Mystery Schmystery
June 03, 2007
Trinity Sunday
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; John 16:12-15
Thinking of famous threesomes, some that come to mind are the 3 pigs, 3 bears, The Three Musketeers; Peter, Paul & Mary; Groucho, Harpo and Chico Marx; Tinker, Evers and Chance who brought the Chicago Cubs to 4 World Series contests (winning 2) between 1906 and 1910; various film trilogies including this summer’s Shrek 3 and Spiderman 3; and of course the 3 Stooges, whose “Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk…” and “Soitenly!” inspired many a sibling relationship. And then, there’s the Trinity.
Almost one year ago the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. met as it does every other year to deliberate, debate, decide issues that relate to the PCUSA. A couple of things happened a year ago which created some controversy. One of these was the vote by the General Assembly to receive a report on the Trinity. They did not approve the report, they just received it, and commended it to congregations for study. Immediately, all sorts of uproar ensued, in both the religious and secular press. Trinity Paper invites female view of the Trinity read the headline in the Layman, the newspaper of the most conservative Presbyterians. I believe in Larry, Moe and Curly Joe, was the headline for Kathleen Parker’s syndicated column in the secular press. Ironically, this brouhaha was created by a report that opens by saying, “Often the church takes up a theological issue only when there is great controversy—a time when a lack of consensus on an issue embroils the church in an intractable debate. The doctrine of the Trinity is a pressing issue for contemporary Presbyterians for precisely the opposite reason.” Are they saying that they wrote the paper to create a controversy? If so, they succeeded! No. The report continues: “Despite the remarkable renewal of Trinitarian theology in recent decades, this doctrine is widely neglected or poorly understood in many of our congregations. The task force is convinced that the doctrine of the Trinity is crucial to our faith, worship and service.”
So does the PCUSA Trinity paper really tread radical ground, as the press suggests? No, it doesn’t. The report affirms traditional theology. Early on, for example, it proclaims: “The mystery of the Trinity is an open and radiant mystery. It is the mystery of the truth that God is holy, abundant, overflowing love both in relationship to us and in all eternity. We meet God’s threefold love in the astonishing faithfulness of the Holy One of Israel, in the costly grace given to us in Jesus Christ our Savior, and in the new life in communion with God and others that has come to us in the gift of the Holy Spirit.”
And, a little later: “We therefore confidently affirm that the doctrine of the Trinity is neither presumptuous speculation nor mathematical nonsense. About this the church must have no doubt: the doctrine of the Trinity proclaims to us the very heart of God. Using the language of Christian tradition, we proclaim that the Father so loved the world, sending the Son for us and our salvation, which we receive in and through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.”
However, the Trinity report does suggest that Christians might benefit from using, in addition to the traditional language of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, other language that the Bible has used in referring to God, for example:
God is called the Speaker, Word, and Breath in various places in Scripture (Hebrews 1:1, John 1:1, John 20:22; Psalm 104:30)
When we think of our own stewardship, as well as the gift of the communion meal, these names from the Bible seem appropriate: Giver, Gift, and Giving (James 1:17, John 2:16, 2 Corinthians 9:15, 1 John 3:24)
Speaking of an angry God, the Bible provides these three images: Fire that Consumes, Sword that Divides, and Storm that Melts Mountains (Deuteronomy 5:25; Matthew 10:34-35; Psalm 97:5);
And finally, the names that garnered most of the negative attention also came from the Bible: Compassionate Mother, Beloved Child, and Life-giving Womb (Isaiah 49:15; Matthew 3:17; Isaiah 46:3).
Some folks were really incensed at those female descriptions, but they come from the Bible. In one place, Jesus even describes his love for Jerusalem as that of a mother hen for her chicks. The Bible uses many images and descriptions for God. The PCUSA was right, in my view, to encourage us to explore the fullness of the Biblical tradition.
