Holy Trinity Year B- Many Persons in one God

Andre-Rublev's Saviour

Homily preached On Trinity Sunday  by Br. Andrew 5th June 2012

Many Persons in one God

Today is Trinity Sunday and in the readings today Father Son and Spirit have been revealed to us, the Trinitarian blessing pronounced for the first time. God is three and God is one!

I have had difficulty in committing this homily to paper, not because the subject is necessarily impossible but too many pathways’ bring us to this point of Revelation of Trinity and just as many proceed from it.

I have chosen, wisely, I think not to delve into the quagmire of the dogma of the Trinity rather to speak of God and how it makes itself known to us..

God is not the name of our Creator; we worship God, with a capital “G” to differentiate our God from other gods which we consider false, none existent and their representations Idols. The Deity has revealed to us its name and in doing so has entered into Covenant with humanity. In ancient times to know someone’s name was to know the source of their secret strengths or life, to reveal your name to another was a huge step towards being in relationship with that person.

Our Creator, through a burning bush that would not burn revealed The Name on mount Horeb to Moses, a lonely shepherd, revealing something of Divine mystery: –

 “ I Am that I Am” – Yahweh, Y’hw’h without its now unknown vowels the  Hebrew consonant’s when spoken together Yoh- hey, vah, hey—almost sounds like we are  breathing. The Name is the very breath we take to sustain life. Moses was alive because he breathed the breath of Yahweh.

I Am forever fully present I AM the One who makes all others things be.

In the reading from Deuteronomy Moses extolls the WORD, and reminds them that the LORD has created them; redeemed them from slavery in Egypt, breathed into them his breath of life and makes them whole and in return asks only that they love him. To be responsible!

Yahweh is forever fully Triune; yet at that point in time humanity’s capacity to believe, even in a single faceted deity, was impeded by recent history, the pollution of belief by their Slavers,  with the forgetting of their religious roots and Practices.

 Yahweh reveals only enough about the One who Is as the current paradigm will allow us to have the wisdom and courage to believe.

We could say of an Anthropomorphic God that in choosing to enter into a relationship with us Yahweh became vulnerable.

The Jews of old knew Yahweh as a Father (Ex.4:22), a Shepherd (Psalm 22/23:1), a Husband, (Is.54:5-8), Potter (Jer.18:6), and Vineyard owner, (Ps.80:8-13) they did not as yet know him as a brother; nor would they believe, in a hurry that their Father, would take a wife or sire a human child.

In his humanity Yahweh God was vulnerable because as soon as he entered into intimate relationship with us he knew that one day, when the time was right he, the Word would be born into the world to die for us; to save us from sin and death.

Moses said to the Israelites “Was there ever a word so majestic, from one end of heaven to the other? Was anything like it ever heard…” (Deut.4:32) When we remove the veil from our Eucharistic elements we say – In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God. Through the Word all things were made. The Word was made flesh and lived among us. (John 1:1-4 NJB) This Majestic Word is Jesus, the second divine personality in Yahweh who became one of us.

While Jesus the Christ was with us he taught us more about Yahweh than was ever yet revealed because He is Yahweh, standing in the flesh beside the people of his time and yet seated in heaven taking care of the world.

There are too many verses to cite the love that Jesus has in his heart for us or to truly understand the terror of execution and the darkness of the grave.

St. Francis of Assisi places the following words on Christ’s lips in the time between the time in the grave and his assumption into heaven – curious that Francis uses the term Assumption as if Christ were being received back into heaven rather than leaving his disciples.

8.    But I have slept, and I have arisen, and my Most Holy Father has taken me up to glory.

9.    Holy Father, You have held me by the hand, you have willed to lead me out, and You have assumed me into glory.

10. For what have I in Heaven, and what have I on earth apart from You? (Psalm 6:8-10)

Before the most Holy Father assumed Jesus into heaven  , Jesus said to his Apostles  'All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  Go, therefore, make disciples of all nations; baptise them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,  and teach them to observe all the commands I gave you. And look, I am with you always; yes, to the end of time.' (Matt 28: 17b-20 NJB)

