Thrice
Isaiah 6:1-8; John 3:1-17

June 11, 2006


All things come in threes. But it’s not always automatic and natural. “Three strikes and you’re out” is a baseball idiom that has found common usage, yet did you know that in 1887 the rules were changed and it took four strikes to be out? It just wasn’t natural, so in 1888 it was back to three strikes. My God, what were they thinking?

Speaking of my God, no one has ever tried to change the rules for the Trinity and make it into a Quartet - Mary would have been the Fourth Person no doubt. The Holy Spirit has been pushed off to the side or subordinated, so that God and Jesus are the only real players.

Many have strongly believed only One is necessary and that it is necessary to have Only One God. While Unitarian movement goes back centuries, the reestablishment of King’s Chapel, Boston, in 1785 and the work of William Ellery Channing beginning in 1819 are the milestones in North America. Opposing the Trinitarian concept of God as Three in One in favour of the single personality God, Unitarians ended up demoting Jesus from Divine status to a fully human teacher with remarkable insight into the nature of God.

The mid-1800’s saw the Congregational Church, one of our three predecessors in the United Church of Canada, rocked hard by the Unitarian controversy in New England. Across the road from Harvard Yard, there are two First Churches in Cambridge, both dating their establishment to 1632. In 1829, the majority of the “liberal” (= Unitarian) members voted against the Trinitarian-believing minister Abiel Holmes, father of Oliver Wendell Holmes, and dismissed him from the church. Reverend Holmes and those “conservatives” who sided with his views formed a Congregational Church a couple of blocks down the street. For once One had more numbers than Three.

We may think unitarian thoughts, but as a rule, we speak in Trinitarian languages - in our worship, our hymns, our creeds. “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty” was Hymn Number One in both the old United Church and Methodist hymnals, its opening lines derived from the famous vision of Isaiah chapter six. That vision in the year King Uzziah died describes how we need to go about the worship of God Almighty. We begin with praise and adoration, move to confession and pardon, then next to being addressed by the Word and finally offer our response to the Word. The hymn, written around 1820, links this awesome experience of the presence of God to the nature of God, “God in three persons, blessed Trinity.”

So we sing and worship the Trinity, but the hard question remains for many of us, why bother? Does it make a difference, this gymnastic idea that never really adds up? We are followers of the One God, we declare, the same One God worshipped by Jews and Muslims and a few other world faiths to boot. Isn’t focusing on God Alone enough? Appropriately and perhaps with pun intended, I am going to offer three reasons why the Trinity is the best way for us to think of and relate to our God.

There is an old idea, spoken with a Greek accent, about just how the Three Persons of the Trinity live and move and have their being. It is “perichoresis” - a word that means a style of dancing and weaving in and out, never touching and inhibiting and getting in one another’s way. It describes physically how the Three Persons mutually dwell within one another without any one Person dominating, interfering or neglecting the other. There are lots of traditional dances that feature this kind of dizzying weaving in and out of a circle, with a precision and control that honours and features each member of the troupe. To say that within God there is this joyous dance, a divine style of play, almost seems frivolous for the Ground of Being. What it reveals is a sense of enjoyment in one another that should give you and me a hint of how we should be dancing with one another, being involved closely with one another, never dominating, never inhibiting, allowing each other to shine for us and to us.

The second reason why the Trinity is the best way for us to think about God is that Father, Son and Holy Spirit demonstrate how to be family. Not the way in which the ideal of the family has been sanctified in many a church and in too many a political ideology. The focus on this ideal family is upon its structure, not upon how it lives to nurture, love, encourage and develop human beings. The traditional family in Canadian and American culture is something like a father, mother, and 2.5 children, give or take a few decimal points. Traditional families are alive and well, though there aren’t as many as we would like. All you have to do is look around you to realize that normal life is not normal. Our calling in the church is not to try to rescue a beloved cultural model, but to love the families living, struggling, loving in our midst. I don’t care what shape these families take on, I care what shape the lives of its members are in. It’s towards the Trinity that we need to looking, not at all those low statistics.

In their intertwining dance, in their enveloping yet liberating love, the first thing the Father, Son and Holy Spirit do is to relate to one another and live together as partners who enable each one to be better. When Jesus and Nicodemus are talking about being born again, it’s obvious that all Three are on the same page. God the Father sends the Son, the Son is lifted up to save the world, the Holy Spirit then acts to give new life to people, to enable them to see the kingdom of God.

In recent years, the imperative of inclusive language has stumbled particularly over the words to be used in baptism. In the name of the Father and of the Son... seemed exclusively masculine, so a number of alternate “formulas” were introduced. The most common is “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer,” which describes the functions of the Trinitarian Persons, what it is that they each do. Families don’t do things as their primary task; families love and nurture. I prefer to stick with Father and Son, not because I am convinced God’s Fatherliness defines who God is, but that the name retains the personal familial relationship that is our guide.

The third reason why the Trinity is the best way for us to think about God is because it is so complex, so subtle, so frustrating that it prevents us from ever believing that we can completely understand and eventually define God. We always control what we define, so when we believe God has to be limited to One Person, we don’t hesitate to try to control the uncontrollable and think we now know how God should behave. If there is a thread of an idea running throughout that wildly diverse book the Bible, it is that God continually surprises us by the way God behaves and blesses those people we would never bless. God in Three Persons are more balls than our minds can keep in the air. The Trinity is pure genius in the way it ties up our arrogant assumptions about God’s very being, a sort of divine Rubik’s Cube. Genius, of course, is not a bad place to begin to think about who God is and how God relates to the universe. We hope genius will rub off a little on us.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan