this. I worked and worked just to account for everybody and when it was done it looked like some Etch-a-Sketch gone mad. I handed it in and the teaching assistant glanced at it and did a double take. As she tried to grasp the complexity of my family, she just kept saying “Oh my!”

The doctrine of the Trinity is the kind of thing that happens when people start to try to describe God. What starts as a simple point on a piece of white paper that represents an awareness of the existence of God grows until it starts to resemble my genogram. As soon as you start to ask questions – “Who or what is God?” “What is God like?” – you get more and more dots on the paper. Sometimes, when there is more than one answer to a question, i.e. “God is merciful” or “God is just” the answers themselves complicate the picture because they appear to contradict each other. A merciful God forgives but a just God requires punishment – so which is it? Soon you have more dots and lines connecting them and arrows pointing and God starts to looked like that Etch-a-Sketch thing.

What is the point of these torturous exercises? I believe the point is why we do them. We do them because we are hungry for God. We come to God presence and table famished. C.S. Lewis said “This hunger is better than any other fullness; this poverty better than all other wealth.” We seek a knowledge and experience of God because there is nothing else that can fill us. Heaven knows that we will try all sorts of other things before we give God a shot. But eventually, the more elaborate our diversions, the more dire will be our need for that which only God can give. True love and true connection. The God genogram is really less complicated than we try to make it. The lines of connection between God and every single person are of equal depth and importance. My professor Clark used to refer to God as “the ultimately related one.” Because of God’s relation to us, we have an equal relationship with each other. We may all have different fingerprints and DNA but we all have an identical faith genogram. All of the lines that connect to us are of equal strength and there’s a lot of them – one for every person on earth. The lines between us and those people we do not know personally go through God and they are as strong as those that connect us to person we love the most.

The clearest way for me to grasp the concept of the Trinity is as relationship. The Trinity exists as a community of equal relationships – God and Christ and the relationship that exists within this divine diversity. The lines of the genogram themselves – the relationships – are also God. One formula that expresses this beautifully is the triune God as Love, Lover and the Loving.

The hunger to know God particularly in this time of change is resulting in some exciting thinking. In her book Amazing Grace; A Dictionary of Faith, Kathleen Norris said this about the Trinity which resonates strongly with the work of our upcoming General Convention and just trying to survive in this world. This is what she says:

“Tension is a creative force. But polarization, which seems an abiding sin of our age, is worse than useless. It stifles creativity, whereas a healthy dose of negative capability, the ability to hold differences in tension while both affirming and denying them, enlivens both poetry and theology. In Christian history, it has sometimes meant the difference between unity and schism, offering a synthesis that provides a third way. Mystics of many religious traditions have often spoken in terms of threes, and although I have very little grasp of how science is done, I love to read about quarks, those subatomic particles that exist in threes. There is no such thing as one quark, but only three interdependent beings; I picture them dancing together at the heart of things, part of the atomic glue that holds this world together, and to the atomic scientist, at least, makes all things on earth more alike than different….

The idea of the Trinity is increasing relevant as we seek to understand the physical structure of the universe and to live together on this troubled earth. Anything that we can do to further and to heal relationships is holy work. – God, the ultimately related One, creates the relationships and then lives the example in perfect unity. We cannot will away relationships simply because they trouble us – we can only strive to be authentic and to live with honesty and love and compassion. When we do that, even if we are not completely successful, the mysterious and mystical and miraculous ways of God will do more than we can ask or imagine. Holy! Holy! Holy!