What's the Deal with the Trinity?
Tuesday June 21, 2011
"I’ve given up trying to understand it," my friend said, shaking her head in near-exasperation. I heard defeat in her voice.
And it’s not that my friend isn’t bright (she leads a department as an executive for a national firm). She’s well-versed in the Christian faith, having gone to church every week all her life. But we were talking about the Trinity, and she had concluded it was impossible to grasp.
I’ve heard others share a related conclusion: "I just don’t see why you need it. Why complicate things with trying to talk about the Trinity?" Some have called attempts to understand it "conceptual acrobatics." Can’t we just say there is God and leave it at that?
Let me confess that for decades, the Trinity seemed to me little more than a doctrine I accepted as true, yet thought had little to do with my life or faith. I experienced God in varied ways--his fatherly awe-inspiring presence, for instance. Or his forgiving kindness in Jesus. Or his moving in people through the Holy Spirit.
But even with those ways I experienced God’s three aspects, the Trinity itself did little to elicit awe or devotion. God was there, yes. Jesus—well, of course he was divine. And the Spirit, well, that was how God happened to move and function.
But not much more.
Something happened, though.
Part of the change has had to do with noticing how much the language of the Trinity pops up in the worship services of my faith tradition. How we use Father, Son and Holy Spirit together time after time in phrases such as "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit."
And I noticed how often in the New Testament the three names appear together in the same breath.
I stood back a moment from Gospel passages to notice again the intimacy with which Jesus prays to the Father. I recalled the way the Father communicates his affection to his beloved Son. And I pondered Jesus sending the Spirit, the Counselor, mentioning him with clear familiarity. All these sketch out a portrait of loving relationship.
And some of the change in me has had to with seeing how the prayers of earlier generations of Christians seemed soaked in awed awareness of this three-personed God. They talked about the threeness of God not for intellectual sport, but because they knew the personal richness of the God to whom they spoke.
That made me wonder. It suggested that there might be more to the God that I know and worship than I had thought. I began to think that in my own teaching I’ve aimed too much of the discussion about the Trinity to the head, or I should say, perhaps, over our heads, instead of aiming at the heart.
For the images that have lately helped me most hark back to experiences I have in the richest moments of communion with others. I mean times we sit as children in a mother’s lap. I mean the kinds of motions of the heart felt when we look affectionately at a spouse or relative. Or times we sit around a table with a group of friends and know we belong.
For to picture God with Trinitarian names reminds us that God is deeply personal. The language alone—Father, Son, even Spirit (with roots in the word breath)--suggests relationship, not stiff science. Such vocabulary helps us realize how little God is a lonely, solitary force. And it tells me how amazing, how relational, God himself is. In his very being, God knows what it means to share in the richness of love and affection. Even before time, God’s nature was to relate.
Writes Brian McClaren, "If … there’s only one God but not three Persons within the one God, then we would expect that the ultimate reality behind the universe could be silence. It could be power. It could be peace. It could be domination." But it would not be love.
"Because for love to exist," he writes, "there has to be a sharing and there has to be a communication and there has to be a self-giving."
One more thing helps me here. Sometimes we throw up our hands and say, Well, the Trinity is a mystery. Since we cannot fully grasp it all we content ourselves with staying confused and confounded.
But there’s another way to think about mystery. A way related to the relational God I’ve been pondering. For we speak of mystery not simply in terms of things we cannot understand. We also speak of the mystery of things that touch us deeply
As professor of theology Steve Guthrie reminds us in his book, Creator Spirit, to say the word mystery is not to leave behind the world of the personal. "It is persons with whom we speak and who speak to us," he writes, "and it is persons who remain always beyond what we can say about them. It is persons whom we most genuinely speak of ‘knowing,’ and it is persons who are most truly beyond our knowing, who always remain, to some degree, mysterious. Indeed, the mysterious is preeminently the domain of the personal."
He gives some examples: "Things (how a television works; how many galaxies there are in the universe) may be unknown—but they are not mysterious per se. They are things that could be known, given additional research and exploration. But no amount of data or scientific analysis could ever eliminate the ineffable wonder I felt when I first held my children; no philosophical speculation could ever resolve the mystery of my wife’s face."
The Trinity is a mystery, then, not in the sense that we shrink back in despair of ever knowing God, but in the sense that we can spend a lifetime familiarizing our hearts with him.
For the Trinity is about relationship. God shows us in this threeness in one what God is like—relentlessly personal, as Eugene Peterson put it. And God comes to us not so much as an idea, but with an invitation. He wants to include us, too, in that heavenly, familial communion.
It’s simpler, when you think of it like that. Simple, and wonderful.
Why I'm Practicing at Easter
Saturday May 7, 2011
I couldn’t go back to sleep. Now that I’m well into middle age, it seems to happen more often: I awaken at 2 or 3 am and lay in bed wide awake for an hour, my mind instantly alert and working over the day’s triumphs or disappointments.
