"Wrestling With the Trinity" (Sermon for Week of Sunday June 19th 2011)

This was my first sermon with St. Mary's and St. Michael's and All Angels this summer, and was on the slightly intimidating day of Trinity Sunday! But everyone seemed to enjoy it, and it was a nice challenge to rise too. Below are week's readings and also an Orthodox Trinity Icon and a Celtic Trinity.

Genesis 1:1-2:4a
Psalm 8
2 Corinthians 13:11-13
Matthew 28:16-20

Good morning. When Fr. Randy and I were looking at my plan for the summer, he said “why don’t we have you preach Trinity Sunday.” Nice relaxing introduction, lets toss Kieran into one of the weightiest questions of Christian theology right off the bat. Make him prove he earned that fancy Harvard seminary degree!

But in all seriousness, I’m honored to be able to share with you today. The Trinity—the Christian belief in God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is a weighty, but also beautiful teaching of our faith—though sadly, perhaps for that reason, it has inspired some of the bloodiest debates in times past. Wrestling with some of that Church history, in fact proved a challenge to me in my own faith journey. But I’ve also come to realize religious truth often shines through most clearly in stories, in the lives of our fellow human beings. Their imperfect lives still give us glimpses of God in the things they were willing to live and die for—and perhaps keep us humbler and kinder when we disagree today. As the late Peter Gomes, the legendary Black Preacher of Harvard’s chapel said “Christian truth is advanced not by… bone crushing logic… but in the living flesh of human beings.” Its in this hopeful spirit I will try and share a few thoughts with you today: looking first at our scriptures, and then the stories of few two that help me understand the Trinity—and I ask all of your kindness in not reporting me to any Inquisitions if I mess up!!

So what’s so important about the Trinity? Well, it makes sense that at some point Christians wanted to explain what KIND of God they worshipped. The Bible is the inspired Word of God, but it isn’t written as a neat instruction manual. It gives us glimpses through poetry, songs and stories things that are hard to put into words—and which Anglicans, like many Christians respect the early work of Apostles and Church Mothers and Fathers for helping us to understand. The Bible points at what theologians came to call MYSTERIES of God. Mysteries not as crimes to be solved in a paperback novel, but an older sort of Mystery—a truth or experience so amazing we can spend the rest of our lives being amazed and transformed by it. But like chasing the setting sun, or a rainbow, the Mysteries of God are also greater than anything we can “grab” in this life. They speak of a God real but vaster than we can imagine. Many ancient ideas of theology are PARADOXES, which seem to hold opposites together, but actually point to truths too big for our minds to understand in any other way. The Trinity, the idea that there are 3 PERSONS of God, each telling us something deeply important about God, but are also somehow all one, is one of those. Some of the most painful fights in the Church’s past tried to make that idea seem more “reasonable,” but risked losing the beauty of the Mystery.

Coming to think about faith and Mystery this way helped to shape MY story. In my last term of college I found myself wrestling with faith. I’d ran into ideas and groups of Christians who, though I still love many of them as friends today—presented me with questions that shook me to my core, especially in seeing some of the hurtful ways the Church has often treated people of other faiths or cultures. The God I grew up believing to be Love seemed far away, and even the Bible or church became painful for a season. I faced struggle but also many blessings in this time of “exile,” surprises and relationships that helped me along my way. One of the most important surprises, was to eventually find myself growing closer again to Jesus as I started to reread the Gospels. Something in Jesus always seemed to turn things upside down, to inspire people to love God and the needy around them while also always challenging them. I realized that Jesus’ teachings, when you really take them seriously had more surprises then I realized and captured my experience of a recklessly welcoming God better than any other religion. The Trinity, the idea that Jesus showed us something unique of God, became important in a new way. I came to appreciate the beauty of paradoxes, and some of these ancient traditions more maturely, but grateful for the lessons my honest struggles affirmed about the God of love we serve.

Our Creation story in Genesis today, in my opinion gives us a great example of the challenge of reading God’s Mysteries in the Bible, and how the Church Fathers and Mothers tried to make sense of the Trinity. “In the beginning when God created…” We find out our God is the One who made all things. We hear of a wind—which in Hebrew is the same word for spirit, that sweeps over dark waters mysteriously before God begin. Is this wind a part of God, God’s Spirit, some kind of angel, or just the wind? Its not clear, and ancient people debated this. We see God creating many amazing things, and saying Creation is Good. Then, after 6 days God gets to something special. God decides to create one final wonder—human beings, who will be “God’s Image.” Humans are somehow special. We are stamped with God, like a mirror or photo we reflect something of God to the world around us, and have the possibility to know and be in relationship with God.

In this simple story, one gets the seed of so many things to come. We get images of a God working in mysterious ways, and see that humans are called to live in ways that seek to understand and reflect God’s light. A big job indeed—and sure enough, it gets messed up real fast! Later, after Jesus, his first followers experienced God in new, saving ways that also reminded them of things in these older stories. As Jews they believed in one God—but they also EXPERIENCED God fully in Jesus, a human being, in a way that changed everything. Then they experienced God coming to live WITH them, and transform their lives and the world around them through the Holy Spirit. Somehow all of these things were part of God and, as Matthew says they began going out into the world to teach and Baptize in these names. But these ideas were still so new, so fresh. The first Christians demonstrated them, above all in the ways they lived and died for their experience of Jesus in a hostile world. But it would take centuries for the first Christians to fully define this as the Trinity.

