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Holy, holy, holy, Lord God the Almighty,
which was, and which is, and which is to come.
Revelation 4:8

I used to dread having to preach on the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity, because I feared that people would expect me to provide the solution to a mathematical problem, and I was never any good at mathematics.  How can three be one and one be three?  How can there be three persons in one God, and one God in three persons? 
            When he evangelized Ireland, St. Patrick used the shamrock to illustrate the Trinity to his prospective converts.  But the Trinity really has nothing to do with mathematics.  The doctrine of the Trinity is the expression of religious experience--first of all, the experience of Israel’s God, who is also our God. 
            This God Jesus called “Abba” (Mark 14:36). the Aramaic word for “Father,” and he taught us to call God “Father:” “When you pray, say ‘Father’” (Luke 11:2).  If God is Jesus’ Father, then Jesus is God’s Son.  The disciples experienced God at work in Jesus’ ministry: in his preaching, his miracles, and his exorcisms.  Jesus himself declared, “If, by the finger of God, I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Luke 11:20). 
            Christians experience Jesus’ death on the cross as the supreme act of the love of God, who handed over his beloved Son for the redemption of the world (Romans 8:32). 
            Finally, Jesus’ disciples experienced the spirit of God, which they received at Pentecost, as the spirit of Jesus, the spirit which the risen Lord had sent to them to be, in the words of John’s gospel, “another Comforter” (14:16).  The New Testament scarcely distinguishes between the holy spirit and the exalted Christ.  In one place Paul says straight out, “The Lord is the Spirit”  (2 Corinthians 3:17)
            The holy Trinity is therefore not some mathematical puzzle but a summary of Christian religious experience.  This experience did not cease with the formulation of the doctrine, and one of the things we have come to recognize in our contemporary experience is the importance of the feminine, which is often overlooked by male theologians.
            The Trinity itself raises some questions in this regard.  There is the Father, and there is the Son, but where is the Mother?  In Hebrew and other Semitic languages “spirit” is feminine, and in Syrian Christianity the Spirit is understood to be the Mother of Jesus.  But in Latin “spirit” is masculine, and in Greek it is neuter. 
            Some have wanted to remove sex altogether from the Trinity and to replace Father, Son, and holy Spirit with Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.  I am conservative in liturgical matters, and I see no gain in suppressing a formulation which has been part of our religious practice for the entire history of the Christian church.
            Moreover, the solution to the dominance of male imagery is not, I believe, the suppression of sexual references or their replacement by abstractions.  Rather, we must balance the male imagery of the Bible with the female imagery, which is actually present in scripture, if only we have the eyes to see it. 
            Before his passion Jesus laments the fate of Jerusalem, comparing himself to a mother hen who seeks to gather her chicks under her wings (Luke 13:34).  Paul reminds the Thessalonians, “we were gentle among you, like a nurse taking care of her children” (1 Thessalonians 2:7).  Mary, the mother of Jesus, could bring the grace of the feminine to us Protestants, as she has always done to Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians. 
            The mystery of God is beyond anything we can imagine or express, so while we continue to use the traditional formulations, let us seek to find in our own experience ever new ways to praise “The Lord God Almighty, which was, and which is, and which is to come.”

June 3, 2007

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