THE MOST HOLY TRINITY – B
Deuteronomy 4:32-34,39-40
Romans 8:14-17
Matthew 28:16-20
There is a section in the book store or on the movie guide called “mystery.” In this genre of story, a crime has been committed and it is up to the detective (who is usually a little quirky) to determine whodunnit. The mystery is solved when the detective sits all of those involved down and explains how he broke the case. In this kind of mystery there is a problem and there is a solution. That is not the way the Bible or Church talks about mystery. Mystery in a religious context is not a problem to be solved and does not readily yield an explanation. You experience a mystery. We instinctively understand mystery in this sense. Being in love is a mystery. While scientists or psychologists might talk of hormones or pair bonding or physiology none of that explains love. We have poems and songs going back four thousand years that don’t fully capture the intensity of love. Love is beyond all explanations. Death is a mystery. The coroner might give you a cause of death – cancer, heart attack, stroke. But the medical description does not capture the disconnect that happens when someone we love dies. How can this person who was so much part of my life be gone? The mother of a friend of mine was bemoaning the death of her husband. “Why? Why? Why?” Her son answered, “Well, he smoked a pack of unfiltered Lucky Strikes every day for the past thirty-eight years.” That’s not what I meant, she snapped. And she was right. The why of death is beyond language. Creation is a mystery. A famous philosopher put it this way: “Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.” We count on physicists and biologists and astronomers to tell us how the world is. But no one can say why there is something and not nothing. We appreciate the scientists, engineers and technologists who have invented the modern world with communication and transportation transforming human society beyond anything our ancestors imagined. (I must confess, my two favorite inventions are the flush toilet and hot showers.) But when we try to pull the curtain back from the observable universe we are in the realm of mystery.
Today the Church celebrates a mystery, in fact the mystery: the mystery of God. Who or what is God? People experience an awesome God, the judge and lord of history, the cosmic power beyond all human endeavor, creator of everything. But people also experienced God in the person of Jesus, a man born in a Jewish family two thousand plus years ago who suffered, died and rose again. A human being was found capable of bearing divinity. And people meet God in their own hearts and souls. The very spirit of God, a Holy Spirit, is given to us and dwells within us. Three different experiences of God yet all pointing to the same God, the one God. We use the term Trinity as a shorthand for how God has become known in this three-fold way.
Naming God as Trinity is more than a fun fact – lemons float but limes sink, the human circulatory system is 60,000 miles long, your heart beats 100,000 time each day. The Trinity has been revealed to us so that we might encounter God as God is and not as we would like God to be. The only way to meet God is as mystery. That makes sense since the most important things are mystery: love, marriage, children, life, death, sickness, humanity, sin, hope, happiness. No matter how hard we try their real meaning is just out of reach, like a receding horizon. We can see the end of the rainbow but can never reach it. People go to seminary, read books, attend catechism classes, listen to podcasts or participate in workshops all hoping to learn something of God and we still don’t know what’s it all about. We are tempted to hold onto the tiny island of our knowledge but we’ll only find God when we launch ourselves into the great ocean of mystery. A twentieth-century poet put it this way: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to live the questions. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Calling God the Holy Trinity is an invitation to live the questions. How can I be a child of God like the Bible says when I am such a mess? Why would God want to love me with all my faults and failings? What does it mean that Jesus promises to be “with us always” when there are times when I feel lost and alone? If “all power in heaven and on earth” has been given to Jesus why is there still war and poverty and injustice and cancer? We must live those questions since whatever answer there might be is shrouded in an unknown future. What we should do when confronted with the mystery of God is dance. The ancient Greeks talked about the Trinity as the perichoresis, as dancing together. (The English word choreography has the same root.) God in being God is a divine dance, a constant flow and a joy-filled interaction of relationships. We enter the mystery of God by participating in the dance – not a ballet with every step measured but a barn dance, a line dance, a chicken dance, a bunny hop, a grapevine, an electric slide. No spectators – everyone on the floor. By sharing our life questions, by honoring the web of relationships we have with one another, by enjoying interacting with those we belong to, we enter into the dance, into the mystery, into the life of the Trinity. May I have this dance?
