The Rev. Noah Van Niel
Christ and St. Luke’s
June 12th, 2022
Trinity Sunday (C): Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Psalm 8; Romans 5:1-5; John 16: 12-15
I want to welcome any special guests who may be joining us this morning in honor of our Anglican Heritage Sunday. Welcome, to Christ and St. Luke’s! And this year, we join with much of the world in wishing Her Royal Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, a happy and healthy birthday, and Platinum Jubilee! As a member of the Anglican Communion, we are always grateful to celebrate the inheritance we enjoy from the Church of England and its head. In truth, our Anglican heritage gives us much to be thankful for—the beautiful architecture of our building, set in the English perpendicular style; the powerful, poetic language of our Prayer Book; the gorgeous English choral tradition we so enjoy. But I think perhaps the greatest inheritance from our Anglican forebearers is their way of approaching the Christian faith. This Anglican approach is notable for seeking a middle way between the historic teachings and traditions of the Church and the experiences of one’s current life. In so doing it has sought a Christianity that is deeply rooted in the wisdom of the past, but continually relevant to the present. To accomplish this delicate balance, it invites us to hold things like the doctrines of the Church strongly, but tenderly; more of a cradle than a stranglehold, leaving space for questions, flexibility, and growth. This is a particularly helpful gift on a day like today which also happens to be Trinity Sunday, the one feast day of the Church year devoted entirely to a doctrine.
The doctrines of the Church—and by that, I mean the formal teachings and beliefs the Church holds and professes—have always been points of contention. Too often they have been the things we argued about, fought about, split up over, spilled blood over. They drove people apart rather than brought them together. As such they have often worked at cross purposes to the Kingdom of God they claimed to describe. Some people cling to them so tightly as to make them idols. Others use them like a secret password to determine who is in or out. And others just learn the right words to say without any concern for how such beliefs should shape their lives, leading to egregious examples of pharisaical hypocrisy within the Church. All this baggage has led many people today to question why we even need these arcane theological formulations, because more often than not, they seem to be hindering not helping people’s ability to live good and faithful lives. As a result, an increasing number of people and even some denominations of the Church, are simply done with doctrine.
It is true, that measured by how it has been misused and abused doctrine is a major hindrance to living a faithful life. But I worry that doing away with doctrine completely, in the name of faithful action presents a false and ultimately unhelpful dichotomy. Because the relationship between right belief (orthodoxy) and right practice (orthopraxis) warrants a more subtle understanding than that and need not be a zero-sum game.
For example, I could say, “I love you” to my wife all day long, but if I never did the dishes after she cooked dinner, or never bought her a present on her birthday, or never kissed her goodnight, my words would be empty statements; the right thing to say, but with no substance to back it up. But likewise, if I did all those things and never said “I love you,” my motivations might remain cloudy or ambiguous, and perhaps more easily lost. It makes a difference to say, “I did these things, because I love you, not because I have to, or hope to be repaid, or because I read in some magazine that’s what husbands are supposed to do.” So just as to love a person is not merely to say it but to show it, and not just to show it but to say it, so too is it to believe something. When we separate these two things, belief and practice, we are already on the wrong track. They are intimately intertwined; complimentary parts that make up a coherent life of faith. Doctrines don’t give us all the answers, but they do give us enough structure to fashion a life around so that we don’t drown in a sea of ambivalence or relativism. They hold us accountable to standards beyond just our own feelings and intuitions. And they offer us direction by trying to articulate something true about the nature of the world and our place in it. That’s why we don’t need to get rid of our doctrines, but we do need to approach them differently. We need to hold them in such a way that our understanding and application of those doctrines can unfold and evolve as we live them. This is a tricky balance to strike—to take them seriously enough that we can orient our lives around them, but not so seriously that we turn them into idols. This is the value and challenge of that Anglican approach—a desire to honor the Church’s traditions and teachings while leaving room for rationality, discovery, reinterpretation, and growth, not stagnant ossification. The relationship between our doctrines and our life is more dynamic than that. Yes, doctrine was and is misused and abused throughout Christendom. But we can’t just disregard our statements of belief as being unimportant, or even less important than the life one leads because the fact is the beliefs to which you subscribe, unavoidably shape the kind of person that you are.
