SERMON FOR TRINITY SUNDAY, MAY 30, 2021

          I took a course in graduate school entitled “The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Early Church.” The professor was exceedingly knowledgeable but sort of haphazard in his presentation of a topic that is confusing to begin with. The class qualified as an elective for both the History of Christianity and Systematic Theology areas of study, so we had students from both programs enrolled. They were generally easy to tell apart. The history folks focused on the ecclesiastical and political significance of the development of doctrine — whose opinions won out and why, and what difference did it make in the lives of believers? The theologians focused on the doctrines themselves. They analyzed and compared and got quite excited about the beauty of certain theological constructs. Oh, those 4th-century Cappadocian Fathers of the Eastern Church, who were the true architects of the doctrine of the Trinity as we know it;    and then the incomparable St. Augustine in the West. (His De Trinitate, On the Trinity, all 473 pages of it in a “translation for the 21st century,” can be downloaded on your Kindle for just $19.99). We read a host of lesser lights as well. I wrote a long, detailed paper on the trinitarian theology of Irenaeus of Lyons, a 2nd-century missionary originally from Asia Minor, who became a bishop in what is now France. I don’t remember much of the substance of my opus; just that the professor complained that it was so thorough in its exploration of the topic that it was difficult to follow. Well, boo-frickity-hoo, as my daughter would say — not nearly as difficult for him to read as it was for me to write.

          The Scriptures do not spell out a doctrine of the Trinity. Jesus did not provide one among the many teachings he shared with the disciples. But he does have a working understanding of the complex nature of God. Identified at his baptism as “the Son, the Beloved,” Jesus pursues his ministry in obedience to the one he calls Father, the one who sent him and to whom he will return. Then, as he promises while still on earth, the Spirit will come to his followers to lead them deeper into the truth of the Gospel and forward into the future of the church.

          In the first chapter of his Gospel John talks about the Word that was in the beginning with God and indeed was God. “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being” (John 1:3). The Apostle Paul echoes this in the first chapter of Colossians, where he writes: “ . . . for in [Christ] all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers — all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:15b-17). John concludes by proclaiming, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Paul makes the same move from the eternal, pre-existing Christ to the incarnate Savior. He writes,      “He is the head of the body, the church, he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:18-20). The story of the Son of God did not begin in the manger at Bethlehem or in the baptismal water of the River Jordan, nor did it end when his mission on earth was completed. As for the third person of the Trinity, the Scriptures testify to the Spirit’s work at creation — hovering over the waters, breathing life into Adam — speaking through the prophets, initiating the incarnation. All of these things happen before the revelation at Pentecost.

          It is not surprising that Christians thought long and hard about how to put these pieces together in their understanding of God. A distinction was made early on between what is called the immanent and the economic Trinity. The first, the immanent Trinity, refers to God as God is in Godself; how do Father, Son and Spirit relate to one another? How do they work together? How do they remain distinct yet one? It is an intimate union, in which you and I and all of creation have no part. Consequently, we got no insider information to go on. We are on different ground, however, when it comes to the economic Trinity, that is, the triune God as God relates to the creation. Here the church draws certain conclusions from the biblical witness and from its own experience of God’s activity in the world. The church has consistently stood its ground against charges of tritheism (that is, having three gods rather than one). It has insisted that this is one God but refuses to defend monotheism by looking at Father, Son and Holy Spirit as phases in God’s life, similar to an actor who plays different roles at different times in the same play or to the stages in the development of the life of a butterfly. That does not accord with the Scriptures or the experience of believers themselves. What we know is one God in three persons — how that works, well, that’s well above our pay grade to explain.    And if it sounds like polytheism to our critics, it’s not clear what more we could say to convince them otherwise.

          Fresh out of seminary and serving my first parish in a small Connecticut town, I joined with other local clergy to start an ecumenical lay school of theology. We all got to offer a course of our choice. For reasons I can no longer fathom, I taught a class on the doctrine of the Trinity. Perhaps I was acting on the belief that the best way to figure something out is to undertake explaining it to someone else. Suffice it to say, the class was not over-subscribed. But there was a contingent of women in the group from the same congregation. Now their church belonged to a denomination that certainly has a trinitarian faith but is not generally interested in trinitarian theology. Their particular Christian community has long prided itself on having no creed but the Bible. They saw no need to augment what God had provided in the Scriptures with their own carefully crafted confessions of faith and doctrinal systems. Those ladies signed up for my class because they were curious    — one of them told me the first night that she didn’t know what the doctrine of the Trinity was and had come to find out — they were curious, but not invested. Parsing the Nicene Creed in detail wasn’t going to make a big difference in their already faithful discipleship. In truth, they were more curious about the first woman pastor in their neck of the woods than they were about the Holy Trinity. Fair enough. It was a good lesson for me right at the start of my ministry, and it stuck with me when I got to the University of Chicago. My theology classmates in graduate school, who happily immersed themselves in trinitarian doctrine, were praising God with their minds, just like the church fathers we studied. But that’s not for everybody. You don’t have to understand the doctrine of the Trinity to be a child of the triune God.

          The piece of trinitarian theology I remember best is a simple image from Martin Luther. In a sermon he describes the first and third persons of the Trinity helping the second get into his coat, the Father holding one sleeve and the Spirit the other, while the Son slips his arms into his new human nature. Each one plays a specific part, but they are of one mind and one heart, working together to the same end, our salvation. Amen.