O Holy Mystery beyond any word I can speak,
O Great Beauty beyond any image I can conceive,
O Tremendous Power beyond any experience I can convey,
How can we dare speak of You?
You are beyond our knowing, and yet we know that you are with us, by your love and grace – You are with us so fully that you are nearer to us than we are even to ourselves.
O God! May I surrender myself to You even as You, in your grace, empty Yourself through Christ and through all Your Creation
May my soul, my body, my voice open to the movement of Your Spirit within us, among us, and beyond, beyond, always beyond.
Amen

Any attempt to convey the reality of “the G-word” that doesn’t risk blowing our minds and blowing open our hearts, is not worth it.

I mean, just try remembering, calling back into your heart, an experience you’ve been graced with that you felt to be holy – holy, holy, holy.

There may be images you have from that experience that we can recall, an afterglow of feeling, or a message you received that you can hold close, sounds, movements, ideas, an object. something like a window you can open back to the experience. … these are very important to keep close and ponder in our hearts, but I bet for the most any way we try to tell someone else about the experience it doesn’t feel like we truly get across the holiness we felt.

The experience may feel distant or fleeting from us – hard to even remember.

The Sacred has a way of slipping our grasp. And the harder we try to hold onto it the more it may elude us.

What we try to mean with this word “God” is beyond our understanding, whatever words or images or concepts or expressions we have … totally beyond, beyond, beyond …

Every Sunday before worship I’m like, “God help me!” How am I supposed to do this? I’m supposed to say something about the un-say-able!? I’m supposed to act like I know something about the un-know-able!?

If you’ve ever experienced here anything of the Holy, the Sacred, the Divine, it is purely by the grace of God. 

And thank God for that! Thank God for the grace that somehow despite our human stammerings and distractions we stumble sometimes into the presence of the Holy.

This is by Grace.

Grace means that God meets us where we are.

Grace means that God, in all of God’s unspeakable magnificence, humbles God’s self, to come to us in ways that we can relate to.

Grace means that God is in relationship with us. God is isn’t only infinite but is also intimate. God isn’t only transcendent – but is even more than that: God is imminent as well, with and within all Creation.

God shows up for us in the ways we need.
God shows up for us in ways that give us something to see, to relate to, to be drawn into, something to share with each other, something to sing out, to dance out, to grow into, to imbue us with beauty and meaning.

And still, I’ll repeat: Any attempt to convey the reality of God that doesn’t risk blowing our minds and blowing open our hearts, is not worth the paper it’s written on.

This brings us to the Christian idea of the Trinity.

The Trinity has become such a dogma of the Church, it has become so formulaic – we rattle off “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” without a second’s thought. It’s at risk of becoming just another creaky wooden human construction that has more to do with us puny humans than with the Holy One Beyond All Name. But we can’t let it! It doesn’t need to be this way.

Because when you actually read the early Christian thinkers who formulated the idea of the Trinity it’s mind-blowing, and blows open the heart. And most importantly, the people who developed the concept of the Trinity – Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazanasius, Basil of Caeasria, Macrina the Younger, John of Damasacus – were all people whose hearts and minds clearly had been transformed by Christ into being servants of the love of God, caring for the least and the last and the lost. They knew what they were talking about, and found a way of talking about it that can draw us into a deeper relationship with the Mystery of the Divine.

The Trinity is a way of trying to convey how folks in the Jesus tradition through the generations have experienced the Great Mystery Beyond All Names as manifesting to humanity through three means:

Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit

Or you could also say:

The Creator, the Christ, and the Spirit.

The Creator, the Redeemer, the Sustainer.

The Creator:

We can be drawn into relationship with God through nature, through the vitality and the rhythms that pulse through the wild, the cycles of life and death and new life, the patterns in the mesmerizing mathematics of the cosmos, the question of the origin of it all.

God as Father, God as Mother is about the God who gave us life … also the God who guides us through life

God the Creator is also present through moral law – that’s why the Torah – the Laws – revealed to Moses is so important. Our yearnings for a just and peaceful ordering of life together can lead us to a God who is present in human history, a God who is active in people’s struggles for justice and peace.

This moral order also means the ways that our actions have consequences that can hold us to account, the ways that the states of our hearts, the wellness or the illness of our spirits can feed others or poison others, can distance ourselves from God or can draw us closer …

These are aspects of what we call God the Father.

God as Son, God as Christ: This is the most human face of God, God who has come into the human condition, God who is in flesh, God who loves us, who loves with us and suffers with us, God who forgives us, God who challenges us to grow into more loving and humble and courageous people.

God comes as Christ to help us with the struggle to be well, to be whole, to be faithful in all that our human lives can bring. In Christ we can see the sacrifice God makes to love us despite the brutality with which humans seek to sever themselves from God. Christ is the way God comes to redeem humanity.

We need not be afraid of death. And so we need not be afraid to live boldly on behalf of what is true and good.

We see this reality of God embodied in Christ through the very particular historic experience of Jesus of Nazareth … and then after his death and resurrection and the re-embodiment in community, we can see Christhood as a universal principle. So some Christians through the years have talked about the Cosmic Christ or the Universal Christ who is present to us through the Holy Spirit:

Holy Spirit. God has come to the faithful and God comes to us as the Holy Spirit.

People have experienced the Holy Spirit as wind, as breath, as fire, as water, as a bird, as a yearning, as an elemental, animal force, that blurs the boundaries between the physical realm and the spiritual, stirs us awake to how, as the Apostle Paul said, In the Eternal Spirit we all live and move and have our being.

The Holy Spirit gives us inspiration, insight. It’s the aspect of God that connects people into community. Through the Holy Spirit Christian Community is unified as the body of Christ. It flows through people in acts of creation and acts of healing.

We can already see a blurring of the boundaries between the Holy Spirit and Christ and ourselves. The Holy Spirit has this ecstatic quality to it. It moves us past the bounds of our limited selves, there’s a mystery at work here.

That’s what each facet of the Trinity does, it draws us out and into a deeper relationship with the Mystery of God.

The early Christian thinkers who developed this idea of the trinity said that these three are essentially one. These are not three distinct deities. But rather ways of approaching the Mystery of the God-beyond-“God”.

The three of the Trinity are inter-related so intimately that it is an inter-being. All three are dynamic facets of the One.

There are two important images the early Church thinkers used to describe the inter-relationship.

One is “self-emptying” – the Greek word is kenosis. Each member of the Trinity empties itself into the other – each gives its very being to the others and receives its very being from the others.

Like Paul says in our reading for today: “Let the spirit of Christ Jesus be yours also. Though the divine nature was his from the beginning, yet he did not look on equality with God as above all things to be clung to, but impoverished himself – [The word is kenosis, self-emptying] by taking the nature of a servant and becoming like one of us”

The other ancient image for the inter-relation of the One-in-Three, the Three-in-One, from John of Damascus, is a dance, a circle dance. The Greek word is beautiful, in my opinion: perichoresis.

Each three of the Trinity embraces in a circle and wheels round and round in a beatific blur. 

            The nature of the Divine is not static, it’s ecstatic. It’s not solitary, but relational.

            At the heart of the Divine is Relation.

            So there you have it, folks. We’ve got it all figured out.

We hope you enjoy your time in the wide-open big-top of the Trinity.

We’ve got mind-bending illusions! We’ve got death-defying philosophical pyrotechnics!

We’ve got kaleidoscopic mystical circles dancing through the cosmos!

And in the center of it all, my friends, is Love.

            For that I give thanks to God.

Delivered Sunday, June 4, 2023, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay