Before I entered
seminary, I was a math teacher, which makes me wonder if that’s why they asked
me to preach here on Trinity Sunday. But,
no amount of mathematical trickery can magically make ‘sense’ of the 3-in-1,
because the Trinity is not a puzzle to be solved, but someone to
adore. We’re not here to ‘make sense’ of
the Trinity, because sense is fundamentally the wrong thing to try to make out
of Love. Love is the thing to make out
of Love: wonder, love, awe, praise and adoration. When we confess God as Trinity, we are
confessing the simple, delightful, death-dying truth that God is Love, and to
do so grateful to theologians who have loved this God, drawn close to this God
in prayer, and given us words to help us approach the awesome mystery.
For if God
is Love, then Love is more fundamental than anything that else that is. And maybe my mathematical training can help
us unpack that a little bit. There’s a
short novel, now a movie, popular among mathematicians called Flatland, an exploration of what life
would be like if space only had two dimensions, not three: everything’s flat. It’s a fun exercise (at least as fun as
anything mathematicians do, which might be a low bar), to think about life
without one of our spatial dimensions. Unsurprisingly,
love is part of this world. What’s much
harder to imagine is a universe without time.
I don’t know how to even go about doing that, but we confess that love
is more basic to existence than time.
Love
pre-exists even time, because ‘before’ (and I know ‘before’ makes no sense
without time, but our language always fails when we attempt God talk)….
‘before’ there was time, love loved. Love
is active; love loves. Love is the most
basic, primordial (pre-ordial!) way of being.
And that’s what we confess when we claim God to be Trinity. That love is not created, finite, limited,
subject to failure, like us. Love is God,
and we only know that because God is for us.
Because the love God is didn’t remain hermetically sealed, curved up in
itself; no, it was poured out. Keeping
good news secret is notoriously difficult, and maybe the reason it’s so
difficult for us is that God never tried.
God didn’t keep the secret of His own love, and telling of it, the
singing of it, was creation.
We heard of
that creative act in our reading from Proverbs, a reading which beautifully not
just lays out but celebrates how the earthly order enfleshes the divine love from
which it flows. We heard of the mutual
delight between God and Wisdom, described as God’s craftsman in our translation
which does its best with a very rare Hebrew word (אָמוֹן) which might also be
an unusual word for ‘child.’ From this
mutual delight, expressed in loving play, comes forth the world and all its
creatures. Love sings of itself, and
creation is what we end up with. And in
that creation, most especially delightful to wisdom who first and foremost
delights in God, is us: humanity.
God is
eternally the beautiful bonds of love that link Father, Son and Spirit. And that love overflows, and love loves us,
and longs to reveal that love God is fully to us and draw us into it. For love does not stand aloof. A lonely clock-maker God might get bored of
us and leave us to our own devices, but a God who is Love and who told of His
love in creation, and delighted in humanity is never aloof. God is for us.
I said, a
little earlier, that as love is more basic than time, it should be easier to imagine
a world without time than without love.
But, I don’t think it is, not for most of us; and that’s what’s wrong
with the world. That we don’t live as the
love-based communion of persons God created us to be. Pope Francis has spoken with sadness of the ‘new
Paganism of self-centeredness’ he observes in the world, this age’s
manifestation of all the violence, prejudice, selfishness, mistrust,
individualism, laziness, sin and Evil that makes it all too easy to imagine a
world without love. We lament the
affliction St. Paul wrote of that oppresses our world so. We lament that the world created afire with
love has grown cold, and dark, and scary.
The world
does not live up to its created splendor, and so God loves it. And the love of God is made manifest in
action, in sending the beloved Son. Jesus
told his disciples in that Upper Room the night before his death, in words we
heard in our gospel, that there are truths they cannot bear to hear before they’ve
witnessed the glory of Easter. There are
truths we cannot bear to hear until we have seen what Love looks like on a
cross, until we’ve seen resurrection, until we’ve seen that Love is so powerful
that not even death, death at our hands, could keep Jesus from being with
us. Until we’ve seen what Love looks
like by seeing the Son return to dwell at His Father’s side (I wonder if, like
Wisdom, he is “playing before Him all the while!”). Until we’ve felt what Love feels like by
receiving the gift of the Spirit in whom the Love of God is made palpable in
our hearts, bringing hope out of suffering, guiding us out of slavery into the
glory of Love, sharing, holding all in common with us like a friend, like a
lover. And this amazing gift, of the
Spirit dwelling intimately within us, St. Paul writes elsewhere, is a mere down
payment on the glory to which we are summoned!
This is
what we mean when we talk of Trinity: that God is Love; and Love loves, and
Love loves us, and Love will draw us into the glory of that Love.
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