When it happened again a few early mornings ago, I found myself thinking hard about Easter. And not just thinking, but puzzling. Why don’t I make more of this holy season that intends to rivet us with the good news of Jesus’ resurrection?
Of course, Easter Sunday came and went almost two weeks ago. You might wonder why I haven’t, church season-wise, moved on. But in my denominational tradition, we say that we still live squarely in the Easter season. Just as there are forty days in Lent, we celebrate Easter for fifty.
Still, it began to strike me as curious that I and the church people I hang around have seemed more aware of Lent and its penitential heaviness than they now are of Easter with its resurrection delight. We adopt Lenten disciplines—forgoing caffeine or candy, or fasting once a week, or adding a weekly act of volunteer service. But now that Easter has ushered in the season of freshness and life, why do I not set up camp in the foothills of resurrection joy? And getting more practical: Why not adopt a regular Easter practice with every bit of the devotion of a Lenten discipline?
So my pre-dawn wrestling lately has me asking myself, sometimes smack in the middle of what someone called "life’s grubby particulars," What does it mean for my life that Jesus was raised from the dead? In what ways do I (and can I) follow what a poem of Wendell Berry urged: "Practice resurrection"? (The phrase suggests that it might indeed take "practice.")
Other ages have lived more vividly in this reality, it seems. The early church’s apostolic witness Paul wrote of the power that raised Jesus from death as a reality for the present moment. He called it "the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead" (Ephesians 1:19-20). The power that made Jesus alive and risen works in and "toward" us? No wonder one morning I found myself too excited to go right back to sleep in the early hours of day.
So I’m asking myself again: What difference does Jesus’ resurrection make? What could it look like now that I know that the risen Lord resides in our world? What might be done to make that remarkable reality more present when morning comes again?
That Elusive Balance
Thursday April 7, 2011
I don’t know many people who say they have achieved a life of perfect balance. Maybe none.
I certainly struggle to give the competing pulls of my life their ordered, rightful place. Email, meetings, phone calls, sermons to prepare, people to whom I want to be available—all that takes center stage most days. But I also know the value of sometimes not doing. So while I like getting things done, and it’s true that I keep a full schedule, I also try to find a healthy, holy rhythm.
Bishop Mike Hill from Bristol, England, is teaching and preaching this week at the church I serve. He was telling some of us how hard it is to keep work and rest in balance. Even Jesus, with crowds clamoring after him, seemed to have to give attention to this balance when facing the constant demands and the overwhelming needs.
Then Mike said something that also struck me, an insight he had gotten from author and pastor Andy Stanley. Stanley has concluded that the struggles to keep in balance work and rest, activity and prayer, will always be tensions to manage more than problems to solve.
That seemed freeing, indeed. I already know I won’t keep a perfect balance or an always-satisfying rhythm. I will get out of whack. And usually not in the direction of praying too much! It helps me to remember that that reality may always something be I wrestle with. Even Jesus had to guard with determination a moment of restful breathing and quiet amid the squeeze and noise of the throngs.
I shared with Mike something that has helped me, too. How some say prayer is not simply preparation for the work (the important things). It often is the work. Getting on our knees becomes a vital way God accomplishes his purposes through us.
And I thought back to something author and seminary teacher Haddon Robinson wrote that has always struck me. For Jesus, he said, praying was not preparation for battle; it was the battle. It was in crying out to God where he truly gained the ground. And we see that pre-eminently in the last hours of Jesus’ life.
"Where was it that Jesus sweat great drops of blood?" he asks, thinking of Good Friday’s harrowing events.
"Not in Pilate’s Hall," says Robinson, "nor on his way to Golgotha." That’s what we would think, off hand. But no: "It was in the Garden of Gethsemane," the place, in other words where Jesus prayed.
"Had I been there and witnessed that struggle," recounts Robinson, "I would have worried about the future. ‘If he is so broken up when all he is doing is praying,’ I might have said, ‘what will he do when he faces a real crisis? Why can’t he approach this ordeal with the calm confidence of his three sleeping friends [his disciples]?’ Yet, when the test came, Jesus walked to the cross with courage, and his three friends fell away."
Sometimes, when the demands mount and the time seems to slip inexorably away, I need to tell myself: What could matter more? It’s tempting, as I wrote in an earlier blog entry, simply to rush in, thinking it’s my perspiration, my gritty effort, my ingenious smarts that will carry the day.
But what if I more often let God get in a word edgewise, let God do for me what I cannot figure out for myself, let God have room to work? What if I spent more time laboring in prayer and less in frenzied effort? Might the balance and sanity mean more than my relentless effort to fix and finish?
I think of a prayer from The Book of Common Prayer, a prayer for a Sunday in Lent, a prayer that has helped me with all this before. Perhaps saying it again (and again) will help me now:
Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Amen. May it be so!
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