The question of gendered language is a complicated one – we know that Jesus was a human male, but the Spirit is referred to in both Hebrew and Greek by feminine nouns. Remember that in many languages, nouns have gender so that, for example, the word “heart” is le coeur (masculine in French), das Herz (neuter in German), el corazon (masculine in Spanish), leb (masculine in Hebrew), and cardia (feminine in Greek). The words for Spirit in both Hebrew and Greek are feminine in gender. The passage from Proverbs which Leslie read is describing a manifestation of the Divine as a woman crying out in the marketplace. God the Father is not physical, and therefore has no gender, but we have all heard mostly masculine imagery for God: Lord, Father, King. Nonetheless, the Trinity report tells us that in the 1500’s, when some argued that “…[the title] Father is ‘more appropriate’ to God, John Calvin wrote ‘that no figures of speech can describe God’s extraordinary affection towards us; for it is infinite and various.’ He further explains that God ‘has manifested himself to be both...Father and Mother’ so that we might be more aware of God’s constant presence and willingness to assist us (Commentary on Isaiah 46:3). God ‘did not satisfy himself with proposing the example of a father,’ writes Calvin, ‘but in order to express his very strong affection, he chose to liken himself to a mother, and calls [the people of Israel] not merely ‘children,’ but the fruit of the womb….’ (Commentary on Isaiah 49:15).”
But isn’t the Trinity more than just a matter of gender and title? Isn’t there some important theology also? Yes there is, and it’s a theology that is woven through the Bible, but never explained systematically, which contributes to the confusion. Abdal Hakim Murad, an Islamic scholar at Oxford, in an address to a group of Christians said about the Trinity “…a deity with three persons, one of whom has two natures, but who are all somehow reducible to authentic unity, quite apart from being rationally dubious, seems intuitively wrong. God, the final ground of all being, surely does not need to be so complicated.” I’m sure many of us would agree with him.
The German Jesuit Karl Rahner wrote “We must admit that should the doctrine of the Trinity have to be dropped as false tomorrow the major part of religious literature would remain virtually unchanged.” He says somewhere else that 95% of our lives would be unchanged. Taking together Rahner’s statement with Murad’s, it’s reassuring to know that no less than a Jesuit and a professor at Oxford have also found the Trinity to be somewhat cumbersome. But, the theologian Catherine LaCugna, in her book God for Us says that if the Trinity is true, we must not yet fully understand it, because if we truly understood it, our lives would be shaped by it. And remember, the PCUSA describes the doctrine of the Trinity as crucial to the faith, worship, and service of the church. Yet, so often, discussions of the Trinity seem to end with the statement that it’s a mystery. And while that’s true, that’s not a satisfactory answer.
So how can we understand in such a way that the Trinity becomes part of our lived faith, for our faith was described by early believers as The Way – it is supposed to be lived. It is not merely a set of theo-philosophical constructs.
LaCugna describes the early debates around the nature of God and Trinity, which were supposedly resolved by the Council of Nicea. She describes the work of the Cappadocians, four early Orthodox theologians from a region that would eventually become modern Turkey. There were 3 brothers: Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, their younger brother Peter (not the Apostle, we’re 300-plus years later now) and their close friend Gregory Nazianus. Together. in the fourth century, these scholars made significant contributions to the theology of the Trinity, contributions which seem to have been largely lost to our common understanding although they undergird orthodox theology (which, remember, we don’t really understand). For the Cappadocians, personhood and not substance was the primary originating principle of all reality – and the significance of this is that personhood is a relational construct, defining someone as they are in relationship to others. Substance defines something in and of itself. So the understanding of the Cappadocians which undergirded the concept of Trinity was the sense of relationality. To explain the significance further: in this view, it is not that God is being, and that Being decided to love. God is love, and it is the nature of love to create and to relate, so from Divine Love emerges a relational God: Father-Son-Spirit. The earliest metaphor for the Trinity was the Greek term perichoresis, which means to dance around. So a more appropriate geometric symbol for the Trinity is a circle rather than a triangle. Perichoresis describes God as a communion of love given and received. For God is not the dancer in this metaphor, God is the dance – an eternal flow of love within Godself, which is constantly reaching out to all creation, inviting us into the flow. God is: love perfectly given, perfectly received, and constantly inviting others in. So God is dynamic, relational and inclusive.
This is a different picture than the classic Old Bearded Man on a Cloud to be sure – and if we take this image of Trinity seriously, and allow our understanding of God to be shaped by it, we move away from the sense of God as some kind of distant overlord judging and bestowing, and instead have a sense of a dynamic flow of benevolence, energizing and including all life. Instead of judgment there is love in motion – and all of a sudden, we have a place and a mission. For we are invited into the Divine Communion, and called to let the love of God flow through us. The life of God is ultimately participatory, and knowledge of God is participatory —we simply cannot understand God apart from participating in the life of God. And we, products of a modern, rational culture, we really have trouble with anything that doesn’t come through the intellect – and so this is our problem with God.
