June 3, 2007

Trinity Sunday and Confirmation - The Confirmation and Beyond

Romans 5:1-5; John 6:12-15

The Reverend Richard E. Allen, Jr.

 

Some people turn away from the journey of faith because its concepts, like that of the trinity, are too intellectually frustrating.  Carl Jung, one of the founders of psychiatry, and the “father” of Jungian analysis, turned his back on the Christian Church early in his life.  Writing in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, Jung tells how as a child he eagerly awaited his own confirmation as the time when he would learn the true meaning of the mysterious doctrine of the Trinity.  Jung wanted to understand, but he found the pastor’s explanations less satisfying than his intellect demanded.  Complicating his disappointment was that the pastor was Jung’s own father, who counseled him to see the Trinity as a mystery and accept it on faith.  Jung found that advice intellectually dishonest, and from that moment he ended his formal association with the church.  Jung’s disappointment with his father and with the church also gave him a lifelong bias against the number three. (John Sanford, The Mystical Gospel, pp. 294-295.)

 

But the truth is that the notion of the Trinity IS a mystery.  At the very least, understanding it will begin not in one’s intelligence but in one’s experience.  We come to know the many distinct natures of God not from our minds alone, but in our history and in our hearts.  Or, as Harry Emerson Fosdick, the founding pastor of the Riverside Church in New York, once declared, “I care little whether a [person] believes a Trinitarian dogma – but I care a lot whether a [person] has a Trinitarian experience:  God not simply the Father, not simply the character revealed in Christ, but also the divine spirit that can be within us all.” (Quoted in Robert Moats Miller’s Harry Emerson Fosdick:  Preacher, Pastor, Prophet, p. 403.)

 

Yes, Carl Jung’s pastor father was correct: the notion of the Trinity is a mystery, appropriated with all the senses and not just the mind.  As we began our confirmation journey with eleven young people this year, we sought to speak to heart as well as head by introducing them to a classic image of the Trinity.  The image is an icon, done in Moscow in the 15^th century by Andrei Rublev, a Russian orthodox Christian.  In the icon, the three persons of the trinity are seated at a table, looking at each other.  Their pose, their gazes, the gestures of their hands, and other features suggest a deep unity, even in their distinction.  On the table before them, a chalice suggests the communion that keeps them together, the same communion that keeps them connected to us around a similar table. (See Jurgen Moltmann, “The Triune God:  Rich in Relationships,” Internet)

 

 That table, the family table of the holy trinity, if you will, connects them to us and us to each other.  We gather at a similar table today, as we have in previous days and years, and as we will in days and years to come.  It will take a lifetime of living together and eating together and working together for us to understand how we are connected to one another.  And it will take the same lifetime of faith for us to ever comprehend the life of the Trinity. 

 

In our final confirmation interviews last week, a student in the class confessed to still having some curiosity – even a lack of understanding – about this notion we call the trinity.  I don’t think that disqualifies this young person, or any of the rest of us, for that matter, from participation in the body of Christ.  Indeed, it is our participation as members in the body of Christ that ultimately accomplishes our spiritual development.

 

If you think I’m going a bit soft on doubt, I suppose I am.  In fact, I tend to agree with Douglas John Hall, Professor of Christian Theology at McGill University in Montreal, who says that doubt plays a crucial role in our life of faith.  “Because faith has been identified with accepting as true an indefinite number of claims made by religious authorities,” says Hall, “doubt has been misconstrued to mean skepticism about all or some of these claims.  Many people labor under the impression that real faith means assenting to all those ‘truths’ – the Trinity, the incarnation, heaven and hell, the divinity of Jesus; and nearly everyone has intellectual difficulty with a good deal of that.  But if faith is understood as a process of trust which develops in the context of an ongoing relationship with God, doubt makes a great deal of sense as an authentic aspect of the life of faith!” (“Faith:  Response in Relationship,” Internet resource).

