Divine Math 6-4-23
Divine Math
Trinity as a Poem; Mt 28;16-20
‘Trinity is a Poem’ Michael Coffey
Trinity is a free verse cosmic love gift
Sending sound waves through earth to hurl speech
Into the ionosphere stirring radio waves to hum
Trinity is a synchronistic dream we and God have
Nightly about the interface of human and divine
The matrix of connections between holy and common
Trinity is a syncopated counterpoint of melody lines
Referencing each other and making music as sonorous
As whales and pulsars and seismic waves all held in tension
Then someone inscribed the free utterance in indelible ink
And someone analyzed the shared dream with Freudian precision
And someone forced the messy melodies smooth in straight time
Behold: just when they think they finished the job and
Brush the dust of such work off their hands and rest
Trinity dances out the door and finds willing partners to twirl
Mt 28:16-20
Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. 17When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. 18And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Prayer - Almighty God, you have decided to make yourself known to us through the Word, your son Jesus Christ. You have revealed yourself to us by the witness of the saints through the scriptures. You have chosen to speak to us today, on this Sunday. You refuse to stay silent, and you refuse to leave us with our own words to guide us. You gave us the gift of Jesus Christ, the one who sends us out, promising to be with us. As you, the triune God, are never alone in your being, so you have not left us alone. We trust that your Spirit is with us as the word is proclaimed, heard, and carried forth in our very lives. Silence the words that trip us up on the journey of faith in you. Fill us up with your Holy Spirit as we seek to make your love and your grace known. Keep the words of your commissioning before our eyes—we need you to do so. Amen.
How many of us have favorite teachers, authors who continue to inspire us with words, sayings, messages that we carry with us to this day? I have shared some of those sayings to you in the midst of sermons – you may not have known or had a clue that I was sharing one of those ‘lines to live by’ that I have been writing down now for over 30 years. Many of those sayings over the years have served as spiritual awakening questions that I have pondered over and over again.
As students of Christianity, we probably remember many of Jesus’ parables as a message that asks us to consider or ponder something on a spiritual basis. One of those messages or sayings is triune God, or Trinity. Today is the Sunday in the lectionary year when we ponder the whole idea of God in Three Persons, blessed Trinity. And while theologians may look upon the doctrine of the Trinity as an infinitely delightful thing to consider, it is somewhat of a logic-buster. Why does one God need three names? How does one God inhabit three forms? How can God be both three and one?
And this is one of those times when scripture adds to the perplexity rather than giving us simple, go to answers by making it sound as if all three operate independently of one another. When I was in seminary - The Trinity was taught to us by professors of theology who spoke in some kind of code lingo – One Being, Three Persons; One Essence, Three Natures; One Substance, Three Entities. It was some kind of divine math that was supposed to make sense, but not really. And so, like much of scripture, I began to differentiate and separate the three from one another – God as Creator, Jesus as Redeemer and Spirit as Sustainer – each has a job to do; each has a role to play on the sacred stage. The Church of the west has done an excellent job of not only separating the Trinity but of becoming ‘Christo-centric’ – focused on Jesus while God and the Spirit have fallen aside in many ways. What has resulted for us may be considered bad theology.
Who are all of these people? How can God be Father be his own son? And if Jesus is God, the whom is he talking to? And where does the Holy Spirit come in? Is that the spirit of God, the spirit of Jesus, or someone else altogether? If they are all one, the why do they come and go at different times, and how can one on them send another of them? I mean, how does all of that work out?
There are orthodox answers to all of these questions, some divine math which is supposed to make sense, but maybe math just wasn’t my cup of tea while in school. I do accept these attempts as earnest human efforts to describe something that can’t ever be described, which is the nature of God. Perhaps we would be better off if we just skipped divine math for some other spiritual class, but that doesn’t always work when you are lying on your back looking up at the night sky full of stars – asking yourself any number of unanswerable questions. After a while you either start making stuff up, like a true theologian, or go inside where it is safe and watch some television.
In one of his books, Robert Farrar Capon says that when human beings try to describe God we are like a bunch of oysters trying to describe a ballerina. We simply don’t have the equipment to understand something so utterly beyond us, but isn’t it fun to keep trying to label, define, get a handle on this being, essence, or whatever as we try to grasp God.
Believers through the centuries have tried to describe God, but very few have been satisfied with their descriptions. Their words turn out to be too frail to do the job. They, we, cannot paint a true portrait of God, because creatures cannot capture their creator any better than a bed of oysters can dance Swan Lake. The best any of us has ever been able to do is to describe what the experience of God is like – how it sounds, how it feels, what it may reminds us of. Whether the experience originates in the pages of scripture or in the events of our own lives, the best any of us has ever been able to do is simply to confess what it is like when we are in the presence of the Divine.
The problem is that it is rarely the same experience twice in a row. Some days God comes as a judge, walking through our lives wearing white gloves and exposing all of 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 of 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 – teacher, challenger, helper, stranger, lover, adversary, the yes, the no, the one who upholds us and the one who gently and terribly lets us fall flat on our faces. And when any of that is true it is offered as a free and unencumbered gift of grace.
God is many, which is at least one of the mysteries behind the doctrine of the Trinity. That faith statement is our confession that God comes to us in all kinds of ways, as different from one another as they can be. The other mystery is that God is one. There cannot be a fierce God and a loving one; a God of the OT and another of the NT. When we experience God in contradictory ways, that is our problem and 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 can boggle our minds.
Perhaps the difficult part of Trinity Sunday is remembering that proclaiming the majesty and mystery of the Trinity is not a discourse on divine math. I remember a youth in confirmation class years ago, a really smart, straight A student. Part of our confirmation curriculum was to have a bunch of 12 years olds write out their statement of faith – that was a ridiculous idea now that I think about it – I’m not sure I could write a statement of faith at 66. Anyway, she wrote a great statement but there was nothing in it about the Trinity. So I asked her about it and this is what I recall of her reflection, “You know I believe in it (the Trinity) and all. But if I have to think about it anymore, my head will explode.” I get it.
So as each of you go home this Trinity Sunday and pull out your Bible Dictionary or perhaps jump on the internet and look up Trinity, you will find Trinitarian breakthroughs and heretical errors. But try and remember this: it is perhaps the most human thing that we can try and do and boil God down into an equation. Should we be grateful for the councils and creeds that describe the mystery of the Trinity for us? Yes – and you may end up with your head about to explode.
Time and again, God shatters our expectations of what God is like. The Messiah we met in the manger is hardly the triumphant savior many were expecting. This savior, meek and mild, enters into the world only to turn it upside-down, proclaiming a kingdom where the greatest are the least, the last are first. And as the stone of the grave rolled into place, few expected that grave to be emptied soon and for Jesus to be risen, back on his mission as before.
Preachers like myself tie ourselves into knots trying to explain what all this means. Some explain that the Trinity is like a three leaf clover. Others point to H20 in its three incarnations – water, ice and steam. One Trinity Sunday, I found a Three Musketeers bar on the hood of my car with a note that read, “All for one and one for three!” Honestly I don’t know why we hold ourselves responsible for trying to explain things that cannot be explained. Perhaps the most faithful sermon on the Trinity is not trying to figure out the divine math, instead, perhaps sniffing around the edges of the mystery, hunting for something closer to an experience than an understanding. What, for instance, is the sound of three hands clapping? Thanks be to God – amen.
(based on sermon Three Hands Clapping, Barbara Brown Taylor)