This Holy Spirit, the ruach-hakodesh is the third personality in Yahweh, like the Father and the Word it has always been there brooding over the earth during creation, given to the 72 elders,(Num.11 : 14-17,24-29 NJB) reserved for anointed kings, given to Prophets but not always permanently, the Holy Spirit left King Saul ( I Sam 16:14 NJB) who went mad. After sinning with Bathsheba king David prayed. “Do not thrust me away from your presence; do not take away from me your spirit of holiness. (Psalm 51:11 NJB)

In our time  the Holy Spirit is given to all who believe in Jesus - after Pentecost when the disciples were thought to be drunk Peter says “On the contrary, (they are not drunk)this is what the prophet (Joel) was saying: “ In the last days -- the Lord declares -- I shall pour out my Spirit on all humanity. Your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your young people shall see visions, your old people dream dreams.” (Acts 2:16,17:cf Joel 3 NJB)

We alive because we breathe the Spirit of Yahweh

When the Holy Spirit comes upon us it melds with our own Spirit to testify that we are now sons and daughters of Yahweh, inheritors of all good things, brothers and sisters of Christ, one with Yahweh in a multiplicity of Personalities, thousands and thousands of Personalities but one God. Unity in multiplicity.

And the self-revelation of Yahweh to his people goes on!

Trinity Sunday Year B: Celebrating Mystery and Majesty and Mercy

In an interview, Paul describes the shack as "the place we build to hide all our crap." Who are we hiding from - God or self?

“Moses said to YHWH, “But, never in my life have I been a man of eloquence,

either before or since you have spoken to your servant.” Ex 4:10

Trinity Sunday Year B: Celebrating Mystery and Majesty and Mercy.

This weekend we honour and celebrate the triune nature of the one true God. It would be easy to get into all sorts of theological abstractions. All catholic and many mainline protestant churches will probably say or sing the 6th century Athanasian Creed. In praying the creed we as Christians affirm the unity and co-equality of the Godhead. We also deny both tritheism (that we worship three gods) and subordinationism (that the Son or the Spirit is subordinate to the Father). Although the Western Church affirms the Athanasian Creed, in the Eastern Orthodox church it has never had widespread use. This is strange, because Eastern "Cappadocian fathers" of the fourth-century: Basil the Great of Caesarea, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and their friend and bishop of Constantinople Gregory Nazianzus, contributed much to the development of the doctrine of the Trinity. When Eastern Orthodox believers celebrate the Trinity, they start in a different place. Western Christians tends to start from intellectual abstraction while the eastern approach emphasises adoration of the mystery. It has always been wary of the limitations of human mind and language, when approaching the reality of an infinite God. And it's a good place to start when we worship God.

Evagrius of Pontus (345–399), who spent the last sixteen years of his life among unlettered Coptic Christian peasants in the harsh Egyptian desert, once observed: "God cannot be grasped by the mind. If he could be grasped he would not be God." The Syrian monk and bishop John of Damascus (676–749) wrote in his 'Exposition of the Christian Faith' (I.4): "It is plain, then, that there is a God. But what he is in his essence and nature is absolutely incomprehensible and unknowable. God then is infinite and incomprehensible; and all that is comprehensible about him is his incomprehensibility." I just love this inscrutable eastern approach to the mystery of God.

