Gospel: John 16:12-15
[Jesus said,] 12“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. 13When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. 14He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. 15All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”
Grace, peace, and mercy are yours, in the name of the Triune God. Amen.
I want you to envision with me three very similar, but also rather different encounters.
It’s a summer day in Northfield, MN, and you’re walking down division street. You have an entire day free, nothing to rush off to, no chores to accomplish. So you think you’ll grab a coffee at Blue Monday and then browse around at the library. But as you are coming out of Blue Monday, coffee and croissant delicately balanced in your hands, you see a friend sitting at a tiny red table in the outside sitting area. Their laptop computer is out right in front of them, their foot is up lounging on the other chair at the table, and they have those little white headphones in their ears. Everything about their posture says, “Do not disturb.” But they notice you! Wave warmly, while pulling out an earbud, in order to engage in some small chit-chat. You think for a moment you might sit down, but your friend doesn’t move their foot nor invite you to sit, and eventually the catching up goes quiet with the obvious social cue that it’s time for your friend to get back to work, or whatever. And so, you with them a good day, and you leave.
That’s encounter one.
Now, rewind time, and imagine that the same scenario, you are coming out of Blue Monday – coffee and croissant in hand – only this time you see two friends sitting at the tiny table. Your heart lurches forward for a moment at the thought of joining them, but then you wonder if this is more of a one-on-one, private conversation. When they see you, they smile and waves big waves. You give them the, “Should-I-come-over?” look, and they glance at each other just long enough to have an entire conversation with just their eyes, and then one says, “Yeah, um…sure, yeah, come over. Join us,” as they awkwardly pull up a chair to their table. So, you sit down. You start asking general questions like, “How are you?”, “What are you up to today?”, and it’s all fine and good, except there are enough “ummms” and “uhhhhs” in their responses that it’s clear you’ve unintentionally interrupted something. There’s no doubt about it – you’re the third wheel. So, in your mind, you commit to enjoy just a few more minutes with them, before casually coming up with an excuse to leave, so they can carry on with whatever they were talking about. A few minutes pass, you lie and say you are meeting someone at the library, and off you go.
That’s encounter two.
Finally, rewind the clock one more time, it’s the same scenario –you’re coming out of Blue Monday – coffee, croissant, you know the drill – and just as you step out onto the side walk, you hear someone call your name. You turn – and there in the corner of the sitting area are three friends, crowded around two tiny tables, and with one empty chair and perhaps, a place at the table, just for you. With smiles and large gestures, they lure you over to them. When you ask if you can join them, they say, “Yes, of course! When we saw you go in for your coffee, we pulled this table and these chairs over hoping you’d join us.” So, you set your stuff down and grab the chair. Your shoulders relax, as you sit down, and are folded into the conversation at hand as if you’d been there all along. As you settle in, you remember – there’s nowhere else you need to be.
That’s encounter three.
I imagine we all have had encounters similar to all three types before. And despite my slightly biased story-telling, there is nothing wrong with any of these scenarios. Each one is part of life. Take scenario one – sometimes people want to be alone. They’ve got work to do. It’s not personal. Or take scenario two – sometimes people want or need more of a one-on-one conversation with a friend and barging or even stumbling into it can be an unwanted intrusion.
There’s nothing wrong with these situations. It’s just that of these three encounters – only one conveys the very heart of God and an experience of the Holy Trinity.
Can you guess which one?
If you guessed encounter number 3, you win an extra crumb of bread at communion.
Today is Holy Trinity Sunday. It’s always the first Sunday after Pentecost. On any other church day, you will likely hear Trinity statements like, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” And on any other church Sunday, we might even sing, “God in three persons, blessed Trinity.” But on this day, Holy Trinity Sunday, today is when we take a liturgical Halftime break to catch our breath and say, “Huh? Wait. Hang on. So, what now? God in three persons? What’s that all about again?”
At it’s most basic (and complex) our Christian belief and confession of faith in the Triune God proclaims that God is three persons in one being – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit…all as One God. Or Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer. Or Lover, Beloved, and Love itself. God is three in one, one in three, we say. It’s not supposed to make sense. It’s not supposed make a nice explainable equation – despite our best hopes, we are not smarter and wiser than ancient Christians from long ago, who proclaimed this stuff.
It’s not supposed to make sense. But belief that God is Triune – that God is Three but also One but also Three is supposed to make us wonder. And sink deep into the mystery of it all.
For many, the most meaningful and understandable way of contemplating this mystery of God as three but also one, is to say that God is – at the very heart of it all – relationship. God is so committed to relationship, to being with God’s creation, that within God’s very own being is relationship – three persons. The relationship of the Father to the Son, the Son to the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit to the Father, and their relationship together. God is so committed to community that God is a community within God’s own self. A community of three person who share in each other’s life together – giving and receiving love from one another. What theologians call a mutual indwelling and participation in each other’s life. It’s the divine way. Therefore, to say we believe in a Triune God isn’t to say that God values relationship and thinks it’s really important in life. It is to say, God in God’s very essence, at the foundational level is relationship. It is “God being with God; it is the essence of God being with us in Christ; and it is the fulfillment of the Spirit’s work in our being with one another.”[1]
While God as relationship is the most meaningful and moving understanding of the Trinity to me, I admit – relationship wasn’t the most interesting and intriguing part of the Trinity for me this week. What struck me was simply the number – Three.