But just as human love is not reducible to formulas or descriptions (though poets and songwriters have tried through the centuries), so too, Divine Love cannot be fully explained – it can only be known through experiencing it. And it is an intimate experience – the Hebrew word for knowing, used to describe knowing God, is the same word used to describe marital intimacy, knowing one another. It is a participatory mutuality.
And as my favorite Franciscan priest, Richard Rohr emphasizes: participation is the key. God among us as Jesus demonstrated God’s willingness to participate in the suffering and joy of human life, and so as we live in the Way of Jesus, we participate in the suffering and joy of others, and we participate in the flow of God’s love– we don’t decide to love others, we allow God’s love to flow through us. We resist the urge to block the flow.
In the Trinity, there is a deferring, a willingness to love the Other as Other…how often do we only want to affiliate with people who are like us, who look like us, think like us, vote like us?? In the Trinity, we see a delight in the Other, a sharing with the Other, an acceptance of the flow from the Other. Rohr says, "Don't start with One and try to make it Three, but start with Three, and know that is the very nature of the One -- and Everything there is."
So as we participate in the flow, we experience what St. John of the Cross, a Spanish priest of the 16th century describes as: “We are caught by the same Great Being, seized by the same delight, breathing the very same air as God….” As our own delight becomes a participation in the delight of the triune God, and we understand God’s delight in us, and our natural exhalation is gratitude, and our life is characterized by joy. And as we participate in the life of God, we are increasingly aware of the connections we share with others, and we are increasingly disinterested in the boundaries that separate us from others, whether those boundaries are national, denominational, racial, political, or of any other kind. We are participating in the Great Unity, we are energized by the dynamic love which powers the universe, and by our participation, we are extending the reach of that love.
Jesus said, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” So our life and discipleship isn’t just about ourselves, our salvation, our peace, but is a participation in the communion of the universe, a communion of love, the communion in which all that is has a place and a purpose. Finally, we begin to understand mystery not as a platitude to use instead of saying “I don’t know”, but a way of describing a kind of knowing that comes through experience instead of through analysis and words. As Jesus said in our Gospel reading, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.” So the Trinity becomes the mystical ground of our life, through we which we experience the flow of love that is in all that is. Amen.
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; John 16:12-15
Thinking of famous threesomes, some that come to mind are the 3 pigs, 3 bears, The Three Musketeers; Peter, Paul & Mary; Groucho, Harpo and Chico Marx; Tinker, Evers and Chance who brought the Chicago Cubs to 4 World Series contests (winning 2) between 1906 and 1910; various film trilogies including this summer’s Shrek 3 and Spiderman 3; and of course the 3 Stooges, whose “Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk…” and “Soitenly!” inspired many a sibling relationship. And then, there’s the Trinity.
Almost one year ago the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. met as it does every other year to deliberate, debate, decide issues that relate to the PCUSA. A couple of things happened a year ago which created some controversy. One of these was the vote by the General Assembly to receive a report on the Trinity. They did not approve the report, they just received it, and commended it to congregations for study. Immediately, all sorts of uproar ensued, in both the religious and secular press. Trinity Paper invites female view of the Trinity read the headline in the Layman, the newspaper of the most conservative Presbyterians. I believe in Larry, Moe and Curly Joe, was the headline for Kathleen Parker’s syndicated column in the secular press. Ironically, this brouhaha was created by a report that opens by saying, “Often the church takes up a theological issue only when there is great controversy—a time when a lack of consensus on an issue embroils the church in an intractable debate. The doctrine of the Trinity is a pressing issue for contemporary Presbyterians for precisely the opposite reason.” Are they saying that they wrote the paper to create a controversy? If so, they succeeded! No. The report continues: “Despite the remarkable renewal of Trinitarian theology in recent decades, this doctrine is widely neglected or poorly understood in many of our congregations. The task force is convinced that the doctrine of the Trinity is crucial to our faith, worship and service.”
So does the PCUSA Trinity paper really tread radical ground, as the press suggests? No, it doesn’t. The report affirms traditional theology. Early on, for example, it proclaims: “The mystery of the Trinity is an open and radiant mystery. It is the mystery of the truth that God is holy, abundant, overflowing love both in relationship to us and in all eternity. We meet God’s threefold love in the astonishing faithfulness of the Holy One of Israel, in the costly grace given to us in Jesus Christ our Savior, and in the new life in communion with God and others that has come to us in the gift of the Holy Spirit.”
