I was texting with an old friend whose mother is a presbyterian minister and mentioned that I would be preaching today. “Well,” he responded, “mom’s advice for this Sunday has always been, ‘never preach on the Trinity.’” In my own reading and reflection preparing for today’s feast, I have come to appreciate the advice
Theologian Nadia Bolz-Weber states the problem succinctly: Preachers dread this day because we see it as kind of a dry dusty theological topic after the exciting and earthy part of the liturgical year that came before it. It’s like there’s this raucous party of Easter and Pentecost that comes to a screeching halt while an old crotchety man shuffles up to the pulpit, blows the dust off an enormous leather bound book, clears his throat saying And now a celebration of church doctrine causing the music to fade, the last of the Pentecost streamers still floating to fall the ground. Church doctrine Sunday.
Partly, the issue is that our feast days usually recall some spectacularly dramatic event: the angel appears to Mary, the child is born, a voice from heaven, death and resurrection, tongues of fire. Against that backdrop somehow the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople in 325 and 381 CE-a bunch of bishops arguing the fine points of theology- just doesn’t capture my imagination in the same way-though I don’t doubt that there was plenty of drama.
The issue also concerns the nature of theology itself. On the one hand the fundamental fact about God is mystery. God is ineffable, unfathomable and theology is our attempt to fathom God. Theologian Karl Barth spoke of God as totaliter aliter, Latin for “totally other”-other than what we think, say or write. Then he proceeded to write volume after volume about the ineffable God. Near the end of his life, he summed up his efforts by quipping:
The angels are laughing at old Karl Barth.
And, yet our acknowledgement of God as mystery has not made us particularly humble about our theologizing. The first major schism in the Church, the one that led to the Council of Nicea, occurred because of a dispute as to the nature of Jesus as created by God at the beginning or as coexisting with God from the beginning. The separation of Orthodox and Catholic Christians in the 11th century came about in large part because of Western theologians describing the Holy Spirit as proceeding from the Father and the Son and Eastern theologians insisting that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son.
Christians have hated each other to the point of shedding blood over such differences in our attempts to fathom the ineffable.
So now that I’ve spent the first half of my homily arguing the wisdom of my friend’s mom’s advice, why you might ask, am I ignoring it? Four years ago, on Trinity Sunday the late Pope Francis shared the following about this feast:
(It) speaks to our heart because we find it encompassed in that expression of Saint John which summarizes all of Revelation: “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8-16). The Father is love; the Son is love; the Holy Spirit is love. And as much as he is love, God, while being one alone, is not solitude but communion, among the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Because love is essentially a gift of self, and in its original and infinite reality it is the Father who gives himself by generating his Son, who in
turn gives himself to the Father, and their mutual love is the Holy Spirit, the bond of their unity.
Now, as beautifully poetic as that reflection is, if Francis had stopped there I might well be preaching about Father’s Day or Flag Day or who knows what except that he closes with this:
It is not easy to understand, but we can live this mystery, all of us, we can live it a great deal.
In the first letter of John that Francis cites we read:
The one who loves is a child of God, and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” (I Jn. 4:7-8).
Who is the one who knows God? Is it the one who professes that the Holy Spirit proceeds equally immediately from the Father and the Son? Or is it the one who professes that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son?” It is neither! It is the one who loves who knows God
We celebrate this important, if complicated, feast as a way of reminding ourselves that at the very heart of the mystery of God is a relationship, a community marked by love. We participate in this mystery every time we attempt to move our own relationships with our neighbors, ourselves and the world around us in the direction of love
The feast of the Holy Trinity is not about the precision of our language or the correctness of our theologies. It is about participating in God’s ongoing revelation of herself through our acts of compassion towards others, our commitment to justice and our reverence towards the planet upon which we all depend. Mysteries are not to be explained, they are to be lived.
A blessed feast day to all of you!