A Whirlwind Tour of the Trinity

Trinity Sunday May 18, 2008
Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley

In the name of the Triune God, eternally creating, redeeming and sustaining, Amen.

Well here it is Trinity Sunday, and in churches all over the world preachers are trying to explain the unexplainable. What is this thing called the Trinity, and how can you be three but still be one?

People have explained the Trinity in all kinds of ways. I have heard that the Trinity is simply a symbol of the first and most lastingly divine thing we experience as an infant- the father, the mother and the child. I have read that the Trinity is the first model for the church, in that it is in of itself a sort of wondrous community. Or that in certain church social circles there is so much triangulation that we just naturally worship the Trinity.

But I believe that any exploration into the Trinity has to start with a deep wondering about God the Creator, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

Having been out of seminary for 3 years now, I recently had a revelation. Before I went to seminary I was very uncomfortable with the idea of Jesus, but very comfortable with the idea of God. After I enduring 6 years of seminary, I found that I was very comfortable with the idea of Jesus, but uncomfortable with the idea of God.

Before I was educated, I thought of God through the lens of Lakota Sioux spirituality: MITAKUYE OYASIN, which is Sioux for “All My Relations.” In other words, God is truly all-encompassing. All creatures are our relations and are all part of God with us. There really was nowhere that God did not touch, and the where and whyfores of what God did and did not do were a huge mystery. Isaiah later imparted something of this feeling to me speaking the words the words of God: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways.

Then I read about process theology and I read Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book ,”Why Bad Things Happen to Good People.”
Rabbi Kushner came to a new conclusion about God when his young child died of cancer. He cold not reconcile the God he loved with anyone who would allow such a thing to happen. He described his new philosophy like this:

A 707 crashed into a bridge in Washington DC- that was physics. By when Maury Schmutnick, who had never had a heroic thought in his life, jumped into the river to save a drowning stewardess, that’s God.

These thoughts were bolstered by an incident closer to home, although, thank God, not in my own family. The VERY FIRST 20 minutes of my tenure as a chaplain at SF General hospital was sent to comfort a couple whose 3 year old had run out into the street and gotten struck by a car. She was on life support, and the parents were trying to decide whether or not to disconnect her live-saving systems. After a long and agonized struggle, they had to come to the horrific realization that she could not be saved. I as so undone by this tragedy that I had a memorial service just for the chaplains and nurses and myself. The grieving couple, thank God, had their own church community. But I preached a sermon for that little girl in my homiletics class and I kept her picture by my home altar to pray for her and her parents. You are not supposed to these things as a hospital chaplain.

But as time went on, I realized that Rabbi Kuschner’s idea of God was too easy an answer. I felt it was wrong to put God in a box, that God in fact was the very definition of “Out of the Box.” A phrase I heard somewhere kept coming back to me: “Do you praise God only when the hurricanes do not blow?”

Or do you embrace and say yes to creation in all its wildness? Is that not at least one definition of faith? Around this time one of my greatest influences was a kind of a renegade priest who was at the time serving (for free) as vicar of St. Cuthbert’s in Oakland. He was known as a kind of an “out of the box” thinker. This was right after the great tragedy of the Tsunami title waves in Indonesia, and I posed this question to him:

“How do you reconcile the reality of that scale of devastation with the idea of a loving God?” He said, “God gives the plates of the earth’s crust the freedom to be plates of the earth’s crust. They then do what plates of the earth’s crust do.” He challenged me to imagine a world in which creation did not have this freedom. We would have an utterly ordered world with no death, never any chaos, no wildness- no wilderness.”

In the book of Job God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind. He speaks of the glories of creation; the unfathomable complexity and power of that God-made creation, and man’s arrogance in thinking he can comprehend or control it.

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements, surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?”

God speaks of the great power of the Leviathan, the sea monster whose creation is noted in our beautiful Genesis reading of today.

Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook? Put a rope in its nose or pierce its jaw with a hook?
Will it make a covenant to be your servant forever?

These wonders are a mystery I don’t want to mess with; the great and truly unfathomable whirlwind that is the glory of God.

If we look at the second member of the Trinity, Jesus, the Son, we have a being who seemed to understand this great glorious mystery in a way that encompassed the Jewish awe of its majesty, while also seeing God in an intimate and loving way. Jesus called God “Abba” which in Hebrew means not Father, but “Daddy.”

Jesus had this trusting, intimate relationship with God, but still understood the power and the mystery. As he knelt in prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, dreading the way his life was apparently going to end, he prayed that the cup be taken from his lips. But, he said, not mine, but your will be done. We may not even be able to comprehend the love of God the awesome creator, but we know the Son so well that we can and do understand the love of Jesus of Nazareth through the myriad stories of his healing, forging and ultimately redeeming love.

I believe that part of the reason we have been given that glorious reading of Genesis today is that it contains the very first mention in the bible of the Holy Spirit. The “Ruach Elohim”- the Spirit of God, or the Holy Spirit that swept over the face of the waters. The Holy Spirit, I believe continues to sweep over the face of the waters, and over the face of everything else too. The Holy Spirit, I believe is working all the time. I often note that when things go well for us, we say, “Boy, the Holy Spirit was really working there!” As opposed to all the other times when the Holy Spirit finds itself unemployed! And our gospel reading of today is the only time the Trinity is specifically mentioned. It is mentioned in the context of the Great Commission- commissioning us all to go forth and spread the news of this unexplainable, mysterious, all-encompassing triune love.

We need the wilderness, we need wildness, but the majesty and the glory and the fearful mystery of God is too much for us. I guess that’s why we need the Trinity.

If we truly have a have a triune God, if we have a true Trinity, then we have all the vastness and wildness and unpredictability of God the Creator. But we also, in the same being, have the human compassion, forgiveness and redeeming love of Jesus. And we have the great power and mystery of the Holy Spirit, which can and does cause both the great and wild mystery of God and the human love of Jesus to flow through us like a great river.

Paul ends his Letter to those tempestuous Corinthians with the following beautiful blessing:

The Grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

Whatever happens, whenever the hurricanes blow, still and always we exist in the love of God. That love is unending, that Father will never leave us, that spirit is within us whatever happens, and that son will always grace us with forgiveness.

At a retreat recently we said the following prayer, which, I felt, protected us with the power of the triune God:



Throughout this day, enliven our minds
inspire our conversation, inform our decisions,
and protect those we love.
And should today bring what we neither anticipate or desire,
increase our faith and decrease our pride
until we know that when we face the unexpected,
we do not stand alone.

Amen.