May 18, 2008

Glynn Cardy

Trinity Sunday     Genesis:18:1-14     Matthew 28:16-20

Sentence and Prayer of the Day

Some nights stay up till dawn as the moon

sometimes does for the sun.

– 13th century Persian prayer

O God our mystery, you bring us to life, call us to

freedom, and move between us with love. May we

so participate in the weave of your presence all

around us that our lives spin with colour. Amen.

– Glynn Cardy

In any literal sense depicting God as a trinity is nonsense. If God is God – that is within and beyond all our human philosophical constructions - there are more than three expressions of the Divine, more than three movements, three ‘faces’, three ways of knowing or experiencing God.

In modern times some scholars have tried to resurrect it’s relevance by emphasizing the social relationships within the Trinity. How the Father related to the Son and vice versa, and how the Spirit fitted in. Two of the key words were ‘self-giving’ and ‘interpenetration’. Yes, they actually said the latter with a straight face!

Yet it all seems very quaint and anthropomorphic to me. God being a cosy little threesome dancing together doesn’t leave much room for the gooseberry called humanity. Even in liberal interpretations of Trinity being a parent-creator, a Jesus-exemplar, and a spirited life force, I fail to see how its social relationships are meant to be a model for team work or community. Is one of us meant to be a creative, another prepared to die, and a third fiery?? And we are all meant to be self-giving and inter-xxxx each other. The mind boggles!

Christianity in the first centuries of the Common Era was trying to come to terms with its experience of Jesus, its experience of his life living on in them, and its realization that God was still more. It wanted to say that their experiences of Jesus and God-within-each-other weren’t the whole story. Yet it also wanted to say that the Divine was more than the fixed idea of a transcendent, untouchable, holy God off the planet. So the Cappadocian boys, and their sister, in the 3rd century offered the Church the oxymoron of a tri-unity or trinity.

At its best trinity is a theological construct trying to hold together infinity and finitude, accessibility and inaccessibility, the tangible and the mysterious, the known and the unknown, the personal and the impersonal, stillness and movement, and diversity and unity. The problem comes when people and institutions lock it down with definitions. A good example of lockdown is the phrase ‘In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit’ from Matthew’s Gospel. For a baptism to be legitimate the officiant has to recite this ‘magical’ formula. I’m surprised we are not meant to say it in Aramaic! But then again it is highly unlikely that Jesus ever said those words himself. They are a formulation of the later Church.

The Church has a long history of trying to contain God, put some quick setting cement into divinity’s gumboots, and fix God to their chosen spot. Some definition of God is I concede an inevitable part of engagement, but definition can quickly drift into dogmatic statements that are then taken too literally too often. The depiction, for example, of two-thirds of God as human-shaped males is a case in point.

One of my favorite phrases from the New Zealand Prayer is ‘Ko te Karaiti te pou herenga waka’. In English: ‘Christ is the mooring post for our canoes’. The metaphor can of course be taken to mean that we go off journeying in our wakas and then return each time back to Mother Church and her dogmas that remain stuck fast into the muddy bottom. However, my spirituality and the spiritual journey of most of us, including the New Zealand Anglican Church, is that we don’t return. We travel long distances and when tired seek a sheltered mooring post. After staying a little while we set off and journey on until again we seek a new mooring. I hear the metaphor as saying that at each place we stop, each new mooring, we experience God in Christ. As we change on the journey so the Christ we experience changes.

God is fluid more than fixed. A fluid God is forever fluid but a fixed God becomes stuck in a time-warp. A fixed God ordains a fixed Church, with fixed ideas, and invites people to join in order to be fixed.

Generally speaking, the Church can’t cope with a fluid God. It wants to nail God down. Its needs for security, stability, and routine are psychologically transferred onto the Divine. One of the most damaging biblical verses is “[God in-Jesus] is the same, yesterday, today, and forever.” It’s damaging because it fixes God in canonical concrete and invites the Church to be fixed too. The Church has tried to hard to be ‘the same, yesterday, today, and forever’ and it’s bored its people away.

This morning we heard read the tale from the Abrahamic legends of the visitors at the Oaks of Mamre. On one level this is a story about a visitation of divine messengers to Abraham telling him that his post-menopausal wife, Sarah, would conceive. Sarah’s response was to get the giggles. Her barrenness had been a constant shame to her. But on another level this story is theologically intriguing because the language used for the three visitors is not that of messengers [or ‘angels’ in Hebrew] but of ‘the Lord’ or God. The division between these three visitors and God is not clear, and seems to be purposefully confusing.

The Christian Church has taken this story and given it a Trinitarian twist. The artist Rublev painting in 1410 gives it another. He paints all three visitors as non-gender specific. In other words each could be male or female.

Rather than get into Trinitarian projections, as I’m sure the Hebrew authors didn’t intend, I prefer to see this story as an example of the fluid nature of the concept of God. Yes, God is mysteriously beyond making a call on our lives. But God is also present among us in our eating, talking, and giggling.

Arising from the understanding of a trinity God who is fluid and not fixed there is, I suggest, three consequences for the practice of our faith.

Firstly, humility. We need to acknowledge that we don’t have a monopoly on God. We need to humbly learn from other faiths and those who have no faith. Yet we also need to dialogue and at times critique other faith and religious perspectives. We don’t have God in our pocket. And the God others have in their pocket may have something to teach us.

Secondly, iconoclasm. The fluid God of Christianity can be incarnated and manifested in a variety of forms. 1960s white Southern Baptists needed to meet the black Christ. The English Anglican Church, and Sydney too, need the female Christ. The Anglican Church of Nigeria needs to meet the gay Christ. Christ comes in a variety of ways to iconoclastically break through our prejudices and stir us to change.

This has implications for the way we pray. We usually create or hold before us images and symbols to centre our prayer. They might include crosses, pictures of Jesus, candles, etc. Yet we also need to regularly practice iconoclasm: breaking from those images and symbols in order to avoid idolatry. I believe the Church by portraying a fixed God called Father, Son, and Holy Spirit has created a three-headed idol.

Lastly, discomfort. The Christian God is not content to offer comfort without challenge. Nor I might add to offer only challenge without comfort. We need however to be constantly wary of the comfortable God and the ways we idolatrously make God comfortable. It is too easy to have an armchair God who never challenges us about how we spend our money or our time, who never challenges us about who we vote for if we vote at all, and who never pushes us where we don’t physically, mentally, or emotionally want to go.

The fluid God though will journey with us if we have the courage to set off unsure of where we might be going.