Triune Relationship – 11 June 2017 – Holy Trinity Sunday

This Sunday rejoices in the Church having found ways to reason about the three-in-one God of scripture, tradition, and human experience despite the complexities of language. The Trinity is not three “gods” or three “persons” with different jobs. Those who have studied the early church councils know how pin-pointed the arguments came to be in order to fend of heretical conceptions. But that doesn’t leave the preacher with an easy task.

The preacher has this Sunday, however, to help people imagine an impossibility: the relationship between person of the Trinity who are each other. And yet not quite.

Matthew 28:16-20

In a world wherein nothing needs more healing than our relationships, could it be that the understanding of God as Trinity could be the most healing word of all? For what the doctrine of the Triune God shows us is that God is relationship, that each Triune Person is identified precisely by relationship with the others.

The Father speaks the universe into being through the Word who is the Son. The Son is begotten, not made; filiated, not built, and so organically, substantially, ontologically united with the Father, not a product or construction. The Father breathes life into the creation through the Spirit who proceeds through space and time, bringing God's presence into the height and depth, the past and future of all that is.

God with us, always, creating and recreating us, saving and healing us, bringing us into the fullness of relationship that is the very image of God. – Paul G. Bieber

Genesis 1:1––2:4a

This account bears some similarities to the Babylonian creation account, enuma elish, but there are notable differences. In particular, unlike the enuma elish, the Genesis account posits no conflict, does not relate the birth of the gods, nor does it suggest that mankind was created to serve the gods. While many readers are familiar with the opening words of Genesis as “In the beginning God created…,” many may not be aware that the preferred translation (cf NAB and NSRV), is “In the beginning, when God created…” This translation implies further that for the writer there was no “creation out of nothing,” but rather God brought order out of chaos.

It is interesting to observe that the term for a watery chaos. . . bears a striking similarity to Tiamat of the Babylonian creation myth, from whom the world was created. The term for create. . . is reserved for God, who creates by the word, that is, God speaks and it happens. The reference to the Spirit of God in verse 2 is best understood as the wind of God, not a distinct being.

Now although some have found a reference to the trinity in verses 1–3 (God, Spirit, Light), this is untenable. The highlight of the majestic poem is the creation of humankind in the image of God. Humankind is placed in a position of responsibility for the creation and in a real sense, the creation continues in the creative activity of men and women. – Jeffrey Galbraith

2 Corinthians 13:11-13

The interest in this pericope for Trinity Sunday is the supposed reference to the Trinity found in verse 13. While it is clear that Paul does refer to God, Jesus, and the Spirit, in words that are familiar to every churchgoer, it does not follow that Paul had any notion of the Trinity as it was to develop in the following centuries. For example, Jesus is not referred to as the “Son,” but the Lord. God is not referred to as “Father,” but the source of love, and the Spirit is not a distinct being, but rather is the source of community. – Jeffrey Galbraith

Paul Bieber is pastor of All Saints Lutheran Church, San Diego, California.  

Jeffrey Galbraith is pastor of St. Paul's Lutheran Church (ELCA) in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and a professor of business administration at Greenfield Community College.

Homily Service 41, no. 3 (2008): 15-23.

The Spirit is Future Present – 22 May 2016 – Holy Trinity

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity gives us not only the workings of the Holy Three but a powerful inner-reliance within them that forms an image of community. All of this can sound either too practical (they each have a job) or too complicated (three is one?).

God the Creator can be too distant (the Watchmaker god who gets the ball rolling and then departs) or too comfortable (there’s not much that is controversial in acknowledging the universe must have a Source).

God the Spirit can be too easily manipulated (we can say God “told me” through the working of the Spirit what I wanted to hear) or so ever-present and pervasive that it loses the particularity of emanating from God the Son (i.e., the Spirit is in every faith).

God the Face––in Christ Jesus––of Creator/Spirit can be either too neatly drawn (Jesus’ sense of what is right and just is in line with mine) or too scary (he’s asking me to grow and change so that I embrace a larger world than I want).  

Preachers might summon the language of mystery today so that what seems to be too difficult to talk about (lest it become boringly understandable or ungraspably academic) becomes absolutely necessary to faith.

The Church and the lectionary give us this day every year to sum up, as it were, ways to think about our confession of faith: I believe in the God the Father… Son… and Holy Spirit. This is a great opportunity to get down to it!

John 16:12-15

Most significantly, we hear from Jesus’ farewell speech to the disciples, promising that a “Spirit of truth” will come to guide the disciples into the future.

Why did Jesus think his followers needed this kind of divine presence? Why not simply tell them: “You have my words, my sacramental body and blood, you have me with you always.” . . .  Even the two-voice God language is too complex for most of us, since God as a (single) “higher power” is what really matters. Why were Jesus' words and sacramental presence not enough of God for the church to hang onto?

Here's a revealing analogy. A contemporary religious community founded about forty years ago by a revered teacher faced this problem. He was their leader, teacher, saint. So they recorded ten thousand hours of his teachings, and after his death kept his living quarters unchanged as a shrine. When new members joined, they were escorted to the room, and could listen to the tapes. Why bother with the Spirit, if the original founder can still be available in this way? . . . .

One answer might be: geographical, physical mobility in one case, but not the other. The [contemporary religious] community stayed in Philadelphia, the house and room providing immediate access to the past when the leader lived there. By contrast, the earliest Christians were forced to flee; they scattered and moved around and most of them lost that immediate link with the literal places where Jesus had been. Of course, a homeless founder helped this dynamic: there was no “Jesus’ own bedroom” to show new converts! But a more significant aspect is that the Spirit, already has a direct connection to the future. . . prevent[ing] the community from only remembering, preserving, returning to a glorified sacred past. The Spirit promises a future with its own worth, its own challenges and novelties. Yet the promise is also that this future will not be Jesus-less, nor disconnected intrinsically from the mighty events recorded in the gospel. The Spirit takes what belongs to Jesus and the Father, and shares this with those to come. . . .

