The Trinity by any other name

A sermon preached at Faith Episcopal on May 18, 2008.

Last Sunday, Steve Lopez, regular columnist in the LA Times had a column that I enjoyed immensely. It was titled “Agnostic feels a tug after Sunday in church.” Mr. Lopez had been invited to speak to the congregation of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena about his three year journey with Nathaniel Ayers, a musician who slept on the streets of skid row. He said, “In describing the journey, the soul-searching and the rewards of giving, I used the words “spirituality” and “grace.” As I did, I saw people nodding as if I belonged in that room with them. But wait, I’m an agnostic, and quite content. So why did I feel such a connection? Could my stubborn resistance to faith be slipping?”

Disturbed by this potential shake up to his habitual approach to belief – which by his own admission was to do nothing about it at all, he sought out the rector of All Saints for a conversation. The Rev. Ed Bacon suggested that the moment of connection came for him as he was talking about giving, which releases the divine in all of us. One of my favorite formulas for expressing the mystery of the Trinity speaks to that directly, the Giver, the Gift and the Giving. God the Father as the Giver, God the Son as the Gift and God the Holy Spirit as the Giving.

There have been many such restatements of the traditional “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” vocabulary in recent years. The Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer, The Lover, the Beloved and the Loving; the Source, the Wellspring and the Living Water, the One who was and is and is to come. My own formula which is helpful to me in how I think about who these three are is the Mind, the Thought and the Imagining. As you can see, all of these are attempts to address the three persons of the Trinity without gender and that in some way, try to escape using language and imagery that is personified. My old boss, the Dean at the American Cathedral was the only one I know who managed to mangle the genders. Of course that was because he couldn’t get the French right and so what he ended up saying, unintentionally, was “In the Name of the Father, and of the daughter and of the Holy Spirit. Not at all helpful except for a chuckle.

There was a time, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, that the doctrine of the Trinity was a hot topic. Apparently, those days are gone and it is really too bad because the Trinity, as an idea and as a model has much to recommend to how we understand the underlying purpose in our lives. The most exciting understanding of this three-fold mystery to have been elevated in the last two thousand years is that God – this three-in-one Divinity is a community. We do not believe in three Gods we believe that all that is Divine expresses itself as relationship. The Trinity gives us the image of God as community. And not only community, but a community that maintains the unity of its diversity. A triangle is the most stable shape because everything is equally related to everything else. In a triangle, each point is equally connected to the other two. In a triangle, there is no odd man out.

The image of Trinitarian community is a healthy model for the human community. Think, if you will, of our little congregation and the world outside of our doors – two points of a triangle. The third point is the relationship that exists between the two. If we have no connection to the greater world, we do not reflect the nature of the community that is God. The connection is dynamic, like the Holy Spirit, it is the charge of electricity arcing between two electrodes. It can heat things up or get them moving.

Another important aspect of triune reality is its stability. A three legged stool never rocks, it sits solidly with each leg bearing equal weight. The Trinity is described as a dance of equals. Relationships that are in balance are divine things.

This week, California joined Massachusetts in the position that marriage is for anybody that wants it. This is creating distress for many Californians, most of whom site scripture in support of their opposition to same-sex marriage. I will try to explain why I believe that the Cal. Supreme Court’s decision brings all relationships into the lens of Trinitarian thinking. This gave me the push to pull down a book I bought three years ago by Rabbi Steven Greenberg, who spoke at our clergy conference. Rabbi Greenberg is the only openly gay Orthodox rabbi and his book Wrestling with God & Men; Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition is good Bible study on those passages that condemn men lying with men. He makes very clear that in Biblical understanding of sexual relations there is an inherent power component. One person is the actor and the other is acted upon. The actor is always the dominant one. I think that the story of the city of Sodom is one of the most erroneously used passages in the entire Bible. The sin of Sodom was not gay sex but being a gated community. Sodom was a place of great wealth and resources and the people there did not want to have to share. Jewish tradition has many stories about how evil the place was. One such story says that offering charity to an outsider was not to be tolerated and if you did it, you would be killed. Lot, the nephew of Abraham, settled in Sodom, he must have had enough money to make himself acceptable. The angels that had visited Abraham on their way Sodom to investigate the cries of distress heard in heaven by those abused in that city arrived at the gates and Lot offered them the hospitality of his home for the night. In the mind of the men of Sodom, those strangers had violated their defenses and therefore must themselves be violated. Rape as a tool of humiliation and power, the degradation of another, is what went on in Sodom and it is the text that informs Leviticus 18:22. “You shall not lie with a man, as with a woman, it is an abomination.” What this text is saying is that no man should have to be the one acted upon because that upsets the way the world was understood – the world in which men were the actors, the powerful ones. No man should have his power taken away from him.

The Greco-Roman world in which the apostle Paul lived and in which he built churches was rife with an understanding that sex was always between parties of unequal power. For an Athenian to give testimony in court they had to swear that they were “not a slave, not a woman and not a foreigner” Jewish men began their days with a prayer of thanksgiving, praising God for not having made them a slave, or a woman, or a foreigner. They were giving thanks that no one could use them as one would use a slave or a woman or a foreigner.

The California Supreme Court recognized that all relationships in which mutual concern, affection and respect are present are equal under the law. I maintain that they are also images of the Triune God – two persons and their relating in balance. Anatomy and mechanics have nothing to do with it. It is the character of our relationships that is either pleasing or displeasing to God. When it’s about love and not power, it is a dance of equals.

The good news for us on Trinity Sunday is that we exist and hopefully know ourselves to be participants in that dance of equals with God. We are loved, we are valued, we are creative, we are in important part of the divine life of all that is.