The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
May 18, 2008

Trinity Sunday – A
Genesis 1:1--2:3
2 Corinthians 13:11-14
Matthew 28:16-20

Today is Trinity Sunday, God Sunday, as a friend of mine puts it, the only major feast day of the Church that celebrates a theological doctrine instead of a saint or an event.

Who is God? In the fourth century, St. Athanasius answered the question this way – that “whoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic faith.... And the Catholic faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost is all one, the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal.... The Father uncreate, the Son uncreate, and the Holy Ghost uncreate. The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible. The Father eternal, the Son eternal, and the Holy Ghost eternal....” And that’s only the beginning of the Athanasian Creed, which is probably the most complex of our creedal attempts to define God, an attempt that perhaps qualifies Athanasius as the first among theologians, as first, that is, among those who, some say, answer questions no one is asking.

But in the fourth century people were asking the question, ”Who is God?” Just as there are plenty of people asking the question today, among them those of us here this Trinity Sunday who are wondering who God is and what God means in our lives.

So let’s begin with what we know for certain. And what we know for certain, as St. Augustine, another fourth-century theologian, said, is that if we know it, then whatever it is, it is not God. That’s the only thing we can know for certain – that God, the Holy Trinity, is beyond our understanding, a mystery.

Augustine, it is said, was strolling on the beach one day, contemplating the mystery of the Trinity, when he came upon a small child who had dug a hole in the sand. The child kept going back and forth to the sea, scooping out a cupful of water at a time and pouring it into the hole. Augustine asked the child what he was doing. “I’m going to put the ocean into the hole on the beach,” said the child, “one cupful at a time.” Augustine told the child that he would never be able to drain the ocean that way, and the child replied that he would be able to drain the ocean before Augustine would be able to understand the Trinity, which may be why Augustine also said that when we Christians use the word “Trinity” to describe God “it is a little better than saying nothing when one has to say something.”

But God does give us glimpses of himself, and maybe this morning, as we face the mystery of the Holy Trinity with Athanasius and Augustine, it would be helpful to begin with two other, more ordinary questions: Where do we come from? and Where are we going? Most of us do wonder about these two questions, and when we do, then we are wondering about theological questions, questions appropriate for Trinity Sunday, God Sunday.

Dorothy Sayers wrote many a book, both fiction and theology, and in The Mind of the Maker Sayers offers an image of the Holy Trinity that is helpful, I think. Asking how God is three and yet only one, Sayers says, is like asking the author of any creative work, the author of a novel or a play or a poem, for example, how the whole of his novel or play or poem is related to its parts.

There are three distinct phases to the creative process, Sayers says. First, before a novel is written, it is conceived in the mind of the author; the author has the Creative Idea for the novel. Second, over a period of time, sometimes over a very long period of time, the author works to bring the novel into shape, writing and rewriting, arranging scenes and rearranging them, editing and re-editing. Finally, after the first two phases of creation are completed, after the writing is completed and the book is published, a third phase begins: the story is read by hundreds or thousands of people and, through the printed or spoken words, meaning is conveyed from the mind of the author to the minds and hearts of the readers or hearers.

And if you were to ask the author which of the three parts – the first, the original Creative Idea of the story; or the second, the Creative Energy the author spent in writing and editing it; or the third, the Creative Power or Meaning that moves from the printed page to the reader when the story is read – if one were to ask which phase is the “real book,” the author would be at a loss to say, because while each is a distinct part of the creation, all three together coexist to make the complete experience of the story.

“All three [parts] are one, each equally in itself the whole work, whereof none can exist without the other,” Sayers insists. The Creative Idea is nothing without the Creative Energy and the Creative Power or Meaning. The Creative Energy is nothing without the Creative Idea and the Creative Power or Meaning. The Creative Power or Meaning is nothing without the Creative Idea and Creative Energy.” This, Sayers says, is what the Holy Trinity is like.

When, in human history, we ask, “Where do we come from?” we first look to the Creative Idea, to God the Father, who, with his Word and Spirit brought the world into being in the beginning: “And God said, ‘Let there be light, and there was light’ And again God spoke the Word: ‘Let the waters under the heavens be gathered into one place, so that dry land may appear.’ And it was so. And again God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their various kinds and let us make human beings in our own image, after our likeness....’ And it was so.”

And then, in another Scriptural image, we say that God’s breath, God’s Spirit, was also there with God in the beginning, for the Spirit hovered over the chaos of the waters. And in still another image the Lord God shaped man from the dust of the earth, and breathed his Spirit into him, and man became a living creature. And so came to completion the first phase of Creation, as we came into being when the Word and the Spirit were there with God in the beginning, “eternally begotten of the Father,” as the Scriptures say and as we affirm in the Creed.

So when we ask, “Where do we come from?” we’re asking a question answered by the Bible and the Creed with an unambiguous theological response: We come from God, who had the Creative Idea of our existence in the beginning and who, through his Word and his Spirit, spoke and breathed us into being and gave us life.

But the moment of our creation in the beginning was not the end of us. The fact that we had come into being did not answer the question of what we would become. Our destiny still had to be worked out. For God created us in his own image, created us as free persons, but no sooner had we been created in the image and likeness of God, created us in freedom, than we began to act as if we were not created in the image and likeness of God. Adam and Eve, men and women, you and I, began to show a preference for life on our own terms. Adam ate the forbidden fruit and blamed it on Eve. And Eve blamed the serpent. And Cain, jealous that maybe God loved his brother Abel more than he loved Cain, killed his brother and then suggested that maybe God would agree that his brother wasn’t, after all, any concern of his.

