Emphasis Preaching Journal

In comment on the three lectionary texts for today, you will read consistent suggestions, if not warnings, not to turn Trinity Sunday into a classroom experience in which an effort is made to convey the doctrinal meanings of the Trinity.

You have to be a Greek among the ancient Greeks, an idealist, a philosopher, to want to try to make sense of the doctrine. Most of our minds do not work in ways that match its formulations and its witness.

Recognizing that, what do we do? First, phone your friendly neighborhood seminary and borrow a theologian. Let her stumble through the dogma. Then, second, preach in the aura, the penumbra, the field of vision and inquiry that the Trinity creates or impinges upon.

I've read good suggestions that the deepest dogmas are best treated as I>doxa, for praising. That should work in respect to the Trinity. In cultures less distracting than our own, this day was publicly observed as "The Festival of the Holy Trinity." Festivals need doxa, praise and praising.

The God who, in Genesis 1, says "let us" create; the God in Christ who says we should baptize in the Trinitarian name; the God who blesses, in the Pauline formulation -- this is a God to be praised. You will find no need to be drawing mental triangles and diagrams about how three divine persons interrelate, without confusing or separating them. You will instead have found new reasons to be attentive to a God who manifestly and abundantly is revealed for all our circumstances. And who on occasion lets some people feel that they have begun to penetrate the edges of meaningful statements about a doctrine. This one. Let us praise.

Grist For The Mill

Genesis 1:1--2:4a

Talk about beginnings! Yes, let's do, on Trinity Sunday.

Today, the first Sunday after Pentecost, we open to page one, line one, "In the beginning ...."

Everyone of age (age five or so) who hears this reading knows something about scientific world views, Big Bang versus Non-Big Bang origins, and more. Everyone of age (age three or so) who hears it also finds the "mythic" way in which Genesis speaks to be vivid and compelling -- whether they accept it or not. By myth, I guess we have to say again, we do not mean anything that has to do with the truth or falseness of a story. It has everything to do with the fact that a truth cannot be as effectively expressed some other way than this.

What is vivid and compelling about the Genesis story is the initiative of the initiator. In the beginning, God created .... And the sequel to that line, namely hundreds of pages of scripture and thousands of years of experience, is a consequence of that. The theologians, responding to the scientists, said: "These chapters are not about how the world began but how God's people came to be God's people."

Others, responding to the stale folks who saw creation as a finished product in a story they could too easily reject, told us to read carefully: this is not a story of God making something out of nothing, though God can do that. (We are not sure whether the Bible ever says God did in the beginning.) God does create "cosmos out of chaos," on page one, day one, and today. The people who hear these words are to be swept up in the activity of God. They get to be co-creators, a nonheretical and dazzling notion.

2 Corinthians 13:11-13

Now, with creation under way, we get to talk about Trinity.

The Trinity is a mystery. Woe to anyone who tries to give a mini-version of the doctrine of the Trinity. Woe not because she or he is involved with a moral flaw. Rather, woe in the "lots of luck" or "you need lots of help" sense. I once took an eleven-week course on the Trinity from the best person alive to teach it. Forty years later I remember only one line: he quoted Augustine to the effect that, in the face of the reality to which it points, we speak of and witness to the Trinity (as a doctrine) because we have to say something, and this is just a bit better than silence, than having nothing to say.

Agreed. We have to say something. We do not have three gods hanging out there in space. We are not ruled by a committee. We are monotheists who must reckon with the divine person of Christ and the presence of the Spirit. We find attempts to use analogy or comparison (iron, heated iron, and all that) cause us to lapse into modalistic monarchianism or some other heresy.

So what do we on Trinity Sunday? Best idea: what Paul does at the end of this chapter, this book; we use the Trinity; we put the Trinity to work. This does not mean that we rob the Creator of initiative but that we accept the gift of creation. We create a circumstance in which Paul's "Trinitarian blessing" gets to have its effects. We get to announce and experience the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. We get to express and revel in the love of God. And we do this in the communion of the Holy Spirit. Doctrines of the Trinity may be necessary, but are flat compared with this use, this experience.

Matthew 28:16-20

We know why this text was chosen for Trinity Sunday; Matthew here represents Jesus sending disciples to baptize "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." Lectionary-choosers seize on such rarities. It happens that the Doctrine of the Trinity, so fundamental a teaching in catholic Christianity that fundamentalists do not list it as a fundamental, has little direct New Testament textual backing.

Instead the philosophers and theologians and creedmakers, faithful to the scripture, came up with it as a means of protecting some biblical teachings, guarding against some heretical ones, and assuring that God the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit would receive full attention in witness.

Because of this passage, most Christians have done their baptizing in the name of the Trinity. There have been a few groups like the "One-ness Pentecostals" who do not, but most of the rest regard this word from Matthew as a command, a license, a promise.

With baptism came and comes discipleship. Trinity Sunday is a good day to ask oneself and a congregation: What does it mean to be discipled in the name of (which means under the care and possession of) the Father we have not seen; the Son who is attested to in records of those who were of his time and place; the Spirit, who is of every time and place? Would we be more catholic, which here means universal and encompassing, if we reflected more on this threefold form of baptism and discipling?

Martin Buber says that God is addressed, not expressed. The Trinity can be an "it" to be expressed. But these texts give us good reason to do some addressing, in this case, of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit.

FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By James A. Nestingen

Genesis 1:1--2:4a

Dog-eared, thumb stained, tongue worn from generations of retelling; fought over, abused, despised or held in wonder, the creation story seldom gets treated for what it really is: a magnificent confession of faith by a people who have come to know God's grace and see it in the creation itself.

Which comes first, creation or redemption? In the order of time, creation precedes. But in our knowing, Christ and the Spirit come before, clarifying the mysteriously threatening ambivalence of a creation apparently at odds with itself,
restoring us to creatureliness so that we can begin to see the creator's hand at work, in its own right, shaping every day. From the perspective of the exodus, Good Friday, Easter and with them Pentecost, it is possible to hear these words, "And God saw that it was good," joining in the confession.

Left without a key, the ambivalence of creation gets overwhelming. The sense of goodness gets nullified by an onslaught of its opposite.

There is beauty: the scent of turned earth in seed time, the sight of a well-thrown ball, the sound of people at leisure in an evening. There is order: the web of life, with its spinning diversity surging in a riot of color and form; the discovery of an adult emerging out of the hormonal floods of adolescence; the relative balance of powers in public life.

But for all of the apparent goodness, there are realities on the other side. Those who smell the earth know also life's fragilities. For all of those who survive adolescence relatively whole, there are countless others victimized for a lifetime. And if the balance is relative, it must also register litanies of names like Dachau, Rwanda-Burundi and Bosnia, where the terrors of the human heart have broken loose.

A psychiatrist reflecting on a parishioner's personal disaster once observed. "It takes people until they are 45 to figure out that they are mortal, and when they do, anything can happen." There appears to be some predisposition in the human heart that makes us unable to register the realities of both life and death. So creation faith becomes illusory, golf-course nostalgia that refuses to acknowledge the negative.

In the face of such simple credulity, Luther argued that the First Article of the creed is in fact the hardest to believe. For it requires the confidence that God not only creates in general but provides for the particularities of each of us, shaping every
moment for good even in that which appears unambiguously evil. In the drenching flood of daily realities, such conviction requires a risen one, a Spirit spilling new realities over every human border.