And, a little later: “We therefore confidently affirm that the doctrine of the Trinity is neither presumptuous speculation nor mathematical nonsense. About this the church must have no doubt: the doctrine of the Trinity proclaims to us the very heart of God. Using the language of Christian tradition, we proclaim that the Father so loved the world, sending the Son for us and our salvation, which we receive in and through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.”
However, the Trinity report does suggest that Christians might benefit from using, in addition to the traditional language of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, other language that the Bible has used in referring to God, for example:
God is called the Speaker, Word, and Breath in various places in Scripture (Hebrews 1:1, John 1:1, John 20:22; Psalm 104:30)
When we think of our own stewardship, as well as the gift of the communion meal, these names from the Bible seem appropriate: Giver, Gift, and Giving (James 1:17, John 2:16, 2 Corinthians 9:15, 1 John 3:24)
Speaking of an angry God, the Bible provides these three images: Fire that Consumes, Sword that Divides, and Storm that Melts Mountains (Deuteronomy 5:25; Matthew 10:34-35; Psalm 97:5);
And finally, the names that garnered most of the negative attention also came from the Bible: Compassionate Mother, Beloved Child, and Life-giving Womb (Isaiah 49:15; Matthew 3:17; Isaiah 46:3).
Some folks were really incensed at those female descriptions, but they come from the Bible. In one place, Jesus even describes his love for Jerusalem as that of a mother hen for her chicks. The Bible uses many images and descriptions for God. The PCUSA was right, in my view, to encourage us to explore the fullness of the Biblical tradition.
The question of gendered language is a complicated one – we know that Jesus was a human male, but the Spirit is referred to in both Hebrew and Greek by feminine nouns. Remember that in many languages, nouns have gender so that, for example, the word “heart” is le coeur (masculine in French), das Herz (neuter in German), el corazon (masculine in Spanish), leb (masculine in Hebrew), and cardia (feminine in Greek). The words for Spirit in both Hebrew and Greek are feminine in gender. The passage from Proverbs which Leslie read is describing a manifestation of the Divine as a woman crying out in the marketplace. God the Father is not physical, and therefore has no gender, but we have all heard mostly masculine imagery for God: Lord, Father, King. Nonetheless, the Trinity report tells us that in the 1500’s, when some argued that “…[the title] Father is ‘more appropriate’ to God, John Calvin wrote ‘that no figures of speech can describe God’s extraordinary affection towards us; for it is infinite and various.’ He further explains that God ‘has manifested himself to be both...Father and Mother’ so that we might be more aware of God’s constant presence and willingness to assist us (Commentary on Isaiah 46:3). God ‘did not satisfy himself with proposing the example of a father,’ writes Calvin, ‘but in order to express his very strong affection, he chose to liken himself to a mother, and calls [the people of Israel] not merely ‘children,’ but the fruit of the womb….’ (Commentary on Isaiah 49:15).”
But isn’t the Trinity more than just a matter of gender and title? Isn’t there some important theology also? Yes there is, and it’s a theology that is woven through the Bible, but never explained systematically, which contributes to the confusion. Abdal Hakim Murad, an Islamic scholar at Oxford, in an address to a group of Christians said about the Trinity “…a deity with three persons, one of whom has two natures, but who are all somehow reducible to authentic unity, quite apart from being rationally dubious, seems intuitively wrong. God, the final ground of all being, surely does not need to be so complicated.” I’m sure many of us would agree with him.
The German Jesuit Karl Rahner wrote “We must admit that should the doctrine of the Trinity have to be dropped as false tomorrow the major part of religious literature would remain virtually unchanged.” He says somewhere else that 95% of our lives would be unchanged. Taking together Rahner’s statement with Murad’s, it’s reassuring to know that no less than a Jesuit and a professor at Oxford have also found the Trinity to be somewhat cumbersome. But, the theologian Catherine LaCugna, in her book God for Us says that if the Trinity is true, we must not yet fully understand it, because if we truly understood it, our lives would be shaped by it. And remember, the PCUSA describes the doctrine of the Trinity as crucial to the faith, worship, and service of the church. Yet, so often, discussions of the Trinity seem to end with the statement that it’s a mystery. And while that’s true, that’s not a satisfactory answer.
So how can we understand in such a way that the Trinity becomes part of our lived faith, for our faith was described by early believers as The Way – it is supposed to be lived. It is not merely a set of theo-philosophical constructs.
