John 3:1-17

This Sunday is Trinity Sunday, the only Christian holy day that celebrates a doctrine. Most of our holy days have a good story attached to them. At Christmas, we have the baby and no room at the inn; at Easter, we have the Last Supper, the arrest and crucifixion, and the empty tomb. Last Sunday we celebrated Pentecost, with the rush of wind, tongues of fire, and the apostles able to be understood in many languages. Even our non-biblical holy days have stories: Reformation Sunday has Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg church. Whether it’s true or not, it’s a good story.

A good story gets a point across in a way that captures our imaginations and speaks to our hearts. That’s why Jesus used stories. The story the lectionary gives us for Trinity Sunday is the story of the Pharisee Nicodemus and his late-night visit to Jesus, but don’t look for that story to solve the puzzle of the doctrine of the Trinity. Jesus talks to Nicodemus about God and Spirit, and so all three members of the Trinity appear in the passage. But while Nicodemus asks concrete questions, Jesus answers with imagery and metaphor, helplessly confusing poor Nicodemus

But maybe that’s the lesson. There have always been ideas, thoughts, and experiences that are hard to put into words. That’s when people turn to poetry. By poetry, I don’t mean verse or rhyme; I mean language that uses vivid imagery, that relies on metaphor, that contains a meaning and a message beyond the words themselves; words that stir the imagination, that have a quality of spontaneity and grace.

The Trinity is poetry. Whenever we speak about God, we are limited to metaphors and analogies. Most of us carry around a picture of God in our imaginations, and that probably helps us have a more personal relationship with God. Jesus called God “Abba,” which is like papa or daddy; many people are still very attached to the metaphor of father in their language about God. I heard an indigenous lay pastor speak this past weekend; he prefers to speak of God as a wise grandmother. But we can never claim that any one image of God captures the fullness of the Divine. We can never claim any of the words we use to describe God are literal. God is ultimately unknowable, a mystery. We trust our experiences of God and the biblical witness of God, but part of what they show us is that God is more than we can know.

The Trinity is the poetry hammered out by the Church long ago to describe God in a way that is faithful to scripture and to the experience of Christians over the centuries. The Trinity gives words to our very personal encounter with God the Creator, the One who is mindful of each one of us and by whom we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139). Scripture declares we are made in God’s image; therefore, we who are made in the image of God are called to be mindful of one another, to love one another, as God loves us. We describe the power to do that as the power of the Holy Spirit. This is a power we feel and know, the power to keep on keeping on when we’re pretty sure we don’t have it in us to keep on keeping on.

At the heart of our Christian faith is a more radical, even scandalous trust that God also suffers with us. The cross planted at the center of our faith declares that God descends with us to the depths of life: “There is no pain that you can bear that I have not embraced,” God tells us from the cross, “there is no darkness that can overtake you that I have not seen; there is no fear that might grip you that I have not known. I have passed through it, and when you pass through it, I am with you.”

But why bother? Why try to explain the Trinity, or even to accept the Trinity as a mystery beyond understanding? The answer is that the way we talk about God and envision God profoundly influences everything else that we say about Christian life and faith. As my theology professor used to say, “Theology matters.”

It matters how we imagine God. One meaning and message in the poetry of the Trinity is that the glory of the triune God consists in sharing life with others. The Trinity describes God’s power not as coercive but as creative, sacrificial, and empowering love. Within the Trinity, the eternal life of God is life in relationship. God exists in community.

Our creating, saving, and empowering God created us for community that saves and empowers. In Wendell Berry’s novel, The Wild Birds, one of the characters quotes the apostle Paul in an argument with his friend. “The way we are,” he says, “we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.”

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.