Did Christians begin and remain a kind of “Jesus cult” in just this sense, fixated on one individual founder? In a way, yes. But the Spirit's role is to keep them and us from getting stuck in this past. We have no forced choice between past and future. Someone in the Community of the Beloved Disciple must have grumbled, “Jesus wouldn't have wanted us to move to Ephesus,” but someone else could always invoke the Spirit's guidance. The test isn't “Would Jesus have wanted this?” but “Is the Spirit guiding us here? Does God have a future for us in Ephesus, revealed through the Spirit?” No search of the sayings could answer that. – Lucy Bregman

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

Let the poetry of this passage, rich in concrete touchstones (water, mountains, earth, heavens, skies, sea…), expand the image of what undergirds all of creation by naming it Wisdom. Before all that ever was, Wisdom was born––another name for the One God.

Romans 5:1-5

The litany of Paul’s list of character traits that build upon one another becomes a kind of ladder to greater and greater capacities that strengthen us in this life of struggle. Paul’s words encourage us to look at the gifts that accrue to those who suffer: endurance, character, hope, and finally the experience that “does not disappoint us” which is joy.

Joy comes from participating in the life of the Trinity, the life of the world. Early theologians spoke of the Trinity being like a fountain with love spilling over from Father to Son to Spirit. Here’s another possibility for that fountain:

Imagine a “Trinity fountain” in which the. . . water moves from the Father to the Son and from the Son to the Spirit—but mysteriously reciprocally returns to the Father from the Son, and to the Son from the Spirit, and from the Spirit to the Father. . . a perfect, tri-personal relationship of love communication and covenant faithfulness. . . – Michael A. Van Horn

This is a description of perichoresis, a dance of the Three, to which we are all invited.

Lucy Bregman, professor of religion at Temple University, Philadelphia, has published several books on death and dying and, most recently, The Ecology of Spirituality: Practice and Virtues in a Post-Religious Age (Baylor Univ. Pr.).

Michael A. Van Horn was, at the time of this contribution to Homily Service, assistant professor of theology at North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago, and a pastor within the Evangelical Covenant tradition.

  

Homily Service 40, no. 7 (2007): 3-14.

Music as Triune Landscape

The latest issue of Liturgy (30, no.1) is focused on “Trinity & Liturgy” as its theme. Music, as Paul Westermeyer writes in this issue is a primary means by which we enter into the relationship between the Three in One.

Westermeyer offers what he calls a roomy, a capacious, landscape created by presuppositions and implications about the Trinity found in our communal song and in other sacred music.

Here is some of what Westermeyer has to say – to whet your appetite for more.

The liturgy, the service of word and table that characterizes the Lord's Day, is replete with trinitarian references. This is true not only in the Gloria in Excelsis and the Credo, where the three persons are named, but also in hymnody that pushes to the lesser doxology, which names them. It is true by implication in the tripartite structures of the Kyrie eleison, the Agnus Dei, and the cries of “Holy” in the Sanctus. . .

 Composers have sometimes hidden trinitarian references in music that has no text and no direct connection to the liturgy. The prime example is J. S. Bach's Prelude and Fugue in E Flat major from the Clavier-Übung. . .  (the fugue called ST. ANNE because its subject begins like the hymn tune of that name). It contains what some see as multiple references to the Trinity—three flats, three themes in the Prelude, three related fugue subjects, and numbers of measures divisible by three. . .

 The room God makes “is our created time,” says [Robert] Jenson. “The opening of that room is the act of creation.”

How, then, does worship song fill our lives with a roomy landscape? What does it give to worshippers? Westermeyer makes a number of key points. Here are just the first of them:

A song to sing: With the coming of the Holy Three in word, water, bread, and wine in the liturgy, we receive a song to sing. The music comes from the song of the God we know as Three in One and One in Three. There never is silence in eternity, as Jenson indicates. The Holy Three is always singing. We get to double that song. As Luther knew, and Jenson suggests, in the capaciousness that God shares with us, music is God's gift to creation. 

 Creation and time. With the gift of creation comes time. The liturgy takes time, music takes time,  and music articulates time. Music is about “establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the co-ordination between humanity and time.” It is no accident that the Psalms have been sung. They concern the order, or coordination, of all of humanity's life in time before God. The liturgy spins out this ordering in an inverted new life . . . as the true order. These matters bear heavily on the church musician's vocation to be considered below.

 Health and wholeness. The music of the church is about health and wholeness. Where these are impeded, the body of Christ suffers as its voice is silenced or twisted into sickness. Rape and its brutal physical or mental relatives literally silence individuals. Attacks on communities silence communities. The song is therefore not without lament. It is honest about what is broken, hurting, and bleeding. With the Psalms it cries out, groans, moans, and screams. Singers can be struck dumb. However, as Fred Gaiser says, life in its fullness “is virtually synonymous with praise,” and “laments move to praise.” 5 To be human is to sing, and to be is to sing the trinitarian doxological song around word, font, and table. 26 

Paul Westermeyer is Emeritus Professor of Church Music, Cantor, and Director of Master of Sacred Music with St. Olaf College, Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minnesota. 

Paul Westermeyer, “The Trinity and Liturgy: Music,” Liturgy 30, no. 1 (2015): 42-49.