And we remember how God grieved throughout this second phase of Creation as we lived our way through centuries of bondage to jealousy and deceit and murder and mayhem, only to find ourselves in even greater bondage as slaves in Egypt.

And we remember how God brought us out of Egypt, and how, on our way back to freedom, God sent his prophet Moses and gave us a plan to live by. We remember how Moses brought us God’s Ten Words, and how through these Ten Words God worked mightily to reshape us, to recreate us so that we might remember that creatures created in the image of God do not misuse the freedom they have to violate or kill other children of God, or to lie or steal or covet things that belong to others. For that is not the way Love lives, and our destiny is to live as God, who is Love, lives.

And we remember, of course, how, after Moses, we continued to prefer life in the image of gods other than the Lord of Love who created us, how we preferred life lived according to images other than the image of God, who is Love. So we created our own gods, gods like golden calves and other dead gods, gods like gold and sliver and boats and wardrobes, gods like nations and flags and careers and success and personal ambition and power, gods with no breath of life in them.

And we remember how, also after Moses, God continued to write and rewrite, to edit and reedit his Creation, how he sent us his Word again and again through the prophets to bring us back to life lived in his image. And we remember how, ”when the time had fully come,” the Word who was with God in the beginning became flesh, and dwelt among us, full of light and truth. And we remember how he lived and how he died, not for himself, but for us, because the Creative Idea of God at the beginning and of the Creative Energy of God in history both carry the image of Love, who reaches out of self to the other for the sake of the other, which is what the whole of Creation is all about. And we remember, finally, how on Calvary he said, “It is finished; the second phase of Creation is complete, here on the Cross,” which is where the Author of Life shows us in all clarity how God lives when God takes human form, and shows us how we were created to live. We remember Calvary, where God points us more clearly than ever before to our destiny, points us to where we are going when we live in God’s image, the image we were created in.

Do you know why Shakespeare couldn’t spell? It was because there was no dictionary in the sixteenth century, because words were alive and constantly changing, and it was only later that we produced the great dictionaries and began to try to capture and freeze and fix and standardize and absolutize the spelling and meanings of words, as if, in words and in life, what once was always has to be what it once was.

But despite our attempts to freeze life and reality into what we can absolutely know, it is a futile effort. It’s like trying to empty the ocean a cupful at a time, because life is not death. Unlike death, life is always changing and growing, because love, which is the most vivid glimpse we have of God, is always calling us not to the static state of death, but to life lived in his Creative Power or Meaning, always calling us to become as well as to be, by becoming all that he created us to be.

And so the Creative Idea of the Father and the Creative Energy of the Son are complete. “It is finished.” The first two phases of the story are done; the story is conceived and the book is published. Life is conceived, and the Word is not only written, but has lived and has died among us. But the Creative Power and Meaning of God is not finished, anymore than a novel is finished once it is conceived and written and published, because a creative story is conceived and written and published in order to be read or heard, in order for meaning to be conveyed to those who would be part of the story.

Just so, the Creation was not complete when the earth and human beings were brought into being. Nor was it altogether finished even when Jesus died on Calvary, because God is not finished. Because it is not in the nature of a living God to stand still. It is in the nature of Creative Love not just to BE, but to BECOME, to continue to convey love and meaning to those who have eyes to read and ears to hear.

So the Creative Power and Meaning, the Love, continues. As we read and hear the story, as God’s love is conveyed to us in our day, and as we appropriate the meaning of love in our own hearts and minds, we ask the question, “Where are we going?” And when we do, we ask once again the question of God, the same question of God that Athanasius and Augustine asked in the 4th century, the question about where God the Creative Power or Meaning is leading us, now.

Where do we come from? And where are we going? These are God questions. And everywhere around us, and most particularly in the Scriptures, God the Creative Father and God the Creative Son are whispering: “We came from the image of God and we are created to live in the image of God. In the beginning the Creative Idea of God conceived us and brought us into being, and in the second phase the Creative Energy of God points us toward the third, toward the meaning and destiny of those who live by his Spirit today.”

When we say God is “Holy Trinity,” what we mean is that the God whose love poured out of himself in the beginning to create us, and the God whose love has led him throughout history to reach out of himself to reshape and finish his creation, and the God whose love continues to lead him to reach out of himself toward us now to convey the meaning of the Cross in our own lives – when we say that God is “Holy Trinity” we mean that all three – the original Idea, the historical Energy, and the contemporary Meaning – are the same God.

Where did we come from? “In the beginning, God conceived us into being.”

Where are we going? “The moral arc of the universe is long,” as Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “but it bends toward justice.” And, I would add, it bends towards mercy, towards the Cross, where justice and mercy kiss, not only in Jesus, but also, potentially, in us.

Where did we come from and where are we going? The answer is the Holy Trinity. We came from God, our lives are the continuous work of God, and our destiny is God. So when, in order to communicate God’s Creative Idea from the beginning, his Creative Energy in history, and his Creative Power or Meaning unto all ages, we call God Holy Trinity, it is only because it is a little better than saying nothing when we have to say something.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.