Trinity Sunday, Year C
The Rev. Dena Cleaver-Bartholomew
I
saw a commercial just recently that featured three men seated on a couch. A middle aged man sat in the center and asked
the other two, “What’s your favorite
band?” The man’s twenty-something
son, seated to his right, immediately responded: “Eminem.” Grandpa, seated on
the left, said, “The
Who speaks to you? “Does not Wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice?” God calls to us in many ways, seeking to stand out among the many voices we hear. Some voices touch us in ways we cannot explain, ways that become evident when we talk about the music we love and the depth of feeling we have about it.
Why is it that Amazing Grace has such a profound effect on vast numbers of people, while Kumbaya elicits eye rolling and snickers? This is more than lyrics and music. When the voice is right the music and the lyrics draw us in and shape us, inviting us to participate in the interplay with singing, dancing, or allowing ourselves to be swept away in the power and beauty of a performance. The ability of song to shape us, to imprint what we sing in both our memory and our being, means that the lyrics really do matter. What is it that we are taking into ourselves? How is it that we wish to be shaped? Do we believe what we are proclaiming through song?
The importance song to shape what we believe has been of concern to theologians for ages. We have long acknowledged the truth of the saying “Lex orandi, lex credendi,” which means that the law of praying shapes the law of believing. How we pray shapes the way we believe. Hymns are prayer set to music. As you will see later today, there is good reason we don’t have the Athanasian Creed set to music. There is also good reason that Karl Barth, a famous German theologian, once summed up the basics of his belief with the words: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
Today
is Trinity Sunday, the first Sunday after Pentecost, and the day we turn our
minds to trying to comprehend and put into words the threefold experience of
God that has been revealed to the Church.
First, there is God as encountered throughout the Old Testament. This is the God of Creation; God of the
Covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all of their descendants; God of the
Exodus and the Ten Commandments; God who anointed kings and sent prophets and
sent
Our
traditional language for the Trinity is that of God the Father, God the Son,
and God the Holy Spirit. Because what we
believe matters, people of faith have struggled to articulate clearly what it
is that we know and believe about God, who is somehow both One God and yet
Three Persons. This wrestling with
language and imagery became very important early on in the Church because it
became clear that not everyone shared the same basic beliefs. In order to clarify what the Church believed
we had to have language for it, which eventually developed into what we now
know as creeds. We have two primary
creeds. The first is the Apostles’
Creed, the “I believe” statement of
faith we find in question and answer form at the time of Baptism. The second is the Nicene Creed, the “we believe” form we use as a
community. Finally, we also have a third
creed, the Athanasian Creed, which is in our historical documents. Each of these creeds seeks to clarify a
controversy about who God is and how we understand the Persons of God, so that
we can state our belief in a positive way.
Yet the creeds only address the biggest questions about our
understanding of God, which is limited in many ways.
Look at today’s reading from Proverbs. How many of you are familiar with Widom? Who is this female—what? Personification of an attribute of God? Person of God? She sounds amazingly like the Second Person of the Trinity, whom we came to know as Jesus. In the First Letter to the Corinthians Paul even calls Jesus “the Wisdom of God.” Yet she also sounds rather like the Third Person of the Trinity, whom we call the Holy Spirit. The Hebrew words for both Spirit and Wisdom are feminine, as are many of the attributes. I don’t see her anywhere in the creeds because we just aren’t clear enough to make any kind of statement about Wisdom, despite the fact that she shows up in a number of Old Testament, Apocrypha, and New Testament books.
The difficulty with creeds is that for all of the good they do, they are limited. They can only point toward some of what we know about God. To believe a creed can sum up all of who God is would be like thinking that one could read the sheet music for Handel’s Messiah and somehow have had the full experience. We have done what we could on paper, but paper doesn’t capture the experience, the interplay, the dimension of participation.
At the end of the movie Anna and the King, the widowed schoolteacher is sitting listening to a music box when the King of Siam approaches her. They are in love, but there is no way that it would be possible for this English schoolteacher to marry the King of Siam. As the music plays, they have this conversation:
“I ordered this some time ago for the children. It’s a fine example of scientific thinking,
as music is mathematical in nature.”
“Chords, constructed from notes, in intervals of thirds, and so on, and
so on.”
“Precisely…I would like to know why, if science can unravel something
as beautiful as music, it cannot posit a solution for a schoolteacher and a king.”
“The manner in which people might understand such new possibilities is also process of evolution.”
Understanding God, like understanding music, is a process of evolution. Our ability to grasp new possibilities develops over time. Jesus said, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth….” Like music, understanding God is far more than writing on paper. It is an invitation to listen, to respond, to participate, to know that music and dance and prayer are more similar than different, because they are all creative processes that shape us and change us and, if we are willing, help us evolve into the people God calls us to be.
Amen