Monday, June 12, 2017
Trinity
Sermon
for the Feast of the Most Holy and Life-giving Trinity
Year A June 11 , 2017
Holy
Trinity & St. Anskar
+In the
Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
St. Helena, from the Roman garrison town of York in what is
now England, was a Christian, and she was also the mother of St. Constantine, Peer of Apostles,
who ended the persecution of the Church in the Roman Empire. Early in the
fourth century, she made a famous tour of the Holy Land, where she was shown
the traditional sites of the Nativity and the Resurrection. Under her
influence, her son built great churches there to accommodate increasing numbers
of pilgrims. The basilicas can be visited to this day in Bethlehem and
Jerusalem.
At the urging of Constantine’s
mother-in-law, a third great church was built in southern Judæa, near the
ancient city of Hebron, at the place remembered as the home of Abraham and
Sarah, in a grove of oak trees called Mamre. According to Genesis, it was there that Abraham welcomed three mysterious
Visitors. The text calls them “men”, but Abraham addresses them sometimes in
the singular and sometimes in the plural. Sarah prepared a lavish banquet for
them, after which the Visitor promised that within a year’s time she would have
a son. Sarah was ninety years old, and so she laughed at the news. And the
Mysterious Visitor joked back that she would call her son, Isaac, which means
“he laughs.”
Constantine built the third basilica at
Mamre in honor of the Trinity. By the fourth century, Christians had a
well-established pattern of searching the Hebrew Scriptures for veiled hints
about Jesus. Abraham and Sarah’s guests were interpreted to refer, prophetically,
to the Mystery of the Identity of Jesus as the Son of God from all eternity.
Jesus revealed to humanity something we could never invent on our own: One God,
three Persons. It took a long time to work out the theological formulation, and
it was not complete even in Constantine’s time, but this was all based on
Jesus’ shocking habit of referring to God as “My Father,”
Until Jesus, there is no record of
anyone, anywhere, addressing God in that way. The Gospel also records that He
commissioned His Apostles to baptize people of all races and cultures in the
Name of the “Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” There are, indeed,
passages in the Hebrew Scriptures quoting God as addressing David as “my son,”
but David does not turn around and call God “my Father.” In the Psalms, the
meaning is symbolic. Symbolic and prophetic,
in the view of the early Church, because God’s honorary “son”, David, would be
the ancestor of the One who would
call God “My Father,” because He would be — in fact — God’s Son.
So, Constantine built shrines in honor
of the three great Mysteries revealed in Jesus Christ: the Incarnation, the
Resurrection, and the Trinity. It is poetically appropriate, perhaps, that the
Basilica of the Trinity did not survive the later Arab invasions, since the
Nativity and Resurrection can be placed in time and space, but the Trinity
cannot be so located. The basilica at Mamre commemorated a cryptic event in
Scripture, later interpreted to refer to the Mystery of the Trinity. The
Nativity and Resurrection were visible. The Trinity is not. It is only by
looking back and rereading the Hebrew Scriptures in the Light of the revelation
of Jesus Christ, that we can detect a reference to the Trinity.
Christians also find a Trinitarian hint
in the very first chapter of Genesis,
when God created heaven and earth. We read that the Spirit of God moved over
the abyss, and then that God spoke the Word of creation: Let there be light. So, it is possible to see the Three Divine
Persons in that account of creation. It is important to notice that all three
participate in the creative act. Since we are talking about something that we
can never really understand, it is all too easy to err by simplifying the
Mystery into something that we can understand. These simplifications for the
sake of comprehension actually close off the Mystery. They are called heresies.
One of the first heresies was the idea
that Father, Son and Holy Spirit simply referred to three activities of the one
God, toward creation: the Father creates, the Son redeems, and the Holy Spirit
sanctifies. In fact, we do tend to
associate these three Divine activities with the three Divine Persons in this
way. The heresy is to think that “Father, Son and Spirit” are nothing other
than names for these activities. If that were true, then the Trinity could not
be thought of as being before the beginning of time and creation. And yet
Scripture also teaches us that the Son was with the Father from before all
eternity. So, “Creator” does not name
the First Person, nor does “Redeemer” name the Second, nor “Sanctifier” the
Third. “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” refer to relations between the Three
living in perfect harmony outside time and space, all Three participating in
every act of God.
One reason to be aware of this heresy,
called “modalism”, is that it tends to obscure the Reality that one contemporary
Orthodox theologian has called “Being as Communion.” Before creation, God is
not simple, undifferentiated Unity: from before all eternity, God is a Society of
Perfect Love. If one is looking for a scriptural warrant, it can be found in John’s
epistles, where we read that “God is
Love." Love is God’s essence, as our own Bishop Gore taught us a century
ago. But if love is God’s essence then God’s love did not begin with the act of
creation. God’s love is active from all eternity, outside time and space.
Love, however, is an act between
persons. Indeed one could go so far as to say that the definition of a person
is one capable of love. We know this from our own, human experience, which is a
reflection of Divine Reality. God is personal, and you can’t be a person by
yourself!
Sadly, our human reflection is dim, the
image marred, and the love imperfect. Human love is limited, and marred by the
alienation tradition calls sin. In
God, there is no such alienation: the love among the Three Divine Persons is
infinite and perfect. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit cannot be separated from
one another, but neither can they be confused with one another: they remain
entirely distinct, yet inseparable in the Community of Love.
The great Russian icon of the Most Holy
and Life-giving Trinity seeks to express this Mystery. The golden wings behind the
figures symbolize divinity, and they touch each other. I
think they represent the Unity of the Divine Essence of Love. The icon also
expresses the mutual love of the Three Persons by seating them around Abraham
and Sarah’s table, upon which stands a cup, a shared cup — a symbol of
community, communion, and sacrifice. The original icon depicts a tiny
sacrificial lamb within the cup, recalling the Gospel’s metaphor of cup as sacrifice. The shared Life of Divine Love is a Life of self-giving.
Self-giving is an aspect of the
essential Being of the One God. The icon expresses it in its deeper structure:
the inner lines of the two outer figures replicate the shape of the chalice in
the middle, as if to say the very essence of God is self-giving, that is life-giving Love.
A final Mystery can be seen in the
perspective of the icon, which is reversed. Look at the dais upon which the
three figures sit and then consider the riddle, “How many are gathered around
the table?” Well, the obvious answer is three, but the reversal of perspective
means that the focal point of the picture is not somewhere deep within it but
rather outside it. The focal point is, in fact, where whoever is looking at the
icon is standing. That means that instead of three, there is an indefinite
number gathered around the table. All who will open their hearts are invited
into to the Communion of the Three Divine Persons, into the interpersonal Love and
Life of the Holy Trinity.
HOLY,
HOLY, HOLY
IS
THE LORD GOD OF HOSTS,
WHO
WAS AND IS AND IS
AND
IS TO COME.
AMEN
