Trinity A

When I was a school governor in Birmingham I went with the kids on a tour of the Central Mosque. Our guide made it clear that Moslems didn’t believe in three gods, but one. I would imagine that the Trinity does look very odd from the outside. Sometimes it looks odd from inside Christianity as well. I have a Lego image of the Trinity ordered from The Brick Testament (http://www.thebricktestament.com/), three plastic figures legoed onto a plastic stand: an old white-bearded man in a robe, a young bearded man and a third figure looking like Casper the ghost. I’ve never been able to figure out if The Brick Testament takes this seriously or thinks it is a joke.

There are all sorts of ways to think about the Trinity and I have probably preached on them all over the years. What interests me at the moment as Trinity Sunday looms on the horizon is the immanence of God in what Paul (2 Corinthians 13.14) calls the fellowship (koinonia) of the Holy Spirit.

The third person of the Trinity is not an objective thing capable of representation in Lego. It is a dimension of the faithful community as subject in its experience of God’s presence. It is the godliness of the faithful community—the community that proclaims its devotion in service as well as hymn singing. Its prayers are never separated from its compassion for the broken and excluded. Its common life is shaped by God’s presence in its faithfulness.

Though this concept of God’s presence in the faithful community is a Christian concept, it is deeply embedded in the Jewish idea of God “tenting” with the people of God, God living in the midst of the sojourning community as shekinah (שכינה). The presence is a dynamic presence. Without getting gnostic about it, God always feels a bit out of place in the world, as do those faithful disciples who are in the world but not, as the Gospel of John says, of the world. The fellowship of the Holy Spirit is a dynamic fellowship that finds its proper location in the world, engaged in specific locations and concrete historical moments as a matter of vocation, but being there in ways that drive toward re-location and new moments of history.

I was visiting a friend here in Wales and wanted to move from where I was sitting, and he used this quaint Welsh expression: "Stay where you're to!" The church is dead if it stays where it is to. It's whole reason for being where it is in the world, as a matter of vocation, is to move on. The model is Exodus and Exile, personal, social, political and institutional transformation. The church dedicated to preserving its past in formaldehyde is not Trinitarian.

Then there is the second person of the Trinity. This is “the Son”—but it is not simply “Jesus”, however much we want to identify the Son with the historical figure of Jesus. The mystery of the second person of the Trinity interprets all discipleship that embodies the life of Christ as its own. Trinitarian theology thus reminds us of the agenda of the biblical Jesus in calling his disciples to do what he did in mediating God to the world. “As the Father sent me,” he says in the Gospel of John, “I send you.” In John we are born again as sons and daughters of God (John 1.10-12). In Mark and in Paul we are witnesses to the resurrection through our own death and rebirth in conversion. The agenda of discipleship is to embody Christ in daily life and thus embody God just as the Messiah does. The mystery of the incarnation, at the end of the day, is the mystery of our own conversion. In faith, we come off our perches as servants and lovers down into an ordinary world that is by turns exhilarating and painful. We put flesh on the Word in our discipleship. The incarnation isn’t just about Christmas. It’s about us, and it’s about every day in the real world.

So the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, lived out in discipleship, is, communally, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. God permeates human experience, wherever we let God in, in a process that transforms people and communities in ways that transform the world. Maybe that’s the difference between Christianity and Islam. I don’t know.

The love of God is that funny kind of love that is full of desire but is nevertheless not possessive or demanding. It is self-emptying. Christ “emptied himself” (kenosis, Philippians 2.7). It’s like wine being poured out at the Eucharistic feast, like costly perfume being poured out by the woman on Jesus himself (Mark 14.3), like the suffering servant who pours himself out to be numbered among the transgressors (Isaiah 53.12). The dynamic of the love of God is the dynamic of movement, of sending, the vocation of the Son kneeling in prayer in Gethsemane and the vocation of the community in the time of Wilberforce and in the time of Oscar Romero. What shall we do? Where will we stand? The idea of the Trinity is thus tied up with the vocation of the Christian to mediate and to embody the reconciling, justice-creating presence of God in the world.

The Trinitarian community recognizes God’s utter transcendence insofar as it is a community that lives unsettled, in hope. “You made us for yourself,” Augustine prayed, “and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” This prayer isn’t about the stress of life finding peace at last in death. Theologian Joe Sittler once said “Heaven is a metaphor for life with God”, and that life is a fellowship we strive toward here and now in the path of discipleship, isn’t it? As my wife likes to say, “Don’t give until it hurts; give until it feels good.” We know when we have arrived even if we know we can’t stay there long. The triangular diagram o f the Trinity illustrates this fundamental energy of tension and propulsion between transcendence and immanence, like the traffic of angels on Jacob’s ladder.

The Trinity is critical for Christian orthodoxy because it is critical for Christian orthopraxis, discipleship. We are commissioned in the name of the Trinity in baptism to this way of life, a way of life that makes the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit real in the world. Notice, for instance, that prior to the blessing Paul gives he is pressing home the way Christians ought to be living. “Examine yourselves to see whether you are living in the faith”, he says (2 Corinthians 13.5).

A final note on the lesson from Matthew for this Sunday: I don’t think the Trinitarian formula for baptism is original with Matthew. For one thing, t seems too early for the community to be baptising in the name of the Trinity as shorthand for orthodox Christian community. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, baptism itself just isn’t an important motif in Matthew, as it had been in Mark, for instance. If you take this bit out as something that had been added later, what you get is much more naturally a conclusion for a gospel that has been about instruction. Make disciples, passing on all I have taught you. Nevertheless, the immanence of God is present in human life in the assurance that, as we witness to continuing generation, God as Emmanuel is with us.