In the name of
the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
Today is Trinity
Sunday, and is unique in that it is the only holy day founded on doctrine, and
not on an event or particular person.
However, the Trinity is at the very
foundation of our faith, and certainly deserves a day devoted to us trying
to understand that God is both three and one.
The question I have is, when you hear "in the name of the Father, and
of the Son and of the Holy Spirit", what goes through your mind when you
hear it or say it?
Saint Patrick
is said to have explained the Trinity to the Celts by using a shamrock, three
individual leaves, yet still one plant. Of
course, that analogy falls apart when we get the lucky four-leafed clover.
Tertullian, one
of the most famous theologians of the Early Church, used the metaphor of The
Trinity as a plant, with the Father as the deep root, the Son as the shoot that
breaks forth into the world, and the Spirit as the force which spreads beauty
and fragrance on the earth.
It's not that
Trinitarian theology or a Trinitarian God is too complicated to understand;
it's finally that a Trinitarian and Unified One God is too complex to be
managed or manipulated by all of us who think we know better than God.
Augustine was a
theologian who lived in North Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries. As the
story has it, one day Augustine was walking along the beach by the ocean and
pondering the deep mystery of God, the Holy Trinity. He met a boy there on the
beach who had dug a hole in the sand and kept busy running back and forth from
the hole to the ocean; collecting water and pouring it into the hole. Augustine
was curious about this, so he asked the boy: “What are you doing?” The boy
replied: “I’m going to pour the entire ocean into this hole.” Augustine then
said: “That is impossible, the whole ocean will not fit into your hole.” And
the boy answered Augustine: “Neither can the infinite God, the Holy Trinity fit
into your finite mind.” Now, probably
not a true story, but a reflection of Augustine's thoughts, and a good example
that sometimes, we simply have to accept that some things are basically too
complex for us to understand.
Now if we look
at the Old Testament lesson today, we are hearing the personification of Wisdom
within the Proverb. As humans, we
consider wisdom to be a quality of our own, gained over time, and yet, Wisdom
was created by God prior to any organizing of the chaos
that was the heavens and the earth.
We've learned over time that God spoke, commanding the formation of
mountains and rivers, heavens and earth – and that Christ was there, as the
Word manifesting in the commands. And we
have learned that the Spirit hovered over the waters of creation. From Proverbs, we find that which learned as
Wisdom, watched creation itself, learning at the Divine's side, so as to teach,
for "rejoicing in [the] inhabited world and delighting in the human
race", Wisdom learned and gained knowledge and experience to grow. Do we listen to the Proverb, "To you, O
people, I call, and my cry is to all that live"? Do we realize how much Wisdom has to teach us about the Trinity, that existed and
created the Earth before we ever were?
Are we able to learn, ourselves, and gain wisdom?
What is
interesting, however, is that Christ has said that, "When the Spirit of Truth
comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own,
but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come." He knows everything that Christ knows, and
Christ knows everything that God knows, so in explaining that to the disciples,
Christ is speaking to every single one of us.
We are still today guided by
the Holy Spirit, and as a result, are guided by Christ and by God.
In an article[1]
written about 20 years ago now, John Brockman in Edge Magazine asked,
"What is the most important invention of the last 2000 years, and
why?" Answers were generally what
you would expect, ranging from Gutenberg's printing press to chairs, stairs and
ploughs, to the internet and digital bits.
Some of the more humorous contributions included,
"Marc D. Hauser, a cognitive
neuroscientist, chooses aspirin, pointing out that "among the Masai,
headaches are treated with a mud compact of goat feces to the forehead. I
prefer aspirin." Leon Lederman, the director emeritus of the Fermi
National Accelerator Laboratory, replies … "the thermos bottle."
Theoretical psychologist Nicholas Humphrey credits reading glasses as the most
important invention, because they’ve 'prevented the world from being ruled by
people under forty.'"
… "A vast array of fields are
spanned by the answers, from medicine (anesthesia, late twentieth century health
care…) to mathematics (geometry, the Indo-Arabic Number System, the
infinitesimal calculus) to science (genetic engineering, the Copernican theory,
quantum theory) to leisure pursuits (classical music, board games)."
The final result was, "'It’s the Distributed Networked
Intelligence (DNI), the collective, externalized mind… It’s the mind we all
share, the infinite oscillation of our collective consciousness interacting
with itself, becoming aware of itself, adding a fuller, richer dimension to
what it means to be human.'"
That last
definition is both inclusive of the concept of wisdom, but exclusive of fully
comprehending that Wisdom is being guided by the Holy Spirit, by the knowledge
and understanding of the Word, and of the Creator. Wisdom delights in humanity, but has humanity
grasped the concept that we have never
been left alone or unguided? And perhaps
more importantly, are we listening?
While we don't
say the Gloria Patri during the Eucharist services, we say it often during
Morning and Evening Prayer: "Glory
be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever
shall be world without end, Amen."
Christ told us that "He will glorify me, because he will take what
is mine and declare it to you." And
we give all that we are and create and learn and understand, and when combined
with Wisdom, we also glorify the Divine.
Because when we understand that God, both in unity and in trinity
created this world in its totality, existing outside of time, then God is ever
unchanging, from the beginning to now and always. That by itself is a mind-blowing concept for
us humans, but when we acknowledge God's Wisdom, we realize that we will always
have more to learn. And at the same
time, we've never been alone, but rather always guided and provided the tools
to gain wisdom – if we never forget
to glorify God, the three in one and one in three.
The Gloria
Patri is not only a statement of doctrine, faith and belief in the covenant
between God and man, these are fighting words in the full defense of
Christianity. The word declaring it so is
"Amen", or so be it. In that
statement, you are stating that you believe that God, in the form of the
Trinity, not only existed from the beginning of time, but continues to exist
now, and will exist long after we're gone.
This is the foundation upon which not only our faith is based, but our
understanding of the universe.
So when we
begin with in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen, we have
literally said as much, and as little, as we state our foundational belief in
the Trinity.
Let us
pray: Most holy Trinity, Godhead
indivisible, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, our first beginning and our last
end, you have made us in accord with your own image and likeness. Grant that
all the thoughts of our minds, all the words of our tongues, all the affections
of our hearts, and all the actions of
our being may always be conformed to your holy Will. So may we, having seen you veiled in
appearance here below by means of faith, come at last to contemplate you
face-to-face, in the perfect possession of you forever in heaven. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment