From Explanation to Encounter - Trinity Sunday

This past week, my family saw the movie, The Sheep Detectives. The story centers on a good shepherd who has been murdered, and his flock of sheep who set out to solve the case. At one point that case leads three of the sheep to a church, where the most worldly wise sheep explains that this is where God lives. “Who is God?” The other sheep ask. “God is a shepherd. But also a lamb. And also damns things,” their guide tells them. “So God is also a beaver?” one of the sheep asks, following the logic. “Yes, but also bread,” the guide replies. “So God is a shepherd who is also a lamb and a beaver and bread,” the sheep repeat, making sure they have it all straight. “Yes,” their guide replies, “and they eat him on Sundays.”

When it comes to God, our explanations can quickly go awry, and this is nowhere more true than in the our doctrine of the Trinity, which we celebrate this Sunday. How can God, who is one, also be three? What is the relationship of the Father and the Son? And how is there a Son when he never actually has a beginning? And where does the Holy Spirit come into all of this?

As it happens, I’m probably more prepared than I’ve ever been to offer an explanation of these mysteries. I’m in a theology discussion group with several other priests from around the country, and for the past several months we’ve been reading books about the Trinity from some of our best contemporary Anglican theologians. Our study has taken us into the theories of the Cappadocian Fathers, the critical problems of the filioque clause, the value of the economic Trinity versus the social Trinity, to name but a few topics of our conversations. We’ve read hundreds of pages and just as many footnotes, but for all of that, the conclusion these theologians have brought me to is that the best way into the reality of the Trinity isn’t explanation, but encounter.

Encounter leads us to a place; it is a you-had-to-be-there kind of truth. There are plenty of these kinds of truths in life. We can do our best at explaining them, of helping make some bridge of understanding, but when it comes down to it, there simply is no way to understand such truths from the outside. The experience of love, the birth of a child, the death of a loved one—none of these things can be known from the outside. You had to be there, and that there means that these kinds of truths need a place.

The place our scriptures offer us this morning is the creation. In the first chapter of Genesis we find a poetic account of the very beginning of the world. Spaces are created and then filled, there is a kind of call and response, a litany of goodness that echos throughout. This is a liturgical text, one written by a priest, most likely. And in its structure, scholars have discovered an amazing truth: that the first chapter of Genesis echos the architecture of the Temple in Jerusalem. What we are given in this creation poem is a vision of the whole cosmos as God’s temple. From the first to the last, our scriptures give us a picture of a God who wants to be with us, in relationship, and that relationship begins in the created world of bodies and mountains, ravens and burning bushes. If we want to encounter the God who is love, who is relationship, then we should go to the places of God’s first temple—the creation which God has made.

And we are a part of that creation, an image of God in the world. Just as God dwells in the temple of the cosmos, working with love and mercy toward its flourishing, God calls us to share in this work. When we learn to exercise our power in creation in a way that reflects God’s power, which is always exercised toward love, goodness, and mercy, then we will find ourselves close to the Triune God.

God created a holy place to be with us and to work with us, but we know how the story goes from there. Instead of exercising our power for the sake of the creation’s flourishing, we took the path of exploitation. Though God had invited us to live like God, exercising our great gifts for the sake of care, we began to turn against God, against creation, and ultimately against ourselves. God had made us to image God, but now God sought to draw us back by imaging us. God became human, as St. Thomas Aquinas put it, so that we could become like God. So it was that God came to us not only in a place, but as a person: Jesus.

Jesus, as our scriptures tell us, is the image of the invisible God. He embodies the original human vocation, the call toward a life like God, showing us what is possible for a human life lived to its fullness. It is through Jesus, this person, that our journey of encounter continues. God now has a face, a body, and we are given an image of what it would look like for us, as flesh and blood human beings, to fulfill our original call of living in God’s image.

In our Gospel today, we find the final call of that encounter—the path toward making it a living reality in all aspects of our lives. Jesus tells his students, his disciples, to go to all the different people groups of the earth, and to welcome them into the life of God—this triune life of Father, Son, and Spirit—through baptism. But more importantly, Jesus tells his students to go and make more students, teaching them to obey everything Jesus commanded. This obedience isn’t a rote life of following rules. Instead, it is what the early Christians called The Way—the pattern of life in which we become like Jesus, the person who was both most fully human and most fully God. When we are able to move our lives into the rhythms of this way, then we too will become fully human and so, like God.

Imaging God is a tall order, but as we celebrated last Sunday, God is with us not only in the Temple of Creation, or in the person of Jesus, but also in the power of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is not only God with us and before us, but also in us. Through the indwelling of the Spirit, we have our own hearts linked with God’s. As Paul writes in Romans, the Spirit even prays through us when we don’t know how to pray. It is through this act of prayer, submitting to the Spirit’s life within us, that we find ourselves in our deepest encounter with the Holy Life of the Trinity.

I’m afraid that in all of this I’ve verged into too much explanation when what I promised was encounter. It’s a problem for people like me who spend too much time reading books, but the truth is that encounter is something we have to experience for ourselves. No one can give you the experience of the Triune God; you have to find your way to it yourself. And I bet you’ve already had moments of this encounter whether it was a time of wonder in the Holy Temple of God’s Cosmic Temple of creation, or a realization of the presence Jesus in an act of self-offering love, or moment of exhilarating power through God’s Spirit within you. Whatever the encounter, if it was God then it felt like love, and care, and goodness. God is after all a Good Shepherd, who is also a lamb and bread that we eat on Sundays. It’s hard to explain. Amen.