Trinity Sunday C, 12 June 2022. The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Proverbs 8:1-4,22-31. Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice?…”To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live.”
Romans 5:1-11. We boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God…because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
John 16:12-15. I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.

O indescribable Holiness, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Happy Trinity Sunday! Today is the Sunday after Pentecost that Western (or Roman and Anglican and Protestant) Christians have designated Trinity Sunday, going back in the Latin Church since the Middle Ages. The Eastern Orthodox Christians didn’t get the memo, or didn’t agree with the terms, so they combine Pentecost and Trinity into one Sunday. Maybe it’s a case of “the grass is always greener on the other side of the street,” but that seems like a good idea to me. I’ve confessed to you before that I’ve never been able to get interested enough in systematic theology in general or the doctrine of the Trinity, specifically (not enough to give it its very own Sunday, anyway). Bishop Gates and I were talking about seminary recently and I said something (could have been just about anything) that prompted him to ask, “Who did you have for systematics?” I laughed and said, “I didn’t take systematic theology. It wasn’t even offered.” And that was just as well because one philosophy course as an undergrad nearly did me in.

When I sat down to start writing this sermon, I heaved my fat Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church off the bookshelf in my study, and then the slimmer but no less dense Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology, hoping to glean something new by re-reading the entries on the “Doctrine of the Trinity.” [1] For anyone who doesn’t know, that’s the ideology or philosophy that God exists in three persons and one substance, self-differentiated and yet one, one God equally in three distinct modes of existence, but not transitory modes because that would be modalism and that is a heresy. My eyes quickly glazed over. I thought, how dangerous and foolish for a nice person like me to preach on Trinity Sunday. Why didn’t I see this coming around again in time to ask one of my esteemed colleagues to preach?

I did note and appreciate that both dictionary entries affirmed that the doctrine of the trinity is not found in the Bible. Our earliest record of the word we translate as trinity is 180 CE. And there was this gem of a sentence: “Christian theologians have seen adumbrations of the doctrine in the biblical narratives.” I had to look up adumbrations. They’re shadows or faint images, suggestions, or hints and allegations as Paul Simon puts it. It’s a big interpretive leap (a big leap that offends me) to consider the adumbrations to be forecasting or foreshadowing, especially when the story of the three visitors at the Oaks of Mamre in Genesis is cited as “evidence” of Trinity in the First Testament. I say, if one is squinting that hard, one probably needs corrective lenses. New Testament adumbrations are also scant. There is the command at the end of Matthew to instruct all peoples and immerse them in a spirit of repentance in the name of the father and the son and the holy life-breath. [2] There’s the benediction in 2 Corinthians: “the grace of the Lord Jesus the Anointed and the love of God and the community of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.” Those are triadic but not necessarily Trinitarian.

There are libraries full of books on the mystery of divine unity in diversity and I can’t see how the often bloody theological debate has gotten us any closer to the creating, redeeming, and inspiring Love of God. (oh wait, that’s Modalism too). In my opinion, the fervor with which people argue about nuances in the language about an ineffable mystery has much more to do with who gets to run the Church, than it does about loving the Divine and loving one’s neighbor. It has more to do with control than it does with the grace of Jesus, the love of God and the sharing of inspiration and empowerment. As far as I can tell, that has always been true.

So, you might wonder, am I a Trinitarian? Well, I’d say a firm yes, but I know some, even in the Episcopal Church would disagree. And that’s okay with me – we don’t all have to think or believe the same things in the same ways to be good Episcopalians. Do I lean into the Holy One in Three and Three in One: In-creation, Incarnation and Inspiration? Yes. Do I pray in the name of the Holy Trinity: Author, Word, and Advocate? Yes I do. Do I invoke the Divine Majesty, Eternal Word, and Abiding Spirit in worship? Yes I do. I love the relational, mutual, and reciprocal non-binary-ness of the Blessed Triune God. With my whole heart and strength and very muchness, I bind myself to the strong name of the Trinity: Love over us, Love with us, Love in us.

When I back away from the heaviness of the patriarchal language and from arguing the rightness or singularity of the doctrine of the Trinity, I have the elbow room to notice that I am quite drawn to the idea that the Trinity model moves beyond a singular idea of one – to a communal idea of one for the Divine, the pronouns of Whom should be “they” and “them.” An interesting thing about communal relationships is that they are always messy, when they are real. One of the fascinating things about Jesus, whether you view him as a great religious leader or the very embodiment of the Christ of God, or both, is that Jesus was not teaching about removing oneself from the mundane or the common. Jesus spent his life teaching that the Divine was in the midst of the mess of everyday life and everyday relationships, and ultimately even on the gallows.

For those of you who struggle with the Gospel of John, our Gospel reading today might be just the thing for you. It begins with an acknowledgement that, while there is much more to say, Jesus knows that you cannot bear it now. Perhaps this is recognition of saturation, of exhaustion, of grief, of the lack of additional capacity among Jesus’ followers. It seems like it might be compassionate, even parental in the best sense. I like to imagine that this statement is true in every age: there are more things than we can hear or bear. I find it to be a very hopeful idea that there is more wisdom and truth than are recorded in the scriptures. Our scriptures are sufficient, but they are not all there is. Wisdom and truth were not entirely revealed in Jesus’ time – they are not completely revealed even yet. The revelation of the Divine is ongoing, continuing.

So far, so good. But then our text has a series of potholes that, for this feminist preacher, threaten to blow out all of my tires. In this little passage – in three short verses, the masculine pronoun appears eight times in reference to the spirit of truth. He he he – for crying out loud! This drives me crazy. The Greek word for spirit (pneuma) is neuter and the word for truth (aletheia) is feminine. The spirit of truth is not a he. I do get the power of the metaphor – I understand the power of the personification of spirit or truth or wisdom or grace. I understand that Jesus referred to God as Father. But I imagine that if the spirit of truth is still speaking, she might respectfully suggest the word Author in place of Father. And if we are not going to use neutral pronouns, we really must use the feminine as I asked Bob to do in his proclamation today.

Remember breath and spirit are the same word – trying to capture the same thought in both Hebrew and Greek. Breath makes vocalizing or speaking possible. There is something very lovely about the breath of truth (or the spirit of truth) listening first and speaking what she hears. The spirit of truth follows the central command of the Hebrew Bible: Sh’ma. Hear. Listen deeply. The spirit of truth speaks what she hears when she listens deeply. It’s like Quaker meeting or the Great Silence in monastic life. The spirit of truth is still enough to hear and then communicate the voice of the Deep – the Author of us all. Our word for that, I think, is Inspiration. Do you believe in Inspiration? Do you know how she works? Can you control her? Would you want to live in a world without her? Remember, too, that the noun glory means stunning beauty, splendor, and magnificence. To glorify is to beautify in a splendorous, magnificent way. That’s what Jesus is saying the spirit of truth will do to and for him.

The idea of the Divine as the Author of existence, of the Divine in the midst of the mess, and of the Divine listening deeply and speaking (that is, inspiring), seems to me to provide a generous amount of elbow room – and elbow room is always what we are looking for more of at Emmanuel Church. It’s a way out of what can feel like a very narrow place of dogma: Divine as the Author of existence, speaking the world into being, the Divine in the midst of the mess, and the Divine listening deeply and speaking and inspiring. As people of God, we might understand ourselves called to be co-creators, co-operators, and conspirators, conspiring with God Who is Love to repair the world. May it be so.