Trinity Sunday

Who do you pray to? And what name do you use?  Which aspect of the Trinity is most comfortable to you?  These are very personal and intimate questions… and here is one more…is there an aspect of the Trinity you don’t feel comfortable with?

The concept of Trinity has been debated and discussed for more or less for ever.  And it may interest you to know the word Trinity isn’t in the bible…the concept is in scripture, but it isn’t spelled out for us.  We read about God who interacts with prophets and creates all things.  We have the biographies of Jesus, incarnate and risen.  We get references to the spirit, breath and fire, the advocate of last week.  Each divine, each unique, each apart of each other.  The trinity.  Three separate beings of one substance…of being begotten not created…as the words of the Creed teach us.  Official sounding and impressive, but not always relatable.

Such is doctrine, the understanding of the church developed and taught over centuries.  Doctrine is what happens when spiritual and academic minded people try to codify the mysteries of scripture. 

The doctrine of the Trinity is one such example, the church trying to tie up the loose ends of scripture…the bits that leave us confused.  We do not do well with mystery…with ambiguity…with questions unanswered.  So, people over the millennia have laboured to identify and define who God is and how God is.   And although we may not have it exactly right… in struggling to understand the Trinity…we grow closer to God.

 

 

In the effort to grow closer to God the first thing we need is a name.

We most often refer to God as Father, Son and Spirit and these are certainly biblical, and in terms of Father and Son, relational and understandable.

Biblically, God is described as a parent, King, beginning and end, the rose, the tree, I Am, Creator and by many more titles.   The people in scripture had a deep and intimate relationship with all members of the Trinity, whom they didn’t hesitate to describe in everyday terms.  Using the world around them and the relationships they were familiar with to describe the indescribable.   As Rev. Rod put it a couple of weeks ago, you can only describe the colour red by showing someone other red like things.

When describing the Trinity the idea wasn’t to create the perfect doctrinal formula to pronounce, in blessing or baptism, but to express the fundamental nature of God in terms we can relate to.

But traditionally, describing this relationship has been somewhat single faceted, hierarchical and masculine.  The trinity is often thought of in order of importance with the Father first, then the Son and finally the Holy Spirit…and even the Holy Spirit which is a feminine noun in Hebrew…we often refer to the Spirit as he.  This is a product of our context and culture, but it isn’t the only way and it is not written in stone.

The importance of naming God isn’t so much the words that are used, as the meaning they convey.   The way you understand the word “Father” for example very much depends on the kind of father you had and the stereotypes of our culture.  Different names will underline different understandings and different aspects of the trinity.  Take a minute to reflect on each of these reflections of the Trinity and what they tell you about who God is in relation to God and to us.

Father, Son and Holy Ghost

Creator, redeemer, sustainer

Earth-maker, pain-bearer, life- giver

Rose bush, the blossom and the fragrance that comes from them.

God the lover, Jesus the beloved and the love itself.

The book, the word, the ink

The candle the flame and the light

 

This is not an exhaustive list, nor are we limited to what others have written the goal is the struggle to know God.  And how we react to the way God is described often says more about our journey to find God than about God. 

Again I ask, who do you pray to? How do you describe God in your own mind?  Which aspect of the God head do you most relate to and Why do you think that is? 

Could you think of God as female? Or male? Or both?  Is God any? Or all?  The languages we have are imperfect and limiting…restricting how we understand God. 

The Trinity in all aspects is indescribable and so we are forced to fall back on metaphor.  It’s not that God looks like or acts like my dad…but at his best my father can behave with the compassion, authority and love of God.  

So, for me… I can relate to God as the father.   I can understand Jesus as the son, as I have been and continue to be a beloved child of loving parents.  The Spirit is tricky. 

So I begin to look at some of the other images of the Trinity, that others have come up with and I get a better understanding. 

I have felt, as a palp-able force, the love that binds my family together and impels them to act of love…even when we really aren’t keen on each other…so the idea of the Spirit as love works for me, not a person of the family, but the binding force between us.

The phrase Father, Son and Holy Spirit is one really good idea of how to understand the relationships between God…but it only takes us so far.

 All the traditional ways of describing the Trinity are simply the efforts one desert dweller trying to describe a blizzard he’s never seen to another desert dweller.  We do our best …knowing words fall short, so we use a variety of similes, analogies and comparisons to express the many expressions of God in our lives.  God has many, many names because God is many things, to many people and always showing new aspects of character and power to us in our journey.

What we struggle to remember is that the purpose isn’t to box God in with labels, but rather to express God’s nature as we experience it here and now.  To be able to share how we know God and who we know God as, to one another.

In discussing the Trinity we aren’t trying to solve a mystery, we’re trying to grow closer to our eternal center of being…our dearest friend and the one who is muse to all creation.  

By struggling to understand who God is and how God is, we continue in to grow our Christian journey and to learn how God is a part of our lives whatever name we use and in every aspect of the Trinity.  God is relationship, Trinity is interactive and interacting, and how we interact with Father, Son or Holy Spirit is just as if not more important than the terms by which we define them. 

As we pray through our days, take a minute to recognize who you are praying to and challenge the nature of the name you use.  So that as you learn new names for God, you can grow in your depth of relationship with the one who has always known you and called you by name. amen