The Old Testament reading (Deuteronomy 4:32-40) this week speaks of the transcendent God as creator and liberator. The psalmist (Psalm 32) speaks of the 'word' of the Lord which can be applied to Jesus the 'Word made flesh'. Paul in his letter to the Romans (8:14-17) teaches about the Holy Spirit's role of helping us to know our true selves in Christ by grace. Paul says, we should not relate to God from fear, but as a child who feels safe with their father: "Abba, Father" (see also Mark 14:36 & Galatians 4:6). The Aramaic word "Abba" used by Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane could be translated as "Papa." a word that Jesus and children of his time first learned to speak for their father. This word is used only three times in the New Testament, and conveys a shocking sense of human intimacy with the divine infinite. In Matthew's gospel (28:16-20 which is used this weekend in Catholic churches) Jesus shares his authority with his disciples urging them to baptise in the name of the Father, Son and Spirit. The assurance that Jesus will always be with us is a comfort to us who now live the 'experience called Spirit' or the Church.
God's radical transcendence is only part of what we celebrate on Trinity Sunday. God is infinite, but in the Romans reading we are remind that God is also intimate and immanent. Many of us would have seen a reproduction of Rembrandt’s painting (pictured below) the "Prodigal Son" (1666) now housed in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia or have read Henry Nouwen's classic reflection of the painting titled 'The Return of The Prodigal Son' (19192). The painting is full of deep, dark reds and browns. In it, the stooping father embraces his kneeling son with compassion, with tenderness, and without any questions about his many failings. The painting illustrates Jesus' parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32). Jesus says this is what God is LIKE (a welcoming father).
For me God is also like a nurturing mother. This feminine side of God is beautifully developed by the American writer Paul Young in his novel "The Shack" (2007). I read this book as we all do with the lens of my background and conditioning, and found it at first challenging. The book was rejected by 26 publishers, and so at first Young self-published it. It was vilified by many self-appointed and self-important theological gatekeepers from both protestant and catholic conservative backgrounds as 'new age' theological nonsense. Today there are over 10 million copies of "The Shack" in print which is a sure sign that the book speaks very powerfully to many readers. The "shack" is a metaphor for our place of shame (the icon of our deepest pain or the place of our deepest nightmares). In an interview, Paul describes the shack as "the place we build to hide all our crap." Who are we hiding from - God or self?

I don't want to spoil the novel, but it begins with a mysterious note (invitation) from God, who invites Mack, the main character, back to the shack he has in the wilderness. And so the shack becomes a place of healing, for our intimate and tender God always meets us in "the middle of our mess" or as scripture of put it - the desert or lonely place. "The Shack" is really a doctrine of the Triune-God in the form of a story (a safe way to do theological speculation). It is not the abstract dogmatic Athanasian-Nicean Creed. The author pictures the Trinitarian God who welcomes us back to the shack as: El-ousia, "a large beaming African-American woman" (Father), a Middle Eastern man dressed like a labourer (Jesus) and "small, distinctively Asian woman" named Sarayu who collects tears (the Spirit).
Mack the very emotionally wounded hero in the novel, discovers that God isn't like what he thought. God's not the product of his projections or the neat formulas of academic theology. God's perfectly good who seeks to heal and not humiliate, to free and not to limit us. Mack learns to trust the God not of his conditioning but the God of 'mystery and mercy' fully and to believe that God is near (See Psalm 139). That for me is the good news for this Trinity Sunday.

Bartholomew I, the Ecumenical Patriarch the first among all orthodox bishops of the Easter Orthodox churches (he's like the pope of the east) and profound spiritual writer, captures both God's transcendence and immanence in his book 'Encountering the Mystery' (2008). He writes: "God as unknowable and yet as profoundly known; God as invisible and yet as personally accessible; God as distant and yet as intensely present. The infinite God thus becomes truly intimate in relating to the world” (p186). So as one in the world I see signs or footprints of the holy-other and the holy-close and I am grateful. So our liturgies begin with the signing of ourselves with the cross and naming the holy three. Now we are at the deep end of the pool of mystery straight away and we have to swim with the help of others past and present to the holy altar-table where we through the elements of the earth we consume God and are consumed by God. By continually developing the art of negotiating this mystery we can learn ways to sink, float, swim and so ready ourselves to be like Christ in desiring and saying "into your hands God, I commend my life".
All theologians and men and women of prayer would agree that our thoughts about God and our prayers to God live with limits. A poem by British Anglican apologist and theologian C. S. Lewis captures the practical implications of God's transcendence. It's called 'Footnote to All Prayers'.

He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow 

When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou, 

And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart 

Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art. 

Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme 

Worshiping with frail images a folk-lore dream, 

And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address 

The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless 

Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert Our arrows, 

aimed unskilfully, beyond desert; 

And all men are idolaters, crying unheard 

To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word. 

Take not, O Lord, our literal sense. 

Lord, in thy great Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.

As usual on the feast of the Trinity, I am tempted to try and say something really new and novel about the mystery in which "we live and move and have our being" but I am a person who recognises their limitations. So as I come before or stand or knee within the reality of that which is "mystery and majesty and mercy" - I stammer. Please forgive