BOTH/AND GOD

Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15

[Since spoken communication differs from written, some of the grammar and syntax of this transcript may seem awkward in written form. To keep integrity with the spirit of the original delivery, the transcript stays close to the exact words spoken.]

Before I begin my sermon this morning, I wanted to offer a brief postscript on the message from last Sunday. Last Sunday I spoke about how the Holy Spirit helps us see a pattern of grace in our lives, and I gave an illustration of that point from Gestalt psychology. It was a picture--if you were there, it was a picture that I said contained the image of a dog, even though it looks like just a bunch of ink blobs. And I received no shortage of feedback about this after worship. Some people sent emails, and they buttonholed me after worship--some saying, "I can see the dog!" Other people saying, "I just can't see the dog!" And so if you're really curious about that, I put a cheat sheet on the door leading into the Fellowship Center, if you really want to see the dog.

It was kind of amusing to see the fun that people had with this...you know, dog spelled backwards.... Someone accused me of being a dyslexic pastor, trying to help his congregation see Dog. So if you're curious, on your way into the Fellowship Center, you can see Dog.

On that note, let's just take a moment to once again breathe in the Spirit, and to turn our hearts and minds to God. Let us pray. O come Holy Spirit. Come as the fire, and burn. Come as the wind, and cleanse. Come as the light, and reveal. Holy God, convict us and convert us and consecrate us until we are completely and truly yours. Amen.

***

Well, today is Trinity Sunday. It rolls around every year this time--the Sunday right after Pentecost, which we celebrate still through these beautiful red flags here in the Meetinghouse. And Trinity Sunday is, I think, a Sunday when all pastors are given a kind of free pass to "get theological," to inflict upon their congregation a whole bunch of Trinitarian theology. So today's message is going to be such a thing. I won't be reflecting quite as much on the texts for today, but if you'll notice each--both of these texts contain references to all three members of the Trinity. But today we're going to look at a framework through which we understand the scriptures, as we reflect upon the Holy Trinity.

And so a bit of a warning before I begin. I'm going to be a bit more abstract, I suppose, and philosophical, or theological than usual. When I was in college, toward the end of my college career, I took a course on metaphysics. And we would study things like: the philosophy of time; and Einstein's theory of relativity; and we'd think about questions like: if we had a rake that reached 30 light years out, would the handle move at the same time as the head of the rake? and mind-blowing things like this. And we'd say, "Who needs drugs when you've got metaphysics?"

So today we're going to get maybe a little bit more, again, abstract and perhaps mystical as we reflect on this very important historic doctrine of the church. But in saying that, I also want to emphasize that I certainly hope this is not just some intellectual exercise that we're engaged in. As pastors our job is to remind people, and ourselves to be reminded, that God has entered into a relationship with us. That God--I think it wouldn't be overstating it to say that God has fallen in love with you; with me; with us, and wishes to come into loving relationship with us. And so we do well to enter, ourselves, into that invitation, that relationship. And we need to know something about this other, if we are to fall in love. If I'm going to fall in love with another person, I need to know something about the nature of that person if I am going to reciprocate. So today we do look at the question: what is the nature of God? as we reflect upon the Trinity. Again, not just as an interesting intellectual exercise, but so we can reciprocate God's love for us. So we can fall in love with the God who has fallen in love with us.

But even in saying that, as we begin to reflect on this question, "What's the nature of God?"...even as we begin by saying God wishes to be in relationship with us, we encounter a problem, I think, don't we? A paradox. Because if we acknowledge that, on the one hand, God wants to love us, on a very human scale, how do we square that with what is really the bedrock of each of the Abrahamic traditions--Islam, and Judaism, and Christianity--namely, that God is beyond any human category. We might think of God, and any thought we would have about God would be completely inadequate to describe the nature and essence of God. S¿ren Kierkegaard puts it this way: he says that there is an infinite qualitative difference between God and human beings. Karl Barth used that definition as well. God is infinitely different from us, and yet God wants to be in relationship to us.

A friend of mine whom I was talking with this week describes it this way: you know, an ant can see a farmer coming; it can see the boot coming as the farmer approaches. It can have information about that boot from the ant's point of view, but can never know the world from the point of view of the farmer. It can never know that world from that larger perspective. Perhaps that's an analogy about our relationship with God, in a sense.

So we have a problem. If God is beyond human categories, how can God enter into relationship with human beings?

Many of the early believers, people who were followers of Christ, whose beliefs were later labeled heresies, basically answered the question this way: God cannot. God can't have anything to do with the realm of flesh, and matter, and feelings, and messiness. They said God can send someone who's human, or God can appear to be human, but God cannot be human. So some of the early Christian sects like the Ebionites believed that Jesus was not divine--he was a messenger, a herald of the messianic age, but he was not divine. Others, and we could describe many of these under the rubric of a thing called Gnosticism--others thought that Jesus was indeed divine, but not human. He only looked human. Some, the Docetists, believed for example that Jesus only appeared to be human on the cross, and didn't really suffer--just looked like it for our benefit. Because if you're a Gnostic, you believe that this world is trash. The name of the game, if you're a Gnostic, is to find the escape hatch on this world, and your ticket to ride is the god Jesus of Nazareth. And I happen to believe--I'm glad, I guess, that Gnosticism didn't win in those early battles over Christian orthodoxy. Because if they had, we wouldn't have an environmental consciousness in the West. We would think of this world as trash. My body would be thought of as garbage that doesn't matter, a thing to be cast off and wasted.

