Sermon, June 14, 2003
Trinity Sunday, Year B
The Rev. Lowell E. Grisham
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Fayetteville, Arkansas
Sermon, June 14, 2003
Trinity Sunday, Year B
The Rev. Lowell E. Grisham
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Fayetteville, Arkansas
Dancing with Oysters
Some years ago when Robert Capon was leading a clergy conference for our diocese, he got a hearty response from us when he told us that a human being trying to describe God is like an oyster trying to describe a ballerina. We just don’t have the equipment necessary to understand a mystery so beyond our limitations.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. It’s not good enough to surrender saying, "The doctrine of the Trinity is just a mystery; it’s more than I can understand, so I’ll just accept it because it’s what the church believes, or, on the other hand, I’ll just reject it because it’s incomprehensible."
One of my teachers Richard Norris makes the point. "A mystery is not something which fails to make sense. It is, rather, something whose sense can be discerned, and even stated, but never mastered or fully comprehended in its richness. The mysterious is such not because of its absurdity or its incoherence, but because of its depth."1
Anyone who is or ever has been in love knows what he’s talking about. Love is a mystery. My wife is a mystery. But my love for Kathy is not something that fails to make sense. It makes wonderful sense to me. But, neither she nor love itself is something that I will ever master or fully comprehend. The mystery of another human being is wonderfully attractive because we are unfathomable.
So, I’m going be an oyster dancing ballet today, visiting with you about the mystery of the nature of God revealed as Trinity.
The doctrine of the Trinity evolved out of the way real people experienced God in their lives. It’s about relationship. First, our relationship to God, and secondly, what that says about the way God is within God’s own divine life.
From early times, people have experienced a relationship with God that has three dimensions. God is our Creator. God loves the universe into being. God appears as the Word, love which is actively present in a concrete and specific way overcoming whatever threatens us. Finally, God comes as Sanctifier, love that is within us to transform us from the inside. And it is all one thing; one act of love manifest in three realities. Quoting Dick Norris, "People’s relationship to God... was a complex unity. It was not three separate relationships -- one to the Father, another to Christ, and another to the Spirit. It was a single, unified reality, a single relationship to the one God as Father, established and revealed in Christ, and brought home to people through the Spirit.2
Let’s look at that through the metaphor of love. God is love. Absolute and infinite love. A fullness of love that needs nothing. God is continually pouring out that divine, creative love into the world. Whenever and wherever that love happens, it is God’s Word being actualized -- out there, objective and concrete. And it is through the Spirit within that we realize and experience whatever God’s love is doing. So we speak of the love of the Father, in the Son, through the Holy Spirit.
I know this sounds complicated, but it’s important too. It is important because Christians have insisted from the beginning that what they have experienced is God -- God’s own life and presence. Anything other than a trinitarian description compromises that.
The early Christians insisted -- when we experienced Jesus, we truly experienced God in a human life. A real human, Jesus, we know to be God with us. Out there, real and objective. The life we have in Jesus is life in God. Theologians, go figure it out. And they insisted, the sanctifying life we experience within us is God. We know God is within us -- living, breathing, healing, making whole. It’s all one thing. Theologians, go figure it out.
Every time the theologians tried to create some distance to protect God from us, the people said, "No." God did not send an intermediary, like angels, or Powers, or say the Word of God as something created by God for us lowly humans. God is not sitting up there "at an immense metaphysical distance from creatures, [doing] business through middlemen."3 God is with us. The same God who Creates is the God who Redeems in the Son and who Sanctifies through the Spirit. And, God is One.
So the theologians helped us with phases like "the only begotten Son," "God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made." God does not call something different from God’s own self into existence. No, God eternally reproduces God’s own being in one who is God’s true self all over again.
How are we doing? Is the oyster managing a pirouette?
In a way, what we are trying to describe is the wonderful dance of God, the dance of perfect love and perfect truth and perfect beauty. The very being of God pouring out in creative life into the world. So, we say, whenever any love, any truth, any beauty is manifest anywhere in creation, that is the activity of the eternal Word, the Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. And whenever any love or truth or beauty is realized and experienced by anyone in the world, that is the Spirit of God active and working within us.
That’s one reason why Christians are never threatened by any manifestation of truth or beauty or goodness, even when it is from a source that is non-Christian or even anti-Christian. We recognize the presence and activity of the Trinity under a different name. We can always honor any one, any thing with some aspect of truth or beauty or goodness as being essentially from God. That is the dance of the Trinity. God is wonderfully creative; infinitely present and imaginative.
As Barbara Brown Taylor says:
Some days God comes as a judge, walking through our lives wearing white gloves and exposing all the messes we have made. Other days God comes as a shepherd, fending off our enemies and feeding us by hand. Some days God comes as a whirlwind who blows all our certainties away. Other days God comes as a brooding hen who hides us in the shelter of her wings. Some days God comes as a dazzling monarch and other days as a silent servant. If we were to name all the ways God comes to us, the list would go on forever: God the teacher, the challenger, the helper, the stranger; God the lover, the adversary, the yes, the no.
...The other mystery is that God is one. There cannot be a fierce God and a loving one, a God of the Old Testament and another of the New. When we experience God in contradictory ways, that is our problem, not God’s. We cannot solve it by driving wedges into the divine self. All we can do is decide whether or not to open ourselves up to a God whose freedom and imagination boggle our minds.4
It is a wonderful mystery. The God of the Universe embraces our lives with intimacy and grace. Every time you pray, you dance with the Trinity. Praying to the Father, in the Son, through the Spirit. Every time you love, you participate in the divine love. The love of the Creator poured out into the Son and received and made real in the Spirit. All of your life is wrapped up in the divine life, the dance of the Holy Trinity. God dances with us oysters, and loves us into life.
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1. Norris, Richard. Understanding the Faith of the Church, p. 100
2. Ibid, p. 90
3. Ibid, p. 98
4. Taylor, Barbara Brown. Home By Another Way, p. 153-4