TRINITY SUNDAY, YEAR B
SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, NORWAY, MAINE
THE REV. ANNE STANLEY
7 JUNE 2009
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Isaiah 6:1-8; Psalm 29; Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit….God, who created us, Jesus who redeems us, and the Holy Spirit who sustains us. In the name of the Trinity, not three gods but one God experienced in three different ways.
Trinity Sunday. The only Sunday of the church year when we celebrate a doctrine. Trinity, the word we give to the Godhead, the word that describes the 3-fold aspects of God. A word that does not appear in the Bible—there’s no doctrine of the Trinity in scripture. Although there are hints in the Bible, the doctrine itself wasn’t formulated until several centuries after Jesus’ life and death.
Of course we don’t come today to worship a doctrine. But we are called to pause and consider God in God’s fullness. Our 3-D God, if you will.
In many ways, this is hard to do. All three of our readings today show us how inadequate are our wordy attempts to describe God, or our experiences of God.
Isaiah trembled in the presence of the Almighty. “Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips…” What else can we say sometimes, says Paul, but “Abba, Father!” since other words fail us. Nicodemus was confused and afraid; he had to approach Jesus at night.
How do we put our experiences into words? Back when I was playing the violin regularly and was in an orchestra that performed regularly, I’d get home after a concert on a real high. If David had gone with me, he’d have shared in that experience in some way. So he had a clue about what it had been like for me. But if he’d had a meeting or something and been unable to go, I’d burst into the house and babble away to him and it was impossible to get him to know exactly what had gone on and how I’d felt about it all. Most frustrating. My words just didn’t do the trick.
How do we put our experiences of the divine into words? That’s even harder! The early church struggled with it and finally, after centuries of trying, after rigorous fights and even loss of blood, they came up with the creeds, their attempts to describe God, their efforts to describe the truth about God: the Baptismal Covenant or Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed (which we say at every non-Baptism Sunday Eucharist) and the Athanasian Creed, written a bit later, probably in the 5th century. Try to imagine, as we recite the Athanasian Creed now, how hard the writers must have worked to get it all just right!
……………………………………………BCP p. 864
That’s not bad, actually. It certainly makes the point.
If I had to choose words to help me focus on our varied, 3-faceted God, I suppose I’d have to go with these words from the New Zealand prayer book:
Earth-maker
Pain-bearer
Life-giver
Never one alone, but all three together.
But words aren’t everything. Sometimes we do other things to describe the holy. Like make Trinity pretzels.
Once upon a time, in the early 600s, or 150 years after the last creed was written, a young monk in southern France or maybe northern Italy, was making unleavened bread for Lent. In those days people prayed with their arms folded across their chests, each hand resting on the opposite shoulder. “Hey,” he said to himself (or whatever words they used in those days). “Hey, I can take leftover dough and twist it into the shape of praying and bake it and give it to children to help them recite their prayers!” So he did. And pretzels were born. One hole for God the Creator, one hole for Jesus the Son and another hole for the Holy Spirit.
Ted Kehn led a few of us yesterday in doing the same thing. Not pretzels for Lent, but pretzels for Trinity. Twisted dough baked firm, with three holes to help us pray. Which hole is which? Which one is God the earth-maker, which one God the pain bearer, which one God the life-giver? Who knows? They’re all one delicious pretzel. Three in One! And that’s the whole point.