Consider the doctrine of the Trinity. As I said at the outset, today is marked in the Church as Trinity Sunday; the day we celebrate the majesty of the triune God—that is one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The doctrine of the Trinity is one over which much ink and blood has been spilled, and it remains virtually impossible to comprehend. All the criticisms of doctrine I outlined above apply to the doctrine of the Trinity, as well. And yet it still does point us to some essential truths about God that can and should impact the good lives we are so keen to live.
One of those truths is that at the center of our faith there sits a mystery. This tells us there are limits to our understanding of God. If we had a perfect mathematical equation at the heart of our faith it would lead us to believe we had God all figured out, fully comprehended, and controlled. But instead, we have an equation that just can’t compute: 1+1+1=1. To say God exists in three persons is to say that God has acted in these three manifestations—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—and yet is still one God and we don’t exactly know how. This posture of humility reminds us that there is more truth that we don’t yet know. This is precisely Jesus’ point to his disciples in the Gospel today, when he says to them, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth,” meaning he’s not done yet. And so, we are left to bow to the infinite, not the definite; to submit in wonder and awe to the truth that God is more than we can ever know or fully explain. God as mystery—within our reach but beyond our grasp—that’s truth number one from the Trinity.
The Trinity also tells us that God is relational. God is not independent or isolated. God reaches out. God’s work is inherently one of connection. Our one God overflowed into the natural creation becoming what we might call, it’s Father; that same God reached out in flesh and blood to the world, in Jesus Christ, the Son, and that God continues to pour into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. The Trinity teaches us that God is a force which extends beyond Godself, forming within Godself a community, a web of relationship. And therefore, as His followers, we are called to reach out and be in relationship with one another. At its heart, the Christian faith is a relational endeavor, that’s truth number two from the Trinity.
And finally, the Trinity tells us that the nature of this relationship, this connection between the persons of the triune God, is love. Love is the tie that binds Father to Son to Holy Spirit. It’s the current running through that divine triangle. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, and his only begotten son so loved the world he died for it and sent it the Holy Spirit to guard and guide it after he was gone. It’s not about order of place, or hierarchy or time in history, the Trinity is about love, and as faithful Trinitarians, we should be too.
Mystery. Relationship. Love. These are some fundamental Christian truths to which the doctrine of the Trinity is pointing us, truths that can and should instruct our life. God as majestic mystery, this humbles us and lets us embrace the world with openness, not arrogance. God as communal, relational; this calls us out of ourselves and into relationship with others. The persons of the Trinity connected to each other and to us through love: this tells us the way we should interact with all of creation. There’s more to glean here, for sure, but what I hope is becoming clear is that doctrines matter, because they tell us things about God that, if we say we believe them, will shape how we live. To the extent that doctrines serve as a shibboleth –a test to determine who is in and who is out of the group—they are idols that need to be smashed. To the extent that they are an intellectual exercise alone, they are empty. To the extent that doctrines are taken to be the last word on the reality of God, they are dead. But doctrines should not be discarded, just as they should not be enshrined. This balanced approach is, I would argue, the greatest gift of our Anglican heritage. For without attempts at explaining things like the Trinity, without the tireless labors of theologians and scholars over the centuries, contentious though they may be, we’d be stumbling in the dark. Instead, we have the candlelight of the creeds and other statements of faith to illumine our path. Through them we know something of the substance of God and this in turn forms the substance of our lives. That’s why, as Christians, everything we do, we do in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit; because when we say “We believe,” what we are really saying, is, “This is who we are.”
So with that in mind, would you please stand and say with me: “We believe in one God…..”