Today is Trinity Sunday. We’ve just emerged from Pentecost- that hugely significant, challenging, and exciting celebration. We’re just getting our heads round the metaphor of the Spirit coming in fire and wind, and opening us to the experience of God in Christ present with us, and now we’re asked to take on board the whole Trinitarian package. It’s no wonder, that in many churches this is the Sunday when the regular preacher finds a substitute to deal with Trinity!
One of the biggest difficulties we have when we’re faced with mysteries beyond our experience, is to find words to describe them to ourselves. I think I’ve told you this story before but it’s worth repeating it. It’s a true story of a group of five-year-olds from Wainoni School who were taken to the beach. They had never been to the beach – it’s only 1km away from where they lived, but their families had nothing extra to cover the cost of picnics at the beach! They had no word for sand. They had never seen it, or experienced the feeling of it – they had no words. It’s hardly surprising that we struggle to find words to describe the mysteries of our faith. Even when we experience them, they’re so big that the words we use never seem satisfactory – there’s always something more.
After all, it took the early church centuries to hammer out a concept of Three-in-One, and One-in-Three that was helpful to them in building their faith. And the formula the Church came up with after 300 years worked for their time and knowledge, but, in the end, it wasn’t a glue strong enough to hold the Church together! The early Christians were passionate about their theology. There were riots in the streets over different interpretations about the nature of God. The arguments spilled out into the markets and the barbers’ shops, and ordinary people came to blows in the streets over the different formulae proposed. Our ancestors really cared about the doctrines of their faith.
We still argue Trinitarian doctrine, but for us it’s become more of an intellectual exercise – the passion has gone out of the dispute. We leave it to the theologians to argue over the fine points. But maybe we’ve lost something in the process. It’s all very well to sing hymns about the Trinity, to name some of our church buildings Trinity this or that, to light three candles as an image of Trinity, and use Trinitarian formulations in our blessings and benedictions – as I’ve done myself today. But do we give much thought as to whether the whole concept of the Three-in-One affects our faith in any way at all? Sometimes, after all, we don’t even bother to make much out of Trinity Sunday, apart from singing a few favourite hymns.
And yet, it’s a major point of difference between our faith and the faiths of the other peoples of the Book. For Islam and Judaism, all this talk of Father, Son and Spirit in one Godhead is simply scandalous. For them, ‘one God’ is very tightly defined indeed. Judaism says: ‘The Lord your God is one.’ Islam says: ’There is no God but God and Mohammed is his prophet.’ And in their faiths, Jesus is also one of God’s prophets. How can the One God have a child walking the earth and yet remain one? How can the Holy Spirit be ‘sent’ from God and yet still be God?
I’ve heard answers; some of the possible answers. But all I can do is to share where my own thinking has got me to so far. My Methodist Sunday School had a lot of stories about God from the Hebrew Scriptures. Sometimes these stories were illustrated, and God was pictured as a benevolent elderly, bearded gentleman. The Sunday School syllabus forgot that Judaism never used images of God. (Our texts were English texts of course!) Judaism was very careful not even to name God. That brings another memory of an Orthodox Jewish woman who was a speaker at a feminist theology conference I went to. At the end, she said she had been fascinated by the arguments over the words to use for the creator. She said :”We’re not allowed to use words for” (pointing to the ceiling)- “so we can say what we like!” They keep the mystery of the nature of God. I came out of Sunday School with some very muddled pictures in my head.
And then, Jesus. There’s no question for Christians but that a man called Jesus of Nazareth once walked the paths of Palestine. And Jesus challenged the Jews when he did give a name to God. He used the language of intimate relationships – ‘Abba’ – Father – or, better, Daddy. We forget how very shocking this language was to a Jew who obeyed the Law. Jesus was challenging his people to move beyond the traditional concepts and to see the God of Israel in a whole new light, and especially to see Israel’s God in a reciprocal relationship with God’s people. But I don’t think Jesus intended us to get stuck with that one image. And, in Sunday School, even our images of Jesus were limited. We had all those very European pictures – remember those flannelette things that we stuck on boards? We made him in our Western image – a handsome young man with fair skin and long blond hair. Later, some of us got very indignant when other races made him in their ethnic image. Remember the fuss about the Maori sculpture of Jesus outside our own Cathedral in the Square?
And how about the third person of the Trinity: ‘glory be to the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost’. Ghost? Goodness knows what we thought we were talking about. Something resembling Caspar the Ghost I suspect, or a nebulous something floating about in a white cloud. Our teachers never really tried to explain that one! I have sympathy with the Japanese gentleman who said: “Honourable Father I understand; Honourable Son I understand; but Honourable Spirit I do not understand at all”.
And then, there are all those images in Christian art down the centuries. God is a mature male, Jesus is a young man, and the Spirit is often a white dove. A dove? When you think of the wind and fire – the power – of Pentecost, why pick one of the most harmless of birds? Just because it brought an olive branch to Noah?
The danger of images is that early concepts can get fixed very firmly in our minds, and limit our understanding. We close our minds to the mystery and the amazing richness of the Three-in-One. I’m not surprised that our teachers didn’t try to disentangle the nature of God – like most of us they struggled to find the words and concepts to make things clear. It was easier to leave well alone and stick to the traditional formulae. But, as a result, Trinity made no sense to me at all, and I don’t think I was alone in that. Unfortunately, most of the people who sat with me through Sunday School disappeared from the churches entirely as they grew to adulthood, and I wouldn’t mind betting that they are still carrying those images in their heads somewhere, and that for them, this is just one more seriously weird thing that church people believe.
Images can be dangerous outside the churches as well. What we hear, what we read, what we see in the first years of life can stick with us. I remember people of my parents’ generation talking about Germans and Japanese and I’m certain that the images those words brought to them were of the ‘dangerous other.’ One of my first summer jobs was in the Linwood Bakery, packing and icing cakes, among a group of young women – girls really – who were the most racist I’d ever come across, and their ‘inferior others’ were Maori. This was the time when Christchurch was visually white. Our Ngai Tahu iwi kept a very low profile. Those girls were simply parroting the words they would have heard at home. None of them had ever met anyone who owned to be of a different race. How much of the angst about bi-lingual road signs in Aotearoa New Zealand is because many people never move beyond the first impressions learned in those first years when language takes on meaning?
Just as we have to grow beyond our Sunday School faith, we have to grow beyond our first impressions – images – of community life. Over these years with Covid we’ve thought a lot about community, and we’ve learned, through being deprived of so much of it, how important community is. Now we need to go on working through this.
For several years my preferred image of the Trinity was a 15th Century Icon honouring St Sergius Radonezh of the Trinity (his Russian title). It really depicts Abraham’s three angelic visitors, but it became a well-known known icon of the Trinity: three figures, asexual, ageless, non-hierarchical and yet different, looking at each other with love, and dignity. It’s is a community of love. They sit at a square table with one side open to the viewer. We are invited in to this Community of Love. It’s a good image for working out our path to becoming community. But it still locks us in to the image of humanity: “God in three persons” as we sang at the beginning of our service. For me, God cannot be “a person”. I am still searching for an answer and may be the answer will never be in words. What is your answer?
Rev Barbara Peddie