What can we say June 12? Trinity Sunday

   Before we explore the Trinitarian nature of the lectionary readings for Trinity Sunday, we should stand back and notice that, if the Trinity is a thing, if the Trinity is the thing, then all texts are Trinitarian, all Sundays are Trinity Sunday. A preaching booboo this week might be to attempt an intellectual explanation of the Trinity. Save it for the classroom. In the liturgy, in sacred space, we don’t disentangle, analyze and explain the Trinity. We worship. We listen. We join that Holy Circle. We let the Trinity speak for itself.

   In last year’s post on Trinity Sunday, I speak of my theology professor’s agony trying to theologize about this, how the structure of a musical chord helps us make sense of things, how visuals like the Rublev icon help (or don’t) – and more. I would strongly commend to you now the video of a conversation I had with the brilliant and pastoral theologian Jason Byassee on “God as…Trinity.” It’s really good. Let’s also turn to this week’s lections:

   Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31. In my Wesley 1 Volume Commentary on Proverbs, I wrote this (speaking of all texts being Trinitarian and how that complicates but also enlightens things!): “In one of the Bible’s most eloquent, puzzling and theologically robust passages, Wisdom isn’t a goddess, although she sounds a little like one! Translators struggle to capture the nuance of qana: the Lord ‘created me’? or ‘possessed me’? or ‘had gotten me’? It’s not that God made things and also made wisdom. Wisdom was already with God, in God, prior to creation. Wisdom was the pattern for and reason in God’s creating. Wisdom here isn’t practical virtue; wisdom is cosmic in scope, divine in its essence, comprehensive, omnipresent, as personal as your mother.

   Christians think of the opening of John’s Gospel, where the Word (logos) was in the beginning, with God, through whom everything came to be, and persists as light and life. Way back in the Iron Age, the poet of Proverbs 8:22-31 perceived the depths of wisdom, or was inspired to write beyond his capacity. Even now we can’t exactly explain all the words. We are gazing very closely now into the mind and heart or God, into the recesses of time and space, into the wisdom that was among the Trinity, always.

   All we can do is read, marvel, and notice a few details. Vivid images of water depths, mountains settling, God appointing boundaries for the oceans titillate the mind. This isn’t a physics textbook, but there is no conflict with science. If the universe is billions of years old and we see pinholes of light at night that began streaming toward us light years ago, if subatomic particles buzz blindingly and together fashion the petal of a rose, if DNA plus time and meals concoct the face of the child who just smiled at me, then we begin to discern wisdom at the heart of the macro- and micro-processes that are our world. Wisdom was the tender power that crafted such beauty. To be wise is to be in sync with the origins of the universe, with the intent of the earth, with the rhythm of creation.

   Ellen Davis thinks Proverbs 8:22-31 might have inspired Michelangelo’s painting of creation on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. God’s left arm embraces a woman. Is it Eve? Mary? Or Wisdom, present with God at the moment of creation?

   Wisdom says that in creation she was ‘having fun.’ The Hebrew may mean ‘frolicking’ or even ‘doing cartwheels.’ Wisdom isn’t just useful. It’s fun, joyful. God isn’t somber. There is joy and delight at the heart of everything, and in our destiny. No wonder the Latin word for school, ludus, also means ‘play.’

   In the early Church, the Arians, seeing Christ as this Wisdom, insisted qana should be ‘created,’ arguing that Christ, whom they adored, was yet one more creature. The Athanasians squashed this notion, going with qana as ‘had,’ that Christ was equally pre-existent as God the Father, fully divine. The author of Proverbs would have been baffled—and may have laughed or turned a cartwheel at such a ferocious debate over what is beyond all imagining.”

   Psalm 8. One of our favorite Psalms, memorable, eloquent, ponderable more than explainable. I think of Francis of Assisi and a statue of him I love where he is lying on his back. He would climb steep paths to get up higher to pray. He slept out under the stars, and did so when there was virtually no ambient light, no artificial halogens. So as he lay on his back, drifting off, he could see what we can no longer see: a dense array of pinpoints of light, a flurry of meteors streaking, the deep darkness that is not dark to God at all. He would have known Psalm 8 by heart.

   When he got to the line which asks, “What is man… and the son of man?” he would have thought, not of himself, so small against the canopy of space and the openness of the fields, but of Jesus. Newer, inclusive translations miss this nuance – that Christian readers read “What is man” not a the male pray-ers down here, but as Jesus!

   What Francis understood about Jesus is that the Most High, Glorious God was not content to hover so high, to remain aloof. That Most High, Glorious God exhibited his glory by coming down, in the humble form of a man, Jesus. Actually, at first the infant Jesus. “Out of the mouths of babes”? Jesus’ first cry, Madeleine L’Engle suggested, sounded like the ringing of a bell. The height of God is measured by the smallness of Christ come down in the infant Jesus. The prayer for God’s will is, like some zoom lens, focused down on something small, tender. God came down from his Most Highness because God loved, God loves – and so God’s will is always about love, bending down, humble, serving.

   John 16:12-15. Christian thinkers would have been lame intellectually if they had not concluded that the Trinity was most assuredly the threefold God witnessed in Scripture. John, especially at that long filibuster postponing going out into the dark to be betrayed and killed, bobs and weaves between speaking of God the Father, himself, and the Spirit. In this short text, this multifaceted Spirit is the Spirit Of Truth, whose vocation is to guide us into all truth. Not to have an emotional high, and not to know how best to wield our absolute truths as blunt instruments to judge or punish others.

   This text reveals part of the rationale of thinking of the Spirit as the “shy member” of the Trinity (Who thought of this? Vladimir Lossky? Frederick Dale Bruner? Did they get it from someone else?). This Spirit is like the backstage lighting guy you don’t see, who doesn’t seek attention, but does his/her work to make the Son and the Father look good. “He will glorify me.” What this Spirit highlights so we can see is – well, is it Jesus? Or God the Father? Yes, both, as Jesus makes utterly clear. Jesus isn’t God the Father walking around down here. But they are one. If you see Jesus, you see directly into the heart and mind of God. And there’s the Spirit, their bond, or as St Bernard of Clairvaux titillatingly put it, “the kiss between them.” Hence the quirky title of my little book on the Holy Spirit: The Kiss of God.