Basically, after Rome’s Emperor Constantine BECAME Christian, things got messy. The government wanted a nice, tidy religion, not loose ends and fights. WAS Christianity about one God or three Gods? How could Jesus be both God AND human at the same time? Can’t we just simplify this whole Trinity thing? This brings me to first inspiring story, of a man named Athanasius.

Athanasius spent much of his life debating something called Arianism, a belief that Jesus was not exactly God, but more like a lesser god, like Hercules or one of the Greek heroes. It seemed easier to understand for former pagans who used to worship gods like that—and it was also nice for Emperors who could worry less about people being more loyal to a divine Jesus than to them. But Athanasius saw dangers. If Jesus was not really God, God did not truly become one of us to die and rise again. The true God is still distant from us, Jesus becomes just middle-management. Athanasius was just a young secretary at the earliest debates, but would become a Bishop and hold onto his beliefs even when he was persecuted by the power of church and state. As Arianism became “official” under the Roman Church, he was exiled 5 different times from his home, and people repeatedly mocked that it was “Athanasius against the WHOLE world.” But in the end, his beliefs stood the test of time, and are held by nearly all Christian churches today. Many of the creeds we pray preserve this Mystery—challenging, but reminding us not to “simplify” the beauty God we meet in Jesus.

Athanasius and others like him tried to explain the Trinity with the best tools of their time. They also sometimes spoke in passionate terms—condemning all who did not believe the EXACT formula to an Eternal Hell, in ways we might not fully agree with today in our understanding of God’s grace. But they leave us a treasure to ponder still. You can find a Creed named after him in the back of our Prayerbook, and I encourage everyone to ponder its paradoxes later on.

But these debates, which made so much sense in the Greek and Roman world often caused confusion or difficulty for other cultures. This brings me to my second, and last story—of a special man seeking to help build understanding between Muslims and Christians today. It’s the story of a man named Mazhar Mallouhi, which I was blessed to read in a book written by a Priest of our Church in Egypt who became his close friend.

We don’t have time for a full lesson on Islam, but I’ll note a few things. First, Islam considers itself to be of the same family as Jews and Christians—it came from Arabs who speak a language close to Jesus’, who were also Abraham’s children according to the Bible—and who share many things with us, like the worship of one God, and the belief in a final judgment. Surprisingly, many Muslims also love Jesus and Mary, and believe Jesus was born through a miracle, while Mary was a Virgin. They even believe Jesus will come again, as Christians do! But Muslims also find many ideas of Christian faith hard. The Trinity is one of the toughest, because to their Prophet, Muhammad it seemed like we worship three Gods—exactly what Athanasius wanted to avoid. Their respect for God’s holiness, and “Otherness“ is so great they reject the idea of God becoming human in Jesus—even though their holy book teaches Jesus was sent by God, and that Muslims should respect Christians and the things he taught them.

Of course, since these debates a long time ago many crusades and bloodshed have come between Christians, especially European Christians and followers of Islam. We still see it in the anger that inspires some to terrorism, and the distrust many Christians have of Muslims today. “Christians” are seen as European conquerors who, after the World Wars controlled much of the Middle East. It was in this time, as many Middle-eastern nations were becoming free, that our friend Mazhar was born to an Arab family of desert people. In time spent in the army, he discovered Jesus though the works of Gandhi and Christian novelists and finally decided to become Christian in a moment of deep depression. This shook up his whole life! He found new life, but family felt betrayed, governments persecuted him, and he also felt saddened by how many Western Christians tried to teach him to hate his own people and culture. He eventually chose to live among other Muslims, but as a follower of Jesus. A crazy idea!

But a deeply fruitful one. Over the next few decades, Mazhar became bookseller and writer himself. Through his work, and with the help of an American wife he made friends across the Middle East, Muslim and Christian, and shared his simple love of Jesus, or Isa, in Arabic. He continued to pray in Mosques, Christian prayers but as a way to continue to meet people and respect them as spiritual gathering places. Many respected Muslim teachers sent THEIR students to him when they had questions about Jesus—knowing he was a Christian, but aalso a fellow seeker of the truth who respected Muslims and would not seek to trick or brainwash them. Many of these students did decide to follow Jesus too- and with Mazhar’s help some joined him in this respectful witness.

Perhaps his most amazing project has been to translate the Bible, legally into Arabic. Many western missionaries try to “sneak” the Bible in, thinking they are liberating people but actually being viewed by many local people as dishonorable for this. Mazhar sought permission to sell his books and, as a native Arab he was more trusted. His books sought to translate the Gospels faithfully, and even included commentaries meant to help Muslims understand hard ideas like the Trinity by showing respect for MUSLIM poets and philosophers who talked about the Paradoxes of God in similar ways. Like Athenasius, Mazhar is trying to translate Christianity into his own culture—but also bravely and honestly being true to the mysteries of our faith, without compromise. And his books are not just selling—they are BESTsellers to people across the Middle East.

The Trinity has come down to us, through fierce arguments, but also through humble men like Athenasius and Mazhar who suffered for their simple faith. Thanks be to God!