Not an ice-cube or a clover leaf

A Sermon preached by the REV. NILS CHITTENDEN

Sunday, JUNE 7TH, 2020

Welcome to one of the most complicated Sundays of the Church Year! One of the most taxing for the preacher, and let’s not forget that preachers have already had to attempt to explain the doctrine of the Incarnation at Christmas, the Resurrection at Easter and the Ascension just a couple of weeks ago. Although these three points in the Church year are, let me assure you, no walk in the park for even professional theologians, today is a real beauty.

One of main reasons why Christmas, Easter and Ascension (strange and complex as they are) present something a hair less perplexing is because we are able, in at least some sense, to understand the context: in other words, we understand everything in the light of us being human beings. We make sense of everything in relation to that - and Jesus Christ was fully a human being. Like us, he was born, and like we will, he died. OK, so it’s highly unlikely that any of us will be bodily carried up into heaven in cloud, but nonetheless, we do still have some points of reference in that this was a documented event which took place, as did the birth and death, within the bounds of space and time.

But what makes understanding the concept of the Holy Trinity so truly mind-bending is that it is beyond space and time. And none of us – not even the most brilliant and perceptive minds of human history – can even begin to comprehend an existence which is unbounded by space and time. And, so, in the absence of that ability, we naturally have to limit our conceptual understanding of the nature of God to what we do at least have some idea of – though even a coherent understanding of space and time is truly beyond even the most gifted of theoretical physicists.

I, like probably every little kid at some time or other, recall asking my mom and dad how God could possibly be at our church in a small village in England, and then get over to some other church in another country in a seemingly impossible feat of transportation or telemetry, and how he was able to give his full attention to my request for whatever was on my mind in, say, 1973 when there was lots of other important stuff going on that needed his attention. I imagine that the answer I was given was along the lines of, “Yes, it is pretty hard to understand, isn’t it? But God can be everywhere all of the time.” But that answer is still within our frame of reference, within space and time, because that’s the nature of our existence.

However, if we at least can conceptualize that it is indeed possible to exist outside of space and time, then we can conceptualize that God, not constrained by those physical dimensions, can somehow intersect with our space-time continuum as if it didn’t exist. Which it doesn’t, if you’re God. Although it did – for at least 33 years - when the God outside of space and time, unconstrained by them, entered into them, bound by them for the earthly life of Jesus Christ, one of the three persons of the Holy Trinity, known also as ‘The Son’.

The Son has always been and always will be. So, the earthly life of The Son was not about God the Father visiting earth for a cameo role before going back home. The Father always has been and always will be. The Holy Spirit didn’t really get a lot of air-time (no pun intended) before The Son came to earth, but that person of the Trinity has always been and always will be. Again, I am describing this in the metaphor of space and time like there is a before and an after and somewhere where they exist, even if it’s everywhere.

You see why this stuff is so complicated? We don’t possess the intellect or the words. There are no words.

And, because we cannot think of the Holy Trinity – that is to say, then, that the one God is comprised of three persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, we still are still constrained by our understanding of what constitutes a living entity, which is, basically, one entity = one person. Which is why it is so hard to begin to get our heads around the notion that God is one entity, but is three distinct persons.

Now we’re getting into some very interesting territory, because all of our well-worn visual aids break down at this point.

I’m sure that if you have been going to church long enough, a preacher will at some point have tried to illustrate the concept of the Trinity with a bottle of water, a boiling kettle and an ice-cube. If that’s the case, please tell us in the Facebook comments. This is the idea, and it seems such a nice analogy, doesn’t it? … All three materials, liquid, gas and solid are still water, but in different states. But the problem is that this describes God as if he/she is either the Father, or the Son, or the Holy Spirit, but is only one of those persons at a time.

Now, for the analogy to really hold up, the water would simultaneously have to be liquid, steam and solid, and it’s anyone’s guess what *that* would look like!

And then we have the other classic sermon illustration for the Trinity: the three-leafed clover. Each leaf is supposed to represent one of the three persons of the Trinity. The problem with this is that whilst each leaf has a full relationship with the stalk, out of which they have grown, none of three have a full relationship with each other. They are separate leaves with a common source, but still distinct leaves. But in the Trinity each of the three persons has a full, vital and reciprocal, interdependent, relationship with each other the other two. Take away one clover leaf and it still exists. Take away one person of the Trinity, and it doesn’t.

And then there is this analogy that you may be familiar with: that the Trinity is like a man who is a father, and a son, and a husband. It seems nice on the face of it, but the problem is that that man changes his role depending on the context, generally not actively being all three at the same time.

So, all our analogies really break down. There is only one illustration that really seems to work, and that is the one here (left).

Each of these analogies have long and complicated academic labels which you will be relieved to know I’m not going to go into today. But over the last two thousand years there have been some very bitter arguments and some massive geo-political rifts because of how we describe the nature of the Trinity.

At one level this is obviously lamentable, yet what could be more important than to understand the relationship between us and God. And it has some far-reaching consequences. Because, for instance, if the Trinity was hierarchical, headed up by the Father, and he sent the Son to earth, that might lead to an assumption that he was just a nice guy who went around being kind to people, and not actually fully divine.

And if he wasn’t fully divine, then that calls into question the Resurrection, and that sin, death and evil weren’t really defeated, but just a good story to give us positive vibes.

But if we understand the Trinity actually to be one God, in which three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all interdependent and co-dependent, all fully God, all of the same substance, all unconstrained by space and time, not only is that mind-blowing but it allows for the possibility that our world can change and be redeemed, because evil, sin and death will never, ever have the final say and, even though the arc of the moral universe is long, is does indeed bend toward justice, and our prayers for peace, healing, justice and love are heard and answered.