Why is God three persons in one being? Why not….two? That can still be about relationship? Why not four persons? That would really highlight God as relationship and community? But why is God three? An odd number – why not even? Even numbers are so much easier and balanced. They make everything flow.
I’m a soccer coach for my son, Henry’s team. On the first day of practice – I had 8 players on the team. Perfect. 4 verses 4 for scrimmages. Four sets of pairs for passing drills. Easy. But on my second day – lo, and behold, another kid signed up. Now we have 9. Nine! It messed up all my plans. We felt out of balance – incomplete…how do I work with an odd number of players? But here’s the thing – what I first assumed was a deficit and a problem to my well-laid coaching plans turned out to be an asset and an answer to a problem I didn’t know I had. Suddenly, with 9 players, an odd number – I had to rethink everything. I had to keep rotating them around. Switching out who their passing partner was, and which teammates they would play with on the field, so that everyone got a turn. And as it turns out, we are more a community in relationship as a team of 9, as an odd number, than we ever were (or would be) as a team of 8.
I think it matters that God is an odd number of persons.
A number of years ago, at seminary, I’ll never forget what a staff person with whom I worked and who was a couple of decades older than me said one day. She said – “You know, as a single person, I always notice the number of chairs around someone’s dining table. If it’s an odd number of chairs – I know that if I am ever invited over, I will fit in and belong here. I know that my presence won’t bring with it a sense of lack, as one chair sits awkwardly empty, or I know that my presence won’t bring burden, as all the other chairs are filled with couples, but an extra non-matching chair needs to be brought up from the basement just for me. An odd number of chairs at the table tells me they are ready for anything. Ready for any kind of configuration of a group. I know they have made room for me.“
Why is God an odd number, I wondered. Why three in one? Why not two-in-one? Why not four? Why an odd number?
I think it matters that God is an odd number. Because somehow, an odd number has a way of always leaving room for more. An odd number makes us stop and reconsider our preconceived plans and to see if it works for everyone. An even number says, “We’re complete, thank you very much. Nothing needed over here, no more room.” An odd number says, “We have to learn how to dance with each other, how to listen and share, and work together and make room for each other in ways we hadn’t imagined. Which means, we can learn to dance with you too. Come on in. Look, there’s room over here.”
God as Trinity – God as Three in One – is quite literally an odd bunch of persons that make room for each other and room for more, out of self-giving love.
As a result – and despite many of our assumptions, I’m guessing – the Holy Trinity is not a hierarchy – with the Father having authority over the Son, and the Son having authority over the Spirit and the Spirit having authority over us. The Trinity is a circle of shared self-giving love. An all-relational, all-vulnerable God, more interested in dependent living with others, instead of independent living away from others. But the thing about the relationship within God, between the persons of the Trinity, is that they are not threatened by making room for more. The persons of the Trinity are so intertwined in their shared life, that to invite others in will not put their connection at risk. There is not a sense of scarcity – that there is only so much relationship to go around – but rather a sense of abundance…that we are more fully ourselves when wrapped up with our beloved creation.
That’s what we experienced in encounter number 3 just a few minutes ago. Stepping out of the coffee shop, we were called by name by an odd bunch of friends, who had – before we even knew they were there – moved over and pulled up a chair with our name on it. They are not a click who see scarcity in our presence, but a circle of friends with room to spare who saw in us abundance.
That’s God as Trinity – an odd bunch with so much love shared between them that they want nothing more than to make room for others and invite them in. A Divine Dance, as some theologians have called it, where there is a flow of relationship, a mutual dwelling in, and shared need for each other.
Speaking of dances, the High School just had its traditional prom dance a few weeks ago. And I can remember, from 20 years ago, all the social anxiety and stress prom had a way of creating and bringing out in people. Who would you ask to prom? How would you ask them to prom? Would someone ask you? What if no one did? Would you still go – alone?
I’m confident that all of that still exists today. But at the same time, I – along with others – have been noticing a growing trend when it comes to Prom and other high school dances. More often than not, when I ask a high schooler if they are going to prom, they say, “Yeah, my friends and I. We’re going as a group.”
And as best as I can tell, it is an effort to remove barriers and social limits on who can come to the dance. Rather than segregating and cutting themselves off from each other – between those with dates and those without – it’s an odd bunch of friends, whose shared love for each other makes room and leaves no one behind, so that all may dance.
That, my friends, is what the Triune God is like. God is like a cluster of friends going to a dance together– committed to each other, leaving no one out or abandoned. When God considering how to be in the world, God looked at God’s options and finally said, “We’re going as a group.”
Words will always fail us on Trinity Sunday. In the end, no image or metaphor can fully express God as three in one. But you are invited to sink into the mystery. If you heard nothing else this morning, hear this: The Holy Trinity, the Triune God is, by God’s very nature, an odd community that freely and joyfully moves over, making space for others – for you – out of self-giving love.
That’s our Triune God. God as community, God as friendship, God as dance. Within God’s very self. And with us.
As one’s made in that image of God, and members of God’s beloved creation, we are drawn into that encircled life of God. We too are folded into the life and loving-joy of the Trinity, as participants. Part of the team, with a chair at the crowded table, and an invitation to the dance.
Amen.
[1] Sam Wells, The Nazareth Manifesto, pg. 15.
Untying the Cerebral Knot 