Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 30, 2010

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

We are members of the UCC, right? And we all know that UCC stands for Unitarians Considering Christ, right? That’s an old dig at our denomination, calling us Unitarians Considering Christ. We laugh at it, but I have to tell you that I’m afraid there’s a lot of truth in it. In my work on the Conference’s Committee on Ministry, for example, I’ve talked and listened to several people who are preparing for ordained ministry in the UCC, or who are even before the Committee for their ordination interview, who really do seem to be Unitarians. Yet the fact remains that, historically speaking, the Congregationalists aren’t Unitarians, Unitarians are Congregationalist heretics. I used to love saying that to my Unitarian classmates at Seattle U. Way back in about the eighteenth century some Congregationalists, strongly affected by the rationalism of the European Enlightenment that was in full swing at the time, decided that they did not believe the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, That doctrine says that God is both Three and One. God is Three in One. God is One and God is Three. That’s not very rational—more about that shortly—and so some Congregationalists rejected it and adopted a Unitarian view of God. The Unitarian view of God says that God is just one and not both three and one. And those folks split off from the Congregationalist churches, which remained Trinitarian in their view of God.

Which means that the United Church of Christ, which is of course what UCC really stands for, remains a Trinitarian denomination. Yes, we are non-creedal. No, we don’t require anyone to recite the ancient Trinitarian creeds to be a member. Yet for all that our tradition is solidly Trinitarian. To open our worship this morning we sang the hymn “Holy, Holy, Holy,” which twice repeats the line “God in three persons, blessed Trinity.” It’s in the UCC hymnal. It wouldn’t be in a Unitarian hymnal, or at least I wouldn’t expect it to be. Still, in our non-creedal church, many people, including people seeking to be ordained ministers, have a lot of trouble with the Trinity. Today is Trinity Sunday, so I want to talk about the Trinity this morning; and I’m going to suggest that the Trinitarian understanding of God, as obscure as it is, is vitally important for us and for our spiritual lives.

First a quick review of the doctrine of the Trinity. It holds that God is Three in One. God is one God in three “Persons.” The “Persons” have the traditional names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Trinitarian doctrine insists that each of them is fully God and yet the fullness of God requires all three of them. Each of them alone is fully God and is not fully God. God is one, and God is three—at the same time. It’s not that sometimes God is one and sometimes God is three. God is always both three and one. The “Persons” are not different aspects or manifestations of God, although we often think of them that way. They are simply God—both individually and collectively. Each requires the other, and each is complete in Itself.

And those Unitarians who left the Congregational Church several centuries ago were right in a way. Trinitarian doctrine doesn’t make any sense. It isn’t rational. It can’t be true. Something can be one, or it can have three parts; but it’s gibberish to say that something is both three and one. Numbers don’t work that way. I can take a whole and cut it into three parts, but then it isn’t a whole any more. I can take three things and weld them into one, but then they aren’t three anymore. Trinitarian doctrine says that God has three parts yet is one, is one yet has three parts. It sounds like utter nonsense. And you know, it is utter nonsense, but here’s the surprising thing: Therein lies its great virtue. It is utter nonsense, and that’s what makes it so vitally important.

To understand the virtue of Trinitarianism we have to start by talking about what we mean when we say God. Anselm of Canterbury way back in the early twelfth century said that God was “that greater than which nothing can be imagined.” He was pointing to a truth that all the great spiritual traditions have known, even if they all too often forget it. That to which we point when we say God is utterly beyond our comprehension. The theologians today say that God is “totally other.” God is unlike anything we humans can conceive of. In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas, the towering giant of scholastic theology, said that we can know that God is, but we cannot know what God is. So totally other is God that we cannot even really know what we mean when we say that God is because even God’s being is different from our being.

The great temptation, especially in monotheistic religion like Christianity, is to think that we understand God. To think that we’ve got God pinned down. To think that we can comprehend God and God’s ways. Yet anything that we can imagine, anything that we can define, anything to which we can ascribe attributes that we take from our knowledge of human beings, cannot be God. When we define anything we limit it. That’s actually what define means, to limit. Yet if God is truly God, God has no limits. We creatures have limits. We have limited powers, limited understanding, a limited number of years of life. God has none of those limits. If God is truly God, God is truly unknowable. If God is truly God, God is and for us humans must remain ultimate mystery.

The great virtue of the doctrine of the Trinity is that it preserves that sense of the mystery and the unknowability of God. The wonderful thing about the doctrine of the Trinity is that it sounds like it’s defining God, it sounds like it’s describing God, but it isn’t. It isn’t because, as we have seen, it’s seeming description of God makes absolutely no sense. It is describing something that’s impossible, something that is both three and one at the same time. The Trinity is not defining God because anything that can be defined is precisely a thing, and God is not a thing. God is “No Thing.” Some theologians even say that God is “nothing,” meaning precisely that God is not a thing.

The doctrine of the Trinity does not define God, it points to the mystery of God. It functions precisely to keep us from turning God into a thing. It points to the mystery of God, and in that there is great spiritual virtue. Anything that we can define is, as I said, a thing. An understanding of God that does not retain the mystery of God, that reduces God to a thing, presents us with an objective fact, something outside ourselves, something that is simply presented to us to accept or to reject. The doctrine of the Trinity does not present us with an objective fact to accept or reject. Rather, it invites us into a mystery. It invites to enter upon a spiritual quest. It invites us to get beyond our ordinary, limited, human ways of thinking. It calls us out of ourselves and into the unknown wonder of God.

In her book The Case for God Karen Armstrong calls the Trinity a spiritual exercise. I have come to think of it as a Zen koan. In Zen Buddhism, practitioners are given unanswerable questions and asked to meditate on them. The most famous Zen koan is “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” The purpose is to get the person out of her ordinary ways of thinking and open to the infinite, to the transcendent, to God. The koan of the Trinity is twofold. It asks: What is One when it is Three? And: What are Three when they are One? The doctrine of the Trinity doesn’t ask us to accept some supposedly objective truth about God. It invites us to meditate on the One Who is Three and the Three Who Are One. When we do, we transcend our limited human ways of thinking. We break through to the divine. We are transported beyond ourselves into the realm of divine mystery. The miracle of it is that in that realm of divine mystery we find our true selves. We find our connection with ultimate reality. We find our connection with God. Not because we have given intellectual assent to some obtuse doctrine about God but because we have left the world of doctrine and human understanding behind and learned to dwell in mystery, the mystery that is God.

So let us not be Unitarians Considering Christ. Let us be Christians, true Trinitarian Christians. Let us not claim to understand the Trinity. The Trinity isn’t there to be understood. The Trinity is there to be practiced, to be prayed into, to be lived into. Those who say that the doctrine of the Trinity makes no sense are absolutely right. It makes no sense, and it is precisely in its making no sense that it is true, that it is real. It makes no sense. It’s not supposed to. It’s a mystery. Thanks be to God. Amen.