God as Trinity

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
      We have arrived at Trinity Sunday, commonly called, these days, the First Sunday after Pentecost. We call it Trinity Sunday, and we recall the old custom of numbering the Sundays after Trinity, for good and essential reasons: God is Trinitarian; the uniqueness of our religion is found in our faith in God as Trinity; our Christian lives are essentially and actually Trinitarian. We need to keep all this in mind, in our very challenging period, when our society and ecology are going through great changes, and when the traditional faith perhaps seems difficult to maintain. It is our faith in the Trinity which will see us through to our destiny of life in God, and which will help us cope with the changes overtaking us.
     In my talk this morning I'm relying heavily on the great Orthodox scholar and bishop and apologist, Kallistos Ware, a convert to Orthodoxy from Anglicanism. In his writings on the Church and the Christian faith, he presents the Trinity and the teachings of the Church in a lucid, engaging, and very friendly ecumenical way, and so his remarks on the Trinity are, and should be, very congenial to Episcopalians.
     First, a remark or two about the word itself. The word "trinity" was invented by Tertullian, in the early third century. It conveys the "three-ness" and "one-ness" of God in one word, "tri-unity." I can't think of any other word which so efficiently unites the two concepts of three-ness and one-ness, and at once expresses the new concept of the Trinity.
     As Kallistos Ware says, "God is not a single person, loving himself alone...he is triunity, three equal persons, each one dwelling in the other by virtue of an unceasing movement of mutual love." Our destiny in relation to this mutual love in God is that we should become part of this relationship, this mutual love. One English word to describe this mutuality in God is: co-inherence. There is a Greek word which expresses the same idea, only more beautifully: perichoresis.
     We believe in the Trinity because we believe that God is personal and that God is love. Each person, each of us, like the persons of the Trinity, becomes a real person only in relationship with other persons. We don't become fully personal, fully ourselves, in isolation. Love is not isolated either, but requires others, of course, to be love.
     Kallistos Ware says, " God is far better than the best that we can know in ourselves." Consequently, and I summarize, if our best is the mutual love of one person for another, then we can attribute the same mutual love to God himself, who is the source of all that is best in us. God knows himself in a three-fold way, and we know ourselves, also in a three-fold way, in our personal relationships and in love.
     The persons of the Trinity are not static categories, but living realities. We hear this in our first reading this morning, Genesis chapter 1, which presents God as making and speaking, about his Spirit moving on the waters, as speaking to humans. Thus God shows us, from the beginning, that his nature is in relationship with ours. So, in the analogies of God's activity in the physical world, and in our experience of love and relationship, we have our first glimpses into the nature of God as Trinity.
     Jesus says, in John's Gospel, "I and the Father are one." In our Creed we say that Jesus is "true God from true God," "one in essence" or "of one being" with the Father. This is a way of saying that Jesus is equal to the Father, that he is God as the Father is God. The Church and the Creed and the Scriptures speak similarly of the Spirit, who is also God. Each is eternally a person, " a distinct center of conscious selfhood," as Kallistos Ware says. They are differentiated in their personhood and united in their being. The persons are distinct but not separate. They have only one will -- none of the three persons acts separately from the other two. And, in relation to the human race, they have only one will: the salvation of the human race and its perfection in the new heaven and the new earth.
     The first person of the Trinity, God the Father, is the source, as it were, of the other two persons. The Father is the bond of unity of all three persons. We say that God is one because there is one Father. As we say in the Creed, the Son is begotten of the Father, and the Spirit proceeds from the Father.
     The second person of the Trinity is the Son of God, the Word, the Logos. To express the nature of God as Father and Son is to express the love between them. It is through the Son that the Father is revealed to us. As Jesus says in John's Gospel, "No one comes to the Father, except through me." And we know from the Prologue to John's Gospel that the Creation came into being through the Son, and that the life and light of all creation comes through him.
     The third person of the Trinity is the Holy Spirit, who shows us the Son, as the Son has shown us the Father. We know this from John's Gospel, in the story of Jesus's baptism by John. John the Baptist says, "He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit. And I myself have seen and testified that this is the Son of God."     
     Where is the Trinity in our lives? To begin with, the Trinity lives in prayer. We pray constantly in the name of the Trinity; we worship the Father through the Son in the Spirit; we call down the Holy Spirit on the bread and wine on the altar; and we call down the blessing of the Holy Trinity at the end of the eucharistic liturgy. The threefold "holy, holy, holy" is addressed to the three-in-one God. The Trinity prompts our prayer, aids our prayer, and is, so to speak, the object of our prayer.
     In the Orthodox liturgy, before the clergy and people recite the Creed, they say or sing these words: "Let us love one another so that we may with one mind confess Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Trinity one in essence and undivided." "So that!!" The people show love towards each other, and then confess their faith. Mutual love is the requirement for, the basis of, our faith in the Trinity, and our faith in the Trinity gives strength and meaning to our mutual love.
     So, as Kallistos Ware says, "human beings are called to reproduce on earth the mystery of mutual love that the Trinity lives in heaven...Each social unity -- family, school, work[place], parish, the [whole] Church -- is to be made an icon of the Trinity...each of us is committed to living sacrificially in and for the other; each is committed irrevocably to a life of practical service, of active compassion. Our faith in the Trinity [means] struggle at every level...against all forms of oppression, injustice, and exploitation. In our combat for...human rights, we are acting...in the name of the Holy Trinity." The Trinitarian life includes taking full responsibility for our society, economy, and ecology, so that we can make it possible for all to live in the world as God intends us to live. This is what the doctrine of the Trinity means. The Trinity is not merely a doctrinal statement to be believed in, in a formal sense, but is a reality to be fully lived in the world, according to our Trinitarian nature.


In name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
(2011 Adv.. 11.VI.17 TSP)