Church of the Incarnation

All across the globe today, in pulpits of every shape and size assistant clergy and visiting priests are preparing to preach. Every priest in a position to do so has found someone else to take on the unenviable task of preaching on the Trinity.

The bottom line is this: the Trinity is a mystery. In ways we can never fully comprehend, God is one substance and yet also three forms. I can't explain how that is. And I'm not sure it much matters how that happens. I'm more interested in examining why God would choose to reveal God's self in three ways.

Let's look first at today's reading from Isaiah. Before God called him to be a prophet, Isaiah was a priest in the temple. So he knew God well, had had visions of God before, and frequently spoke with God. Because he spent so much time in the temple, he had become accustomed to handling sacred vessels and caring for holy articles. They surely held less awe for him than they once did. And yet God appeared to Isaiah in a way that awed even the complacent priest. God was enormous, the hem of his robe filling the entire temple. And he was attended by winged seraphs who worshipped him even as they hid from his majesty. The seraphs' song proclaimed that God was God of the whole earth - the one true and all-powerful God. Isaiah encountered what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins calls "God's Grandeur," that awe-inspiring, massive, blinding magnificence that's absent in mere humans. Isaiah encountered God in a form that would bring him to his knees and inspire him to leave the relative security of the priesthood for the nomadic, persecuted life of a prophet.

Nicodemus, in today's gospel reading, was an important leader of the Pharisees. He was a man of power and prestige, and he was a man who wasn't free to have an experience of the holy that didn't conform to Pharisaic expectations without risking his own life and the safety of his family. Nicodemus, like the other Pharisees, believed that he knew all there was to know about God. But he'd been watching Jesus from a distance, and he'd seen in Jesus the presence of God in a way he couldn't explain. He'd seen God working through Jesus not merely by guiding his decisions, the way God did with the Kings of Israel. And he'd seen God working through Jesus not merely by giving him the words, the way God did with the ancient prophets. So in the dark of the night, Nicodemus came slinking through the dim alleyways to have an intimate conversation with the personal form of God, "God with skin on," God who can explain himself and look Nicodemus in the eyes when he talks.

Throughout the Bible, people's encounters with God are as varied as the people themselves. Moses encountered the awe-some and yet unrelenting, wholly other God in the spectacle of the burning bush and the fire atop Mount Sinai. Elijah encountered the Spirit not in the great wind, not in the earthquake, and not in the fire. Rather, Elijah encountered God in the sound of sheer silence that enveloped the mountain afterwards. Peter encountered Jesus in his fishing boat, casting the nets on the other side for a miraculous catch of fish.

God's great desire is to be with us, to be close to us. The only barrier to that is us - our blindness to God. I believe that the Trinity is God's attempt to reach us. I believe that the one God assumes three persons not because God needs it, but because we do. One expression of God won't reach all of us - one expression may not even reach one of us all the time. So God, in yet another act of divine humility, is three in order to reach us more completely.

I just finished reading The Shack, William Paul Young's New York Times Bestseller. In it we meet Mack, a devoted father. Mack was on a camping trip with his three children when two of them overturned their canoe. Mack managed to extricate them both from the lake and turned around to discover his five-year-old girl had disappeared. Much searching finally revealed that she had been abducted. The trail led to an abandoned shack far out in the woods where they found a puddle of the little girl's blood and nothing more. Mack was so overwhelmed by grief and guilt and anger that he closed himself off: from his wife and children, from his friends, and from God.

Then one day he received what he was sure was a note from God inviting him to the shack for the weekend. So Mack retraced the painful steps that had once dashed his hopes of finding his daughter alive, dashed his hopes of finding the world a kind place, dashed his hopes of finding a loving God in charge of it all.

As Mack reached the porch of the shack, he heard voices inside, and he knew he was about to meet God. As he hesitated at the door, unsure of the rules of etiquette for such a meeting, the door flew open and there was God,

a large, beaming African-American woman.  
Instinctively he jumped back, but he was too slow.  
With a speed that belied her size, she crossed 
the distance between them and engulfed him in her arms, 
lifting him clear off his feet and spinning him around 
like a little child.  And all the while she was shouting his name... 
with the ardor of someone seeing a long-lost and deeply loved relative.  
She finally set him back on Earth and, with her hands on his shoulders, 
pushed him back as if to get a good look at him.  'Mack, look at you!' 
she fairly exploded. 'Here you are, and so grown up.  
I have really been looking forward to seeing you face-to-face.  
It is so wonderful to have you here with us.  
My, my, my, how I do love you!'  
And with that she wrapped herself around him again.  
Mack was speechless.  In a few seconds this woman had 
breached pretty much every social propriety 
behind which he had so safely entrenched himself.  
But something in the way she looked at him and 
yelled his name made him equally delighted to see her. 1

Over the course of his visit to the shack, Mack lies under the stars with Jesus. He stands on a cliff with the Holy Spirit and is able to see the Spirit glowing in the people below in the valley. And he sits at table with the three - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - and shares a meal. Each one of the Trinity is able to touch a different part of Mack's hardened heart. And by the end of the visit, his hard heart has been softened.

I don't understand the Trinity. I can't explain to you how one God is three persons. But I know that the fact of the Trinity shows me again God's self-giving love for me. And I'm grateful that God is both almighty and all-loving, a strict judge and a loving papa, the force that created out of nothing and the creativity that painted stripes on the zebra. No matter what I'm going through, no matter how I'm feeling, God is there, reaching out to me to offer me exactly what I need, in humility and love. Thanks be to God.

Amen.

References:

1. William Paul Young, The Shack (Windblown Media: Newbury Park, California, 2007), 84-5.