The Trinity: The Grammar of Love

It is Trinity Sunday-it's a unique day in the church year because the focus is on a doctrine as opposed to the stories and teachings that generally inform our faith. I think of Trinity Sunday as a hinge or a turning point in the church year. We spend all the time from Advent to Pentecost reliving Christ's life-his birth, his ministry, his preparation for the cross; his death, resurrection and ascension and finally, the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Then comes Trinity Sunday and after that, we enter the long green season, also known as ordinary time, though there is never anything ordinary about trying to follow Christ. But what they mean is that in the season after Pentecost, we focus on the daily struggle to live out our faith-to be disciples of Christ in the way we live and love. Trinity Sunday is the turning point of the church year, a pause before we turn from the narrative of salvation through Christ to our ongoing efforts to live out his teachings. It is a moment to pause and contemplate in wonder, love and awe the God who is revealed through creation, Christ and the Spirit.

I had a seminary professor who used to say that anything you say about the Trinity after "in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit" is bound to be heresy. And the truth is that words ultimately fail us when we try to articulate the mystery that is God. God is the inexhaustible, unfathomable mystery at the heart of all reality. Perhaps silence is the only appropriate way to enter into that mystery. I'm always tempted to celebrate Trinity Sunday with silence instead of a sermon. But since fools rush in where angels fear to tread, I will venture to offer a few reflections anyway.

It is easy to get discouraged if you think of the Trinity either too concretely or too abstractly. Some of us have images of the Trinity formed in childhood that are still with us-an old man with a long white beard, a young man and a dove. Those images have some relationship to the Scriptural story, because Jesus knew God as Father, and taught us to think of God as intimately as a child would think of a beloved and trusted parent. But for many, these images are too literal and too limiting for us to stop there. God is father, and is not father. God is son, and is not son. God is spirit and is not spirit. Those images are also problematic, because they leave out the feminine divine. Even thought the Bible is often condemned as patriarchal, and it certainly emerges from a patriarchal culture, it nevertheless contains many feminine images for God. In the gospels we hear God compared to a mother hen longing to gather her chicks to her, or a woman searching carefully for lost coins. And most astonishingly, in today's reading from Proverbs, God is also the female figure of Wisdom, who was present at the creation, rejoicing in the inhabited world and delighting in the human race.

So, the Trinity itself does not describe God exhaustively, and especially not if it is construed too literally. The doctrine of the Trinity is also problematic when it is expressed in terms that are so abstract that we no longer see their relationship to our faith. For example, God is three Persons but one substance. That formulation has a long and venerable history and is based on Greek philosophical categories, but for me at least, it is not all that helpful for thinking about God.

So how should we think of the Trinity? Michael Downey, in his book, Altogether Gift: A Trinitarian Spirituality, offers this analogy. The doctrine of the Trinity is to our faith what the rules of grammar are to our language. We learn faith by living it out just as we learn language by speaking. But the rules of grammar clarify the underlying structure of the language and establish parameters for speaking. In the same way, the doctrine of the Trinity distils the revelation of God in Scripture and offers us a framework for speaking of God.

And as we speak of God as Trinity, we will find that we already know more than we think we do, because we encounter God in a threefold way, and we live out a Trinitarian faith from day to day.

At the heart of Christianity is the understanding that God is love. That love has been revealed to us in creation-the life that is poured out continuously, abundantly, in beauty and diversity, ever-changing and ever-new. As Michael Downey says, "Life is altogether and absolutely gift: a gift [that] come[s] freely, unexpectedly, undeservedly." Scripture and our experience confirms that the Author and Giver of Life is not an abstract principle but a Someone-a Someone who loves us deeply, intimately, personally, a Someone whom Jesus called Father.

God's love is further revealed to us through Christ. The incarnation and the cross are revelations of God's self-giving love for us-a love that could not bear to see us lost, alienated, broken or afraid. God not only gives us life, God restores us to life when we are dead, spiritually, morally or physically. Christ shows us that we need not fear death or any of the negative experiences of our lives. The power of Christ's love enables us to go through dark times trusting they will lead to transformation and new life, instead of trying to avoid them. We know God's love on a deeper level through Christ, because he was willing to take on human life, and then give it up for our sake.

God's love is also revealed to us in the Spirit, who dwells in each of us. The Spirit is our deepest inner voice, the voice of God whispering in our hearts, the gift of life that is always giving. The Spirit guides us, gives us courage and peace, renews and transforms us. It is through the Spirit that we are able to see God in creation, and recognize that Christ is God. The Spirit constantly opens us to new ideas and new ways of being that lead to greater wholeness and more abundant life.

From our threefold experience of God, as revealed in Scripture and in the life of faith, arose the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity is a kind of shorthand way of referring to the whole Christian story. And when you think about it, if God is love, then it makes sense that God is a community of persons as well as a unity. Love is inherently relational. Love cannot exist without another. Love involves one person giving him or herself to another, in mutuality, vulnerability and interdependence. God has given God's self to us, having become vulnerable to us, as those who love are vulnerable. And so we know that at the heart of the divine is vulnerable love. At the heart of God is the relationship of Lover, Beloved and Love, which was how St. Augustine formulated the Trinity. The three persons of the Trinity live in a relationship of mutual self-giving love, which makes them one as well as three.

The implications for us who are made in the image of God are enormous. We are God's people, made by love, through love and for love. Relationship is at the heart of who we are. We cannot be whole without others-our personhood is incomplete without others. Without others, there can be no love. Abstract love for the whole world is easy-it's the day to day practice of giving ourselves to one another in mutuality and interdependence that is the hard part. That is the essence of Trinitarian spirituality and the essence of being a Christian. In the image of the Holy Trinity, we were created to love one another, give ourselves for each other, be a source of life for one another.

God is not reducible to the Trinity, but the Trinity expresses something essential about God. God is self-giving love, and in grateful response, we give ourselves to God and each other.

With wonder and joy and praise, we share in the divine life of God, the Three in One, who created us in love, through love and for love.