Well, today is Trinity Sunday, which may or may not get us excited. But back in 1998 the theological students at Oxford were excited. The eminent Eastern Orthodox bishop Kallistos Ware would be giving a series of weekly lectures on the Trinity. Now, if there was one thing known about Eastern Orthodox theologians, aside from their enthusiastic love of incense, it was their deep thinking on the Trinity.
And so, when the day came, the lecture hall was packed and a hush moved around the crowd as Kallistos got up to speak – and I quote: “The Holy, Blessed and undivided Trinity is a mystery of God impossible for human minds to comprehend or human speech to explain.” And without saying another word, he walked calmly out of the hall.
Because I am not a bishop, and nor do I have a tenured university job like Kallistos, nor rector status, I am not going to sit down, and let the silence, our silence together as the Body of Christ, explain the trinity – though, the silence would do a better job.
Nor will I, in a very laudable and admirable attempt to avoid the trap of words, use common day objects to SHOW the trinity, like a clergyperson of my acquaintance ANECDOTE
Also, we cannot let images OR even the most profound silence abide today, because it is necessary to try and explain the trinity, even though we know we cannot.
It is necessary to use our language and our minds to conceive God, so that God can be present in our language and in our minds. As incarnate, bodily images of God, we have to try and hold onto god, so God can incarnate within us and through us.
It is necessary to refine our words and concepts of God, so that our words and concepts reflect both what we know of God, and the limitations of our knowledge, what we do not know of God.
So, we do know God as three persons, traditionally imaged as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We do not fully know who these three terms refer to; we do not fully know God.
We do know that the terms “father” “son” and “spirit” refer more to the relationship that exists between the persons rather than three discreet and independent forms of God. We do not, cannot, fully know the nature of that relationship.
And of course, while knowing that the One God is Three Persons, that three are One, we do not know how this really works.
This illogic, this impossibility is the key to the Trinity, the key to the Christian conception of the Divine, because we affirm a truly scandalous and illogical Gospel – that the uncreated creator incarnated as one of us, as flesh and blood and died so that we may all live – that Christ is both fully human and fully divine and even more crucially offers us, all of us, every person, an eternal share in that divinity.
The impossible, yet Real, trinity affirms the impossible reality that our destiny, each of us, is to unfold and expand forever with the Trinity as part of the intra-divine life.
The Trinity – symbolically and spiritually, not logically – is the why and how of the gospel.
The “why” we remember every week at the Eucharist: God so loved the world that Christ was born and died so we may live, and die no more.
The trinity then points to the greatest love that we can ever know, the greatest love that we can ever tell.
And, as prayed through the profound and beautiful body prayer of Bishop Kallistos as he walked in silence out of the lecture hall, the trinity is the greatest love that we can NEVER tell.
As a person made in the image of the God we know this. When we fall in love – with a child, our partner, our animal companions – we want to tell the whole world. Over and over again – because we know that no matter what we say, whatever words we use, we will never be able to express the love bursting out of our hearts, a love than cannot be told.
With the Trinity, we have these two poles – speech and silence, comprehension and mystery.
In the modern world of emails, texts, books – and yes, sermons – we are very comfortable with speech and comprehension. We are not so familiar with silence and mystery. So, we naturally try and “explain” the trinity with words. And we have to do this – we have to proclaim and witness to the scandal of the Gospel, to the astounding love of God through Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit for all people and all creation.
This is why, after leaving in silence, Bishop Kallistos returned the next week and gave his profound and brilliant series of lectures.
But when we do try to explain the trinity, how three are one and one is three, our minds, as creatures of God, naturally use aspects of creation such as ice, water and steam; salt, flour, water. God, the Trinity, though, is not of creation, and so every explanation can never fully work, as literally anything we can think of is born of our creaturely minds, and while in Creation, infusing Creation, God is also beyond creation.
The beautiful, astounding gift of the trinity then is the failure it brings.
Trying to understand or explain the trinity leads us from comprehension to bafflement – and to the profound, and uncomfortable realization that we do not know and live always in mystery.
As each and every explanation of the trinity is revealed as inadequate, we become more humble, more open to new thoughts and concepts of God, more open to her love and more open to other people who, as images of God offer the mystery of God to us.
But this will not happen if we prematurely accept we cannot understand the Trinity, and do not make the effort to try – if we skip over to the end of the book as it were. It only happens if we question, pray and explore by engaging with God as she engages with us.
It is our engagement, our participation with God, that leads us to the HOW of the Gospel – how we may receive and share the eternal love and life offered by God.
In our Gospel today the Trinity is in action – ALL, everything, God has is given to Christ “All that the Father has is mine” – and then the Holy Spirit takes this divine fullness, this completeness and declares it to us.
The three persons, working in relationship, offer us the fullness of divinity. As our readings from Romans tells us, this occurs because “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” This same Spirit, the Spirit of Truth from the Gospel, leads us into all the truth, revealing to us all that is Christ’s – which is all that is the Father’s. Father, Son, Spirit, and then … us.
The eternal flow of the divine has been gifted to us, through love, and has entered our hearts and our lives. And so, WE become part of the flow and part of the story of the trinity.
What this means though – because this divine outpouring into our hearts has already happened, is always happening – what this means, is our eternal life has already begun.
We already share the life of the Trinity. We are already part of the greatest love ever told, the greatest love story that can never be told. Amen.