TRINITY SUNDAY

June 12, 2022

Christ Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

 

The Trinity is the central doctrine of the Christian faith. Before we can begin to make sense of it, however, we need a clear understanding of the role that dogmas and doctrines themselves play in the Christian life. A key point is that doctrines aren’t what need to be explained—because they are the explanation. The late Fr. Homer Rogers of Dallas, Texas, made this point at the beginning of his course of adult confirmation class lectures:

“Let me say by way of preface that I am not here to ‘explain’ Christianity, for that isn’t the problem. A person coming to this planet from Mars and landing among us wouldn’t ask, ‘Why do you believe in the Trinity?’ or ‘What do you mean by transubstantiation?’ He would ask, ‘Why do the good die young? Why is there many a slip twixt the cup and the lip? Why do the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley? Why is it that the best puppy in the litter is the one that gets run over? Why does a man’s reach exceed his grasp? Why is there so much pain, sorrow, grief, misery, and ugliness in human life and human society? Why is everybody homesick, even when he’s at home? …’

 

“Let me carry the matter a bit further. Why should there be people on earth in the first place? Or, for that matter, why should there be an earth? Why should there be anything? These are the things that need explaining. The Christian religion seeks to explain them. Sooner or later you will make up your mind, if you haven’t already, that the Christian religion is true or false, not in terms of how persuasively I explain to you the doctrine of the Trinity, and not even in terms of whether or not the Christian religion makes sense, but whether or not the Christian religion can answer any of these questions.”

So, what we’re likely to find most helpful is not any explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity itself but a prior understanding of the questions it answers, the problems it solves, the contradictions it reconciles, the confusions it clears up. For again, the doctrine is not what requires explaining because it is itself the explanation.

 

In his book Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis suggests that as the first Christians reflected on their new relationship with God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, they gradually formulated the doctrine of the Trinity as the only way of giving a comprehensive and coherent account of their religious experience. He writes this:

 

“People already knew about God in a vague way. Then came a man who claimed to be God; and yet He was not the sort of man you could dismiss as a lunatic. He made them believe Him. They met Him again after they had seen Him killed. And then, after they had been formed into a little society or community, they found God somehow inside them as well: directing them, making them able to do things they could not do before. And when they worked it all out they found that they had arrived at the Christian definition of the three-personal God.”

But there’s more. Doctrines provide not only an explanation but also a kind of roadmap. A bit earlier in the same book, Lewis describes an encounter with hard bitten old RAF Officer who stood up after one of his lectures on Christian doctrine and declared, “I’ve no use for all that stuff. But, mind you, I’m a religious man too. I know there’s a God. I’ve felt him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that’s just why I don’t believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about him. To anyone who’s met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!”

 

Lewis immediately agrees. That RAF man probably had a real encounter with God out in the desert. When he turned from his experience to the Christian creeds, he was turning from something real to something less real. In the same way, if we look at the Atlantic Ocean from the beach and then turn to a map of the Atlantic, we are turning from something real to something less real: from real waves, wind, surf, and sand to a sheet of colored paper. 

But, says Lewis, the map pieces together the cumulative experience of thousands of people who’ve actually sailed the Atlantic. Only, while our view from the beach affords but a single glimpse, the map fits all those partial perspectives together into a comprehensive whole. And, if we want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. Walking on the beach is much more satisfying than looking at a map. But the map is much more use if we want to sail from England to America.

 

So, Christian doctrines are like maps. They fall far short of the reality they describe. Merely learning a doctrine is like reading a map without going anywhere. But once we do embark upon the voyage of the Christian life, the map becomes indispensable. We don’t get anywhere by looking at maps without going out to sea. But neither are we safe if we go to sea without a map—and an accurate and reliable map at that.

Lewis goes on to relate the Trinity to the life of Christian prayer. He writes: 

 

“An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers.  He is trying to get in touch with God. But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so to speak, inside him. But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God—that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening: God is the thing to which he is praying, the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing which is pushing him on, the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. So that the whole threefold life of that three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers.”

If we regard the doctrine of the Trinity merely as an intellectual puzzle to be solved, we won’t make any real progress in understanding it. But as we grow in the Christian life, cultivating our relationship with God the Father through our union with Christ, stirring up the Holy Spirit’s gifts within us, the doctrine will more and more make sense as the only adequate guide to the vast ocean of reality on which we’ve set sail. 

 

Today’s celebration lays before us an invitation: not merely to understand the Trinity conceptually, but to enter a living relationship with the triune God towards whom the doctrine points. In that way, we participate in the eternal mystery of God’s own life as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; and his life becomes our life as well.