Trinity Sunday (2007): :The Church’s “Funny Math”: The Story of the Trinity"

Trinity Sunday (2007): "The Church’s “Funny Math”: The Story of the Trinity"
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Psalm 8; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15
preached by Jane Barter Moulaison, June 3rd

This past week I attended the Canadian Theological Society meeting in Saskatoon. I heard an Anglican theologian reflect on about how, when she was training for the priesthood, her rector asked her to prepare a sermon on the trinity. She did so, preached the sermon, and her rector declared that he was very grateful to her because he had managed to preach each Sunday for twenty years and avoid the topic of the trinity altogether!

For many, talk of the trinity has become difficult, obscure, even incoherent. I had a Jewish friend who used to call the doctrine Christians’ “funny math.” Christians just don’t make any sense when they claim that God is three in one. Three persons in one being. All of it smacks of a speculation of irrelevancy. What could the doctrine of the trinity possibly teach us that would matter?

When a child or a student comes to us with questions, these are generally of two types. One is the kind of question that arises from curiosity: a question which seeks to resolve a problem. How do you grow tomatoes from seed? How did you and Dad meet? Who attends General Synod? By and large, for questions such as these, there is a limited response that will generally satisfy the curiosity of the questioner.

But there are other kinds of questions that can be asked, and those are the questions, not of curiosity, but ones which demand wisdom; the wisdom of the respondent to dig into her memory and intellect, to try to bring to the surface those things that are implicit, that form the deepest part of us. These are the questions that will try to bring to language the unspoken background of our lives. What is our responsibility for this earth? Why do you and Dad love one another? Why the Church?

The Psalm that we have heard this morning asks such a question of God: What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?

Responses to these questions require depth and nuance. And they require that which cannot be contained in words—they evoke emotion, conviction and a way of life. They are the questions that once asked require a lifetime of response.
And thankfully, these difficult types of questions are not determined on our own. We are not the sole tellers of the story; indeed, as the Proverbs reading for this morning claims, God, personified as Wisdom, seeks us out and makes certain that we will not be satisfied with the simplistic answer. Wisdom calls us instead to know her.
8: 1 Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice?
8:2 On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand;
8:3 beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries out: To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live.
God seeks us out in our questioning and our doubt, and God the Holy Spirit, leads to the truth: in the front of the town, at the thresholds of our lives, to us all, God does not leave us abandoned to figure out this life on our own. Instead, as the readings today attest, God reveals the truth of our lives by coming among us.

The problem with the trinity, historically and to this day, is that folks often confused the two types of questions, asking the Trinity to solve a problem once and for all rather than being the beginning of our conversation. In short, we asked the trinity to satisfy the demands of curiosity rather than being faithful to Holy Wisdom.

This happened in the very beginning of the church’s history when those who attacked and scorned the Christian church asked the Early Church how they, Jewish followers of Jesus, those who insist that there is only one God, could possibly worship this “man who appeared recently?”

It is the same question as that posed by my Jewish – the funny math question. How can three—Father, Son and Spirit—be one?

This very question preoccupied Jesus’ followers for the next four centuries. While those who mocked the church in these early times demanded that they be given a neat, logical answer, the Church responded instead with wisdom, with a story, not their own, but one given to them by the Holy Spirit. As Christ predicted in the gospel reading for today, that Spirit would take all that was Christ’s and declare it to them. And so, the story that Christians tell is the story of the love of God for the world called trinity.

Without that story of God’s love for the world, we are not only unable to respond to our opponents, but we also cannot make sense of God or of ourselves.

So what is this story that I claim is the story of God’s love for the world?

This story has three characters, whose unity in intention is perfect and complete. And so this story tells us that the very essence of God is relationship. That like us, God exists for and in the nexus of relationship.

God is understood then as a God for others, one who is involved in the deeply personal love of a parent and his progeny, and in the specific and special love of a father and a son. Yet the Trinity is not an idea about relationships, it is the relationship between God whom Jesus called Abba and his beloved son.

If we want to know what God looks like, we look to Christ who exists for others. We look to Christ, whose whole being was directed to the love of God and to the love of God’s people. We don’t attempt to freeze Christ in time, but his holiness, his incarnate nature, is revealed in relationship in being for God and in being for the world.


If I were to ask you to describe someone who is good, who has passed on, what would you say? Selfless, kind, thoughtful, considerate. But after a while you would run out of adjectives, and I would still want to know more. And in order to tell me more you would have to tell me a story. A story which inevitably involves other characters, and a story of course happens in time. I remember when she organized a charity for a family that had lost their home to fire. I remember how he cared for his wife when she was dying. We cannot know someone apart from their stories of relations with others through time.

The trinity is like this. It is not a dry concept or a philosophical argument, but it is a story in time. It begins with the character, God, who is maker of heaven and earth, of everything in the world seen and unseen. That there is, the trees the earth the seas, the life that pulses and surges unseen within and beyond us, all of those are from God’s overflowing gift.
The Trinity is the name we give to our Christian story of salvation. It is the adventure story of God taking on flesh uniquely and for all time, in time. Because he loves us. It is the story of a man so uniquely identified with God that there is nothing within him that rebels or fails to display God’s own beauty. He is pure light from light. There is no darkness within him. There is no darkness or vice that he can possibly wield upon the world. There has never been anyone like him—he is, of one being with the Father. As the reading from Proverbs that we have heard this morning puts it: “then he was beside him, like a master worker; and he was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.”
But this is not all, for the very nature of the love Christ shares with God is not to be hoarded or concealed, but breaks forth in the acts of our salvation. In a life that identifies fully with our own lives, even to the point of the misery of death. The story that we Christians call the trinity is the story of love that is stronger than death, of a love that cuts through time first in a tomb, in a world that could not contain such a love. And so, even as the story centres upon Christ’s return to his beloved father, but also reaches into our own time, and beyond our time, to a time in which this kingdom of perfect love, mutuality, self-donation, will have no end.

Finally, the Trinity is that name we Christians give to our story of salvation through the Holy Spirit. A Spirit abiding, a spirit that hovered over the creation of the world, a spirit that lit the prophets on fire, and a spirit that brooded and groaned in Christ’s death. It is that same spirit that girded up the frightened apostles and sent them out into the city, and it is this spirit who abides because Christ has promised not to leave us alone. It is this Spirit that awakens us to the love of God for the world in the wordless joy that is the eucharist. It is this spirit that transforms us from one alone, from strangers, to a communion of those who love God and one another.

Life in the trinity, then, can never be a life lived for ourselves, and the mystery of it is that such a life is far more abundant than the life we hoard and keep and preserve, the life in which we build defences and seek to protect that limited parcel that seems to be ours. All of the things I have learned in this life can be reduced to this: once I was alone and terrified and small, and the Spirit sought me out, and changed all that. The greatest gifts, the greatest joys, the greatest meaning that I have participated in always have to do with what Saint Paul in today’s epistle describes as “God's love … poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”

And so, if there is funny math here in the doctrine that one plus one plus one makes one, we are not to be embarrassed. Indeed, we can even be so foolish as to say that one plus, one plus, one plus the Christians gathered here today, add the Christians gathered across the world, plus the Christians throughout time make one. We might even go so far to say that were we to take this one and subtract and deprive it of all the worlds’ gains and measures – take away wealth, take away power, take away health, take away security--we would still be one. Within the doctrine of the trinity, within God’s story of love for the world, all this makes perfect and wonderful sense.