Before I entered
seminary, I was a math teacher, which some people might think would give me an
advantage in preaching 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. Love is the heart of our belief in God as a Trinitarian
God. Because if there wasn’t more than one person in the Godhead, God wouldn’t
have been able to love before He created us. That would mean that God would
have created us out of a neediness, a need to have someone to love. And it
would mean that love is kind of an add-on to God, an optional extra He chose to
take on at the dawn of time.
But, no, we
don’t say, God has gotten really into love recently. We say, God is Love, because
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. If we find it easier to imagine a world without love than to imagine a
world without time, that shows just why God had to send His own son to show us
what love looks like.
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 always was and always will be. It’s us that 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 that Love that God is overflowed. Far from
creation out of neediness, 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.
And that
would be enough to be worth us showing up here and celebrating, and praising
Father, Son and Holy Spirit, for that to be our origin. But, it’s more than our
origin. Paul tells us that the love of God has been poured into our hearts, the
Holy Spirit lives within us. The love that God is is not just our origin, but
it’s our present too.
And right
now, we need that Spirit within us, within each of us, and in our midst as
church. We need it because of all that’s hard in our world. All of what he
calls afflictions, that we must endure. Whether that’s health problems, grief,
family difficulty, problems in the church, whether it’s natural disaster,
others sinning against us, or the pain of knowing we’ve sinned against another,
there is a lot in our world, in our lives, in our hearts, that we need the Spirit
to help guide us through. And God promises the Spirit’s aid. That’s what lets
us come and not just worship Father, Son and Spirit, but worship the Father in
the Son through the Spirit. That the Spirit enlivens our very worship.
And this
present would be enough reason to come and worship. B our present enjoyment of
the reality of the Spirit in our hearts pales in comparison with what God has
in store for us after the final consummation of all things, the heavenly
existence He dreams of for us. Christ has gone to prepare a place for us there,
to which the Spirit is leading us. Christ hasn’t gone because he didn’t want to
be with us anymore, but to prepare the place where we can enter fully into that
divine Love that is God. We often picture him seated, very regally, at God the
Father’s right hand in glory, and there’s a lot of truth and beauty in that. But,
I wonder if we might think Christ playing day by day at His Father’s feet too,
like Wisdom did, the craftsman-child of God. Playing, and delightedly loving
being at the heart of that love again. And all the while praying for us, that
we might come and join in that play.
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