This
coming Sunday is Trinity Sunday, when, perennially, those who preach in
Christian churches feel pressure to explain how God can be both three and one.
I
think this pressure should be resisted. It is not the job of the preacher to
provide simple (or in this case simplistic) answers to questions, but to lead
people deeper into mystery, believing that we have a spiritual need for
mystery, for that which is greater than we can contain by way of reason.
The
various authors of the various volumes that make up the library we know as the
Bible makes no such attempt to explain God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They
simply write about the experience of encountering God in combinations of these
terms.
One
of the texts we will hear read on Sunday is Romans 5.1-5. Here, Paul describes
God—the god Jesus calls our Father in the heavens—as the source of wellbeing
(peace), dignity (glory), and affection (love)—all of which, we can be assured,
God shares with us.
Expanding
on wellbeing, Paul describes Jesus, the one who unifies divinity and humanity
in his person, as the ground of loving-kindness in which our lives are located.
Expanding
on affection, Paul describes the Holy Spirit as the one through whom God’s
being and your and my personal humanity are joined, in a connection of
continual and constant affection.
But
it is dignity that is at the heart of Paul’s reflections here. The shared
dignity made possible by the wellbeing that experiencing loving-kindness
creates and constant affection.
It
is dignity—which elsewhere Paul describes as something we experience in
increasing degrees—that is the focus of anticipation (hope). Created in the
likeness of a God who possesses dignity, the human is made for dignity, and our
spirit knows this even if it is not our daily experience, even if dignity is
withheld from us, because of our age, or gender, or different abilities, or
ethnicity, or sexuality, or religious tradition, or, or.
And
here Paul introduces the idea of being constrained. This is not an abstract
idea. It is something we experience in our bodies. In particular, as we grow
older, our body takes on—willingly or unwillingly—more and more constraints. We
are finite creatures, with limitations. But Paul rejoices in these: perceiving
that it is our constraints that bring about endurance; and endurance that
reveals proof of character; and character that produces anticipation—that is,
sustains the secure knowledge of our God-given dignity—guaranteed to us by the
affection of which God is source.
What
is more, because Jesus is the human god, God who has taken constraint upon
himself, this reveals endurance, or the constancy of God; reveals proof of
God’s character, as loving; and reveals God’s anticipation, of our sharing in
that affection, that wellbeing, that dignity.
Professor
John Swinton, writing about memory and dementia, notes that the Latin root of
the English word to remember means to pass time through the mind, in a
sequential ordering; whereas the root meaning of the Spanish word to
remember—recordar—is to pass time through the heart.
This
is true also of theology, or the love of God. We can say something about God as
Father, Son and Holy Spirit with our minds—the Creeds do this, as well as is
needed—but we experience God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the assurance of
wellbeing, grounded in loving-kindness; in the anticipation of dignity; in the
mysterious ways by which constraints bring about endurance, and endurance proof
of character, and proof of character anticipation; testified to by affection.
This
is what we (the Church) have to proclaim about God. Chances are, you believe in
god; that even if you would describe yourself as an agnostic or an atheist, you
can describe the god you cannot be sure exists or are convinced does not exist.
But this is what we (the Church) proclaim (and must proclaim to ourselves as
much as to anyone else).
This
is the God to trust our lives to, or to not yet be sure of, or to reject.