LaCugna describes the early debates around the nature of God and Trinity, which were supposedly resolved by the Council of Nicea. She describes the work of the Cappadocians, four early Orthodox theologians from a region that would eventually become modern Turkey. There were 3 brothers: Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, their younger brother Peter (not the Apostle, we’re 300-plus years later now) and their close friend Gregory Nazianus. Together. in the fourth century, these scholars made significant contributions to the theology of the Trinity, contributions which seem to have been largely lost to our common understanding although they undergird orthodox theology (which, remember, we don’t really understand). For the Cappadocians, personhood and not substance was the primary originating principle of all reality – and the significance of this is that personhood is a relational construct, defining someone as they are in relationship to others. Substance defines something in and of itself. So the understanding of the Cappadocians which undergirded the concept of Trinity was the sense of relationality. To explain the significance further: in this view, it is not that God is being, and that Being decided to love. God is love, and it is the nature of love to create and to relate, so from Divine Love emerges a relational God: Father-Son-Spirit. The earliest metaphor for the Trinity was the Greek term perichoresis, which means to dance around. So a more appropriate geometric symbol for the Trinity is a circle rather than a triangle. Perichoresis describes God as a communion of love given and received. For God is not the dancer in this metaphor, God is the dance – an eternal flow of love within Godself, which is constantly reaching out to all creation, inviting us into the flow. God is: love perfectly given, perfectly received, and constantly inviting others in. So God is dynamic, relational and inclusive.
This is a different picture than the classic Old Bearded Man on a Cloud to be sure – and if we take this image of Trinity seriously, and allow our understanding of God to be shaped by it, we move away from the sense of God as some kind of distant overlord judging and bestowing, and instead have a sense of a dynamic flow of benevolence, energizing and including all life. Instead of judgment there is love in motion – and all of a sudden, we have a place and a mission. For we are invited into the Divine Communion, and called to let the love of God flow through us. The life of God is ultimately participatory, and knowledge of God is participatory —we simply cannot understand God apart from participating in the life of God. And we, products of a modern, rational culture, we really have trouble with anything that doesn’t come through the intellect – and so this is our problem with God.
But just as human love is not reducible to formulas or descriptions (though poets and songwriters have tried through the centuries), so too, Divine Love cannot be fully explained – it can only be known through experiencing it. And it is an intimate experience – the Hebrew word for knowing, used to describe knowing God, is the same word used to describe marital intimacy, knowing one another. It is a participatory mutuality.
And as my favorite Franciscan priest, Richard Rohr emphasizes: participation is the key. God among us as Jesus demonstrated God’s willingness to participate in the suffering and joy of human life, and so as we live in the Way of Jesus, we participate in the suffering and joy of others, and we participate in the flow of God’s love– we don’t decide to love others, we allow God’s love to flow through us. We resist the urge to block the flow.
In the Trinity, there is a deferring, a willingness to love the Other as Other…how often do we only want to affiliate with people who are like us, who look like us, think like us, vote like us?? In the Trinity, we see a delight in the Other, a sharing with the Other, an acceptance of the flow from the Other. Rohr says, "Don't start with One and try to make it Three, but start with Three, and know that is the very nature of the One -- and Everything there is."
So as we participate in the flow, we experience what St. John of the Cross, a Spanish priest of the 16th century describes as: “We are caught by the same Great Being, seized by the same delight, breathing the very same air as God….” As our own delight becomes a participation in the delight of the triune God, and we understand God’s delight in us, and our natural exhalation is gratitude, and our life is characterized by joy. And as we participate in the life of God, we are increasingly aware of the connections we share with others, and we are increasingly disinterested in the boundaries that separate us from others, whether those boundaries are national, denominational, racial, political, or of any other kind. We are participating in the Great Unity, we are energized by the dynamic love which powers the universe, and by our participation, we are extending the reach of that love.
Jesus said, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” So our life and discipleship isn’t just about ourselves, our salvation, our peace, but is a participation in the communion of the universe, a communion of love, the communion in which all that is has a place and a purpose. Finally, we begin to understand mystery not as a platitude to use instead of saying “I don’t know”, but a way of describing a kind of knowing that comes through experience instead of through analysis and words. As Jesus said in our Gospel reading, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.” So the Trinity becomes the mystical ground of our life, through we which we experience the flow of love that is in all that is. Amen.