So if we reject all that kind of thinking, where does that leave us? How do we solve this problem? If we believe that we can have a relationship with God, and that God is as intimate with us as our own breath, how do we square that with this notion that God is beyond all human categories? Well, here's the answer, at least from the point of view of Christian orthodoxy. Are you ready? We don't. I think life's more fun that way--when you live with paradox. Because the center of our Christian theology is the paradox of a Both/And God.

About 15 years ago, I participated in a thing called "T-group." In some future sermon, I may say more about what that is. It's nothing spooky, but it's an experience that really breaks one open, and opens one to the mysteries of one's existence. And during that experience, the leader of the group said something that somehow always stuck with me. He said, "Life is not a problem to be solved. It is a mystery to be lived." Life is not a problem to be solved. It is a mystery to be lived. And I've always somehow come back to that, and I think it's appropriate to say as we explore this understanding about how God has been revealed--as one in three.

The Trinity is not a math problem. It's not the same as getting 2 + 2 = 4; a problem to be tamed and mastered by our human mind. But rather, it's meant to be a door. And on the other side of that door is the mystery of God's love for us. And the mystery of the Trinity begins with this understanding: that if there is an infinite chasm between human beings and God, and human beings' deepest desire is for God, only God could cross that chasm. And the miraculous thing is that God has done that, in Jesus Christ. Has become human and dwelt among us, out of love for us. That is the formulation offered to us by the theologian Karl Barth.

You might say that the mystery of God has been revealed to us in that way. And, by the way, that's an important word to say here--revealed. This isn't an idea that we cooked up in our human minds. That God is both beyond any concept we might have, and yet God has become word and flesh, and because of God's love for us, has dwelt with us. That's the mystery that God has revealed to us.

But so far, I guess what I've been talking about doesn't sound like it has much to do with the idea of Trinity. We've been exploring what I think is probably the great stepping stone to the Christian understanding of the Trinity, which is all about incarnation, how God became human. But what about a third party, here? I think there's something missing, isn't there? If we say, on the one hand we have the concept of a God beyond concepts, an uncreated Creator--and we ought not associate that property too closely with any one person of the Trinity. And yet, that's maybe how we think of God whom we have called "Father" or "Creator." On the other hand we have the paradoxical notion that God became a human being, who was known scandalously as Jesus of Nazareth, a very particular person from a particular time--the carpenter from--from that backwater town up north, from Nazareth.

What about the third person, who's always the hardest to understand? Maybe here's a start:

A few months ago I was reading an article about the law that states that every, about 18 months--I think it's called "Moore's Law"--that microprocessors double in speed. Are you familiar with this law? Every 18 months, our computer processing power doubles ¹. But what's happening now--people are running against the physical limitations of a microchip. You can only get so many electrons along one wire. And so what some have considered, in building a new microchip, is to go beyond a binary system. A system beyond the system we have now, which basically only recognizes ones and zeros. That's an either/or proposition. And some are considering the huge amount of processing power that would be unleashed by a system that recognized both ones, and zeros, and ones & zeros. I love that idea. Because I think it's an idea of Trinitarian thinking in everyday life. If you look hard, you can see such examples everywhere.

St. Augustine in his book On the Trinity puts it this way, in one of his analogies about the Trinity: he likens the Trinity to three modes of relationship--Nolan mentioned this in his prayer a few minutes ago. That of lover, beloved, and the love that they share. And we can go too far with this, but perhaps the Spirit is that principle of relationship that binds the other two together. I think of Trinitarian thinking when I think of two people who don't agree with each other. And the third principle is somehow the miracle of love that enables them to be together in relationship, even when they don't agree.

There are many ways to understand the mystery of this doctrine--the doctrine of the Trinity. But maybe the most basic way we can describe the mystery is to say that God is love. And for God to be love, in God, even in the unity of God, is community, is love and intimacy. As Karl Barth put it, God who is One, is also "one with another in a spirit of love and freedom."

One final word before I conclude this morning. I mentioned St. Augustine, one of my favorite theologians, and a book that he wrote about the Trinity, in which he offers a whole bunch of analogies for understanding the inexhaustible mystery of the Trinity. He says in one chapter, "It's like this...it's like a lover, and a beloved, and the love they share." And the next chapter he says, "No, that's not quite it. Let me give you a better analogy." And then in the next chapter he says, "Well, that analogy is not quite right either. Let me give you a still better one." And it's sort of a brilliant stair-step kind of argument. And you expect that at the very end of the book, he's going to reveal the mystery, once and for all, and the grand analogy. But instead, guess what he does? He prays. He offers a prayer to God.

Maybe that's a good segue to next week, and the next three weeks, when we examine and reflect upon prayer for a 3-part sermon series. Because all this stuff is just hot air if it doesn't help us somehow to love God, and to love one another. To be "one with another, in a spirit of love and freedom," as is this one triune God, whom we worship.

And so all blessing and honor be to you O God Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit, for ever and ever. Amen.

¹According to the official Moore's Law page (http://www.intel.com/technology/mooreslaw/), the actual period of time predicted for micro-processing power to double is "about every two years," but is often cited as 18 months.

June 3, 2007

Jeff Vamos

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