 

My point is that this notion of the Trinity is a difficult concept, discerned over a lifetime of faith lived in community – the community we call “church.”  That will mean that our notions of trinity will be as varied as these several ways of talking about the trinity that I discovered this week:  Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, yes, of course; but also Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer; and Presence, wisdom, and power; more creatively, perhaps – Womb of life, word in flesh, and brooding spirit; or, for the intellectually inclined, Primordial Nature, Consequent Nature, and Superjective Nature.  These formulations are enough to make one’s theological head spin, though they are merely representative of a much larger universe of Trinitarian formulas.

 

That said, there is another truth to note.  If discerning the depth of the Trinity takes a lifetime, then in this life we are challenged to give ourselves completely to God’s transforming spirit.  In a recent commencement address a pastor invited the graduates to a lifetime of positive change:  the change of ourselves and the change of our world. Jim Wallis, evangelical social activist pastor and author of last year’s best-selling book, God’s Politics:  How the right gets it wrong, and the Left doesn’t get it, addressed this year’s graduating class at Georgetown University.  In his remarks, Wallis challenged the graduates to think about the world into which they are going, and to decide what they will find “acceptable” and what they will find “unacceptable” and give themselves to correcting.

 

Here’s how he said it: “So the question to you as graduates [and, I would say, as those being confirmed] as ambassadors for a new generation [and, I would add, for Christ], is this: what are you going to no longer accept in our world, what will you refuse to tolerate…?  Will it be acceptable to you that 3 billion people in our world today – half of God’s children – live on less than $2 per day, that more than 1 billion live on less than $1 per day, that the gap between the life expectancy between the rich places and the poor places in the world is now 40 years – meaning that death has become a social disease, and that 30,000 children globally will die today … from needless, senseless, and utterly preventable poverty and disease?” (“What’s Acceptable?  What’s Possible?”, Sojourners Online, June, 2007.)

 

To the question posed by Jim Wallis I would add:  If the trinity means anything in our lives, how does the God who created these people, and the Savior who died for these people, and the Holy Spirit, who seeks true and abundant life for these people expect us to live?  If the relationship that exists in the trinity is the model of our relationship to others, what are we called to be and to do?  And, if we are honest, where in our world is hope?

 

Later in his address, Wallis relates his hope:  that our world will be led to change by its youth.  Here’s his story.  Wallis was in Minneapolis, speaking and signing copies of God’s Politics.  Looking up from his table he saw a little girl who was the next in line.  “How old are you,” he asked.  “Eleven,” she said.  He stopped the line to ask her what she had heard him saying that night.  “Well…” she said, “I think we are just going to have to change the world!”  He then asked her, “And who is going to do that?”   She replied, “I think people like me!”  The next night, in Tacoma, Washington, he told the story of that exchange.  In the book signing afterward, sure enough, was another little girl.  Wallis looked at her, and she grinned at him and, before he could ask, she answered his question:  “Nine!”  The next night … (Don’t you wish you could tell Carl Jung how the best stories always come packaged in threes?) … The next night he told the stories of both girls, and, sure enough, there was another girl.  She said to him, “I’m the youngest of all.  I’m eight!”  Wallis asked her what made sense to her from his remarks that night.  She thought a moment and answered, “When you talked about that ‘silent tsunami’ that is killing so many children every day because of poverty – children like me. … I was just sitting there and started to think, if I’m a Christian, I’d better do something about that.” (“What’s Acceptable?  What’s Possible?" Sojourners Online, June 2007.)

 

There’s no age limit on the truth.  Today’s lesson from John notes that the function of the spirit is to guide us into truth?  Hear again what the departing Jesus promises to his followers:  “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 will come…” (John 16:13)  We know, by the guidance of God’s good Spirit, where we should change, what should be acceptable, and what we should never accept.

 

It’s not too late to live in the power of the trinity, in holy relationship to God, to each other, and to our world.  Or, as we like to remind ourselves, to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength, and our neighbors as ourselves.

 

I may not fully understand the concept of the Trinity, but I deeply believe that the God who created us, the God who also showed the depth of compassionate love in Christ’s love for us, is this same God who helps us to know the truth about ourselves, about our world, and about the lifelong need to love God and neighbor.  That’s not so much a mystery as a challenge for all of us this day.

 

Amen.