by CCW | 11 June 2017 15:00
A strong and provocative statement, perhaps, but surely no less so than Jesus telling Nicodemus who came to him questioning in the night that “ye must be born again”, a phrase, I fear that has often been misunderstood if not hijacked to the agendas of a purely experiential religion of sentiment and feeling and its corollary of authority and self-righteous presumption devoid of thought. Does not Jesus also tell Nicodemus “marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again”? He goes on to talk of the great mystery of spiritual life. Ultimately, he speaks about the mystery of his own life, the mystery of the Trinity. “If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not; how shall ye believe heavenly things?”
And yet, it is precisely heavenly things that he reveals in and through the things of this world. We are in the presence of the great mystery of God, the holy and blessed Trinity. “He therefore that would be saved let him thus think of the Trinity,” the great Creed of Athanasius[1] puts it. What does that mean? To think of the Trinity in a certain way. What is that way? It is the very way which Jesus shows us, taking the things of this world and showing us that they only have life and meaning when they are lifted up into the life from which they come and to which they return. Apart from me you are nothing, we might say.
That way of thinking is the dance of apophatic and kataphatic theology. Fancy words, perhaps, but words which reveal the necessary and important way of thinking God. They are the forms of our negative and positive thinking about God, the counter to our idolatry and atheism. They are about our freedom and life.
God is nothing, meaning no thing like other things, no being like other beings. It is entirely proper to say that God is nothing if by that we mean something different from our world and day, from us and our being. That is negative theology. It distinguishes God utterly from everything else in the created order. The Creator is not the same as the created. And yet, there is a relationship between them that is also positive; nowhere more profoundly so than in the idea that we are made in the image and likeness of God. God reveals himself to us by way of the things of the world, perhaps most wonderfully in the parables of the kingdom. “The kingdom of heaven is like unto” this and that image from our world and day. That is positive theology. The Athanasian Creed dances us through the necessary paradoxes of reason without which our reason is dead and deadly, destructive and empty.
Life gives itself as life to itself and knows itself as life. That is the life of God. “In the beginning God,” Genesis states. “In the beginning was the Word,” John’s Prologue begins, a Prologue which is both introduction and summary of the entire Gospel. “And the Word was with God and the Word was God… In him was life and the life was the light of men.” Trinity Sunday is nothing more and nothing less than the beginning and the end of spiritual life. We are lifted up into the wonder of God’s own life in whom alone we have our life and being. The lesson from Revelation signals profoundly what that means. It means worship and praise, the worship and praise of the God who is life in himself and gives us life in creation, in redemption and in sanctification. We are entirely finite beings who cannot and do not give life to ourselves. Here is the life upon which all life depends.
The Trinity is not a puzzle to be solved through some sort of clever algorithmic reasoning. It is the mystery of life itself without which we cannot think and feel, live and be. That is the radical nature of the Trinity. When we forget that then we turn God into something which we project and make. As in the story of the Tower of Babel, we fall into the folly of presuming not only to “make a city ourselves with its tower in the heavens” but even more to “make a name for ourselves.” As if it is all us when in fact we are nothing in and of ourselves and cannot make ourselves. When we forget the Maker, I fear, we become the monster.
Such forgetfulness leads to one of the great paradoxes of our times. We can indeed make things; we are secondary creators, properly speaking, creators in the image of the Creator. But when we choose to ignore that truth, we become the makers of our own unmaking. Monsters in the ancient and classical world are combinations and perversions of rationality and animality in one form or another: centaurs and minotaurs and sphinxes, for instance. For modernity, the monsters are more like machines. The paradox is one which Albert Camus has wonderfully captured as the symbol for the destructiveness of our technocratic culture. The guillotine is the machine which is made to take off your head. We make the machine that unmakes us. It serves, I think, as a powerful image of the madness of our disordered world. It is the result of our profound rejection and forgetfulness of the teaching of the Trinity.
God is the life that gives himself to us as life and knows himself as life in that self-giving. There is nothing that is not part of eternal life. That is the meaning of Christ’s exchange with Nicodemus and it is the insight of the powerful image of worship in the lesson from Revelation. We are made for God, “the soul made apt for worshipping”, as Dante puts it. We only live when we live to and for and with God. “Apart from me ye can do nothing” because apart from me you are nothing. To reclaim this understanding is the task and purpose of the Church for without it the Church itself becomes but another destructive machine, a bureaucracy, merely another human construct which cannot account for itself in any fashion and can only destroy all that belongs to the truth and dignity of our humanity.
Trinity Sunday sets before us in an unequivocal way the priority and primacy of spiritual life. It is a redire ad principia, a kind of circling whereby we participate in the comings and goings of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in their infinite and eternal and self-complete life through our comings and goings to and with God in our lives of prayer and praise, of word and sacrament, of service and sacrifice. This is our life, the life to which our liturgy constantly calls us. Here is the real truth and meaning of our lives, our lives lived for and with God. Only so can we truly live for and with one another.
The Anglican poet and divine, George Herbert, captures this sensibility wonderfully, reminding us precisely about what Trinity Sunday celebrates, namely the gathering up of all things to God from whom all things do come and in whom we live and move and have our being. He draws explicitly upon the images from the lesson from Revelation.
Thou hast but two rare cabinets of treasure,
The Trinitie, and Incarnation:
Thou hast unlockt them both,
And made them jewels to betroth
The work of thy creation
Unto thy self in everlasting pleasure.
We only live when we live in the praise of the Trinity for then we live with God, for God and in God in the life that has no end.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity Sunday, 2017
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2017/06/11/sermon-for-trinity-sunday-8/
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