Sermon for Trinity Sunday
admin | 22 May 2016“Thou art worthy, O Lord”
Well, that was quite an intellectual and spiritual work out, wasn’t it? You are probably completely exhausted and utterly mystified, confused and bewildered. And well you should be! Yet the Athanasian Creed is one of the three catholic creeds of the universal Church. For Anglicans there was a time when it was stipulated to be used thirteen times a year, once a month and on Trinity Sunday. That intention says a lot about how the Anglican Churches once appreciated and understood the fundamental importance of the doctrine of the Trinity as the essential and defining doctrine of the Christian faith. If the Anglican Church is going to be an integral portion of “the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church” and not merely some fideistic sect, it will only be through the intentional recovery of the centrality of the Trinity. The Church is about our communion in the Trinity. The Church is herself Trinitarian.
The “Supplementary Instruction” in the Catechism of the Prayer Book (BCP, p. 552) makes this clear. “What is the Church?” It is asked. The answer is “the family of God, the body of Christ, and the temple of the Holy Spirit.” It is, in a way, a remarkable summary of what the Church is in the witness of the Scriptures creedally understood. The Church, too, is one of the creedal mysteries. Though not mentioned in the Athanasian Creed, unlike both the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, the Church is completely presupposed, as our liturgy puts it, as “the blessed company of all faithful people” whose faith is in God the Blessed Trinity revealed through the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. Such is the twofold focus of the Athanasian Creed. It presents a remarkably concise and concentrated understanding of the Scriptural witness to the nature of God.
The very first article of the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles complements the Athanasian Creed. It is “Of Faith in the Holy Trinity”, an article which expresses, first, the philosophical and theological understanding of God that Jews, Christians and Muslims hold and, second, the specific Christian form of that understanding. “There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible”, it begins and, then, concludes, “and in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost”. What the Athanasian Creed sets before us is a theological way of thinking God as Trinity. Thinking about God in a certain way.
The point is that we cannot not think about God because that is what it means to be the Church, the place of our abiding in the mystery of God revealed in Scripture and Creed as Trinity. This is the particular challenge of the Athanasian Creed. “He, therefore that would be saved, let him thus think of the Trinity”.
But what is that way of thinking? It is the way of affirmation and the way of negation, ways which recognize God as the fundamental principle of the being of all things, on the one hand, and which distinguish God absolutely from everything else, on the other hand. The interplay of these two ways, so wonderfully laid out in the Athanasian Creed, avoid the twin dangers either of collapsing God into our discourse, into our ways of speaking, or denying altogether the possibility of thinking the truth of God.
These twin dangers belong to a despair of revelation, a despair of thinking God in the form of the witness of the Scriptures, on the one hand, and in the form of philosophical and theological discourse, on the other hand; in short, to our contemporary nihilism. The critical issue for the Church in our world and day is the recovery of the interplay of these two things: the witness of the Scriptures to the revelation of God as Trinity and the intellectual integrity of our philosophical and theological traditions of reason that belong to thinking the Trinity.
What we celebrate on Trinity Sunday is not one doctrine – one teaching – among many others. It is not a teaching for one time and not for another as if it were merely some matter from the dust-bin of history. No. It is the central and defining doctrine of the Christian Faith, the doctrine which brings coherence and order to the many, many ways of speaking about God in the Scriptures as well as in the great religions and philosophies of the world. We cannot not think God as Trinity.
We behold a mystery but the mystery lies not in what is concealed but in what is revealed, the mystery which we can never hope nor want to exhaust and so reduce to ourselves, the mystery, however, about which we are obliged to speak and say something, to say, in fact, what God has given us to think and say, the things which raise us up into the Spirit. We are being required to think upwards, to think analogically. That is the fuller meaning of Jesus’ words to Nicodemus about being born again. And it is what is captured in the lesson from Revelation.
For “behold, a door was opened in heaven” – not just a window through which we might peer as in a glass darkly – but a door through which we might enter humbly. We are drawn into the mystery of the life of God, the God who is declared to us unambiguously and without being collapsed into the world as the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost; the God who is Trinity. And we are drawn into that mystery by Word and Spirit. The twenty-four elders, in Dante’s view, symbolize the authors of the books of the Old Testament or in another view they symbolize the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve Apostles of the Church; the four living beings represent the four Gospels of the New Testament but through the imagery of worship derived from Ezekiel and Isaiah. All this is in the Spirit and shows the Church, whose very being is grounded in Scripture, engaged in the worship of the trice Holy “Lord God Almighty, which was, and which is, and which is to come”, the mystery of God in his spiritual life as Trinity.
The Trinity is not one image alongside of other images for our thinking and speaking about God. It is the definite and comprehensive image which unites the whole pageant of revelation in the witness of the Scriptures, the motions of God for us, with the wonder and mystery of God in himself.
Scripture presents us with a great number of images and ways of thinking about God. The traditions of philosophy and even individual human experience may suggest as well a great number of ways of thinking about God. But this does not mean that the Scriptures or human experience present simply a smorgasbord of images about God from which we are each free to choose what suits us, to pile up our own salad plate of divinity, as it were. For that would be merely a god for me, a god of my own making, and so no God at all. We would empty the images of Scripture and experience of any content and meaning. The doctrine of the Trinity gives coherence and meaning to the various images of God in Scripture, tradition, and reason, without which they fall into competing and mutually exclusive positions and ultimately result in the kinds of atheism such as we see abundantly in our Church and world today.
To distinguish God from everything else is to say that he is no thing, which is not to say that God is nothing. It is to say that he is not one thing like any other thing, another being in the vast plethora of beings. No. God has to be utterly distinguished from the being of the things of the world precisely as the cause and principle of their being. How God can be related to the world and radically other than the world is the real meaning of the doctrine of the Trinity. We celebrate nothing less than the mystery of the divine relations – God’s own relation to himself which is the principle of his relation to all else. Trinity Sunday is the fullest possible affirmation that the spiritual is what is real, not the material, and yet the material world is redeemed and participates in the spiritual reality of God.
This gives coherence and meaning to the images of Scripture because there is an order and a hierarchy of images. The definitive images in the Christian understanding are those of Father, Son and Holy Ghost which at once suggest an intimacy and a remove, a distance. These are precisely not images which are the projections of social, economic and political arrangements or of our fevered imaginations about gender identities. God as Father is not like a human father; nor is God as Son like a human son and, perhaps, it is that elusive and ambiguous third, the Holy Ghost who most helps us to realize the nature of the deep mysteries of God which cannot be reduced to the world but which cannot be in flight from the world either. There is the redemption of all the images of God through the definitive revelation of God as Trinity.
Our lessons make this clear. It is really all about worship, all about the worthiness of God, the God who is worthy of our thinking and our loving. It requires of us that we be born again, born anew, born from above. Our minds have to be exercised upon the high things of God revealed to us through the witness of the Scriptures and in the Spirit. They teach us things about our humanity but, most importantly, they teach us about the God in whose image we are made, individually and corporately, the God who is Trinity.
“Thou art worthy, O Lord”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity Sunday, 2016