Steam? Water? Ice?

Trinity Sunday, just what does it mean to me?

As I look back at the years of sermons I have heard on just what Trinity Sunday means, a couple of them stand out for me. The first meaning that I remember hearing preached in a sermon compared the Doctrine of the Trinity to a three leaf clover… each separate but part of the same plant.

Later in my thirties, I recall a sermon that compared the three states of water: steam, liquid, and ice to the three persons of the Trinity and that satisfied me for quite a number of years, actually until fairly recently.

In the last few years, as I have studied the modern biblical scholarship that is now available and especially this past year, reading ‘Christianity, the first three thousand years’ by Diarmaid MacCulloch [c.2009] I have come to wonder just these doctrines meant to the original developer. By the end of the 4th century, this doctrine had substantially reached its current form.

Language has changed greatly in the last 16 centuries, as has our understanding of how this universe works. Not to mention the clerical errors that could have crept in during that time because of the necessity to hand-copy all documents, and just maybe to amend them slightly in order to make them more palatable to others. They were simply trying to express, with the knowledge available to them at that time, how they understood God.

And so I was very thankful to read this year, a new [for me] explanation of the Trinity. The Trinity, said the author, is simply the way we experience that which we call God.

I experience God in creation, in the natural world, in the beauty of a sunset, the magic of the buds coming out in the spring, the majesty of a starry night. I also meet God in all other people, believing that we all are connected, all share the same hopes, fears, needs, and joys. Then there is that spark deep inside me the never changes, but fuels my core convictions, guiding me as I struggle to live in a way that expresses them. Three different ways that I have, and continue, to experienced ‘god’ - my doctrine of the Trinity!

And I wonder if that is what the original doctrine meant to those who first heard it. Whatever it was those long-ago theologians were trying to say to the people of their time, one thing is self-evident. It needs to be interpreted taking into account all that we have learned about this world in the intervening 16 centuries. They weren’t speaking to us, they were speaking to the times in which they lived. We have spent the intervening eons trying to make their words in the Nicene Creed speak to us. “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth…..And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God,….And in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified.”

It is past time to move into the 21st century if we want the church to become relevant again to the culture in which it finds itself.

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