That Which We Do Not Know, Knows Us!

That Which We Do Not Know, Knows Us

That’s it. Every year clergy all over the Church and World do one of two things: Find a substitute preacher for Trinity Sunday, or, scour our bookshelves and the internet for some new angle on preaching about the Trinity – God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Scouring the internet was extremely disappointing as there are so many bad websites with perfectly horrible information beginning with assertions that the idea of the Trinity is Biblical despite it never being mentioned once in the entire Bible. Oooops! So, after a lifetime in the church, seminary, being ordained since 1983 and preaching any number of sermons on Trinity Sunday, none of which I looked up this time around, this is the best I can ever come up with: That which we do not know, knows us.

All the theology and metaphors and images of the Holy One, or perhaps Holy Oneness is better, of all the religious writings of all the world’s and history’s religions, the truth of the matter is that that Holy Oneness that knows us better than we know ourselves transcends all that can be said – that Holy Oneness loves all of creation, every atom, every planet, every star, every creature and wants to be known by us and by all. All. All is all. We get glances. The stories, myths, poems and doctrines catch glimpses and sparks, and yet…and yet.

The Holy Oneness that knows us and loves us is not a doctrine, not a myth, not even a truth, as much as we would like to say it is any one of those. We sometimes say Salvation came to us as a person. Those who knew him in life, in death and his resurrected presence never heard of anything like the word “Trinity.” It would be several hundred years later when yet another tin-horn dictator, emperor or whatever you want to call him demanded a definition of the Christian God. Once again, Hubris disguised as leadership! The solution did in fact not end at Nicaea in 325, but rather was amended in 381 in Constantinople and is therefore officially called The Nicaean-Constantinopolitan Creed – we’re just too overwhelmed or too lazy to say all of that every Sunday so we shorten it – just as we always end up shortening whatever it means to experience and describe the Holy Oneness whenever we glimpse it, usually in the most unlikely places at the most inconvenient times. Sometimes there just are no words.

I’ve struggled with the Trinity since I was fourteen. After two years of Confirmation Classes I was asked to sign a copy of the Creed we call Nicaean. I hesitated, and raised some questions about my discomfort at doing so: it sounded rather exclusive to me then, and struck me as somehow not really getting to the heart of it. And how could it? It was conceived to refute several ‘heresies’ of the time. That is, it is negative theology really saying that whatever others had to say about the Holy Oneness does not count. I was told, “Look, just sign it because we already have a Bible with your name engraved in gold on the cover to give you in front of your parents and the whole congregation.” I signed it. I regretted that for years after and even contemplated calling the church to pull it from the files so I could burn it.

Over time I came to some peace with aspects of this Creed and what it tries to express – which is really more about being in relationship with the Holy Oneness in a variety of ways, and three in particular which can, with some exegetical skill and gymnastics, be construed from a few Biblical texts. For instance the third word of the Bible in Hebrew is “Elohim” – as in, “In the beginning God/Elohim created the heavens and the earth….while a wind/breath/spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters.” Elohim, the word for God, is plural. Once again it is plural in verse 26 when the Holy Oneness says, ‘Let us make man in our image .. so God created them male and female in his image.’  There is something inherently communal about the Holy Oneness, a part of which is mentioned in verse 2 as the “ruach” of God: the wind, breath or Spirit of God. If the Holy Oneness is a community, then we are created to be in community with others. All others.

Interestingly, hundreds, perhaps a thousand years later, the Fourth Gospel quotes Genesis 1 and tells us that “In the beginning was the Word,” a logos. Later this Word is identified as Jesus Son of God who comes to dwell among us – again in community. This Jesus or logos or Word was there before “in the beginning,” and all that was created and continues to be created comes through this Word who has a “like father like son” resemblance to the Holy Oneness that creates all that there is, “seen and unseen,” or “visible and invisible.”

This opening salvo of the Creed curiously lands us in the realm of that other discipline of human meaning, science. Over the last one hundred years or so scientists have learned a few things about the heavens and the earth, and what we call the entire universe. Edwin Hubble, for whom the telescope is named, made a startling discovery: there are galaxies other than our own, and the universe is still expanding. This led the Belgian priest and scientist Georges Lemaitre to assert that the universe must have had a starting point. Which in turn led George Gamow in 1949 to formulate the Big Bang as that starting point, still a working theory that has been modified along the way. A woman, Wendy Freedman and her team of astrophysicists in 1998 concluded the Bang that banged happened roughly 13.7 Billion years ago. And beginning around 2003 or so, thanks to the telescope named Hubbel and other technology, an energy that cannot be seen has been detected that is expanding the universe, and gravitational forces that hold galaxies together that also cannot be seen: for lack of better terms, Dark Energy and Dark Matter respectively. Dark Energy is estimated to make up some 70% of the known universe, and Dark Matter makes up some 25%, leaving the kinds of matter from rocks, planets and stars, to atoms, electrons, quarks, gluons and the rest making up a mere 5% of the known universe. What we can see, touch, detect and measure is only five-percent of it all.

Which means that those clerics back in 325 and 381 seemed to have gotten it right: whatever you want to call the Bang that Banged, for our purposes the Holy Oneness, created everything seen and unseen, visible and invisible – and the unseen-invisible dimensions of creation make up 95% of it all. All. The parts we cannot see hold things together and at the same time stretch everything apart into further creativity. Some call this “mystery.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the most important theological minds of the 20^th Century calls it amazing and that all of this ought to call us to Radical Amazement. According to Judy Cannato in her book of the same name writes about, “Heschel, who said that wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of a religious attitude toward life and the proper response to our experience of the divine. The insights that connect us to the Holy One come ‘not on the level of discursive thinking, but on the level of wonder and radical amazement, in the depth of awe, in our sensitivity to the mystery, in our awareness of the ineffable.’ Living in radical amazement brings us into the space in which ‘great things happen to the soul.’” [Cannato p10]

I now embrace the Creed as a call to Radical Amazement! This Radical Amazement means to call us into relationship with the Holy Oneness who banged the bang! Which is dimension of the Holy Oneness I can fully embrace, and makes me happy I never retrieved my copy of the Creed with my signature to burn, because I am constantly radically amazed at what life, death, resurrection, relationships and most of all the eternal drive toward Love offers us.

It ought to be acknowledged that those Creedsters did not really talk of God as three persons, but rather as having three “personas.” A persona, in the Greek that some of the Creedsters were speaking back in Nicaea and Constantinople, is an evident characteristic of someone, or the role an actor plays in a drama on a stage. Back then one actor could play several ‘personas’ by changing masks. When Harper and Kirk Alan Jr were young, I had make masks for Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Their interpretations of these personas were themselves radically amazing! The Son was pictured as the Sun wearing sunglasses, so bright is the light of Christ’s Love! And recalling that on Pentecost, just a week ago, the arrival of the Spirit included fire, that mask looks perhaps a little more like the guy pictured down-under, and yet still captures the hearts set on fire that day in Jerusalem that sent many people on their way to spread the Word, the Logos – the News that the Holy Oneness wants to become our companion in this journey we call Life!

Really, we all have multiple personas, which is one way that we are made in the image of God who is Elohim. I’m a man, a son, a father, a husband, a priest, a drummer and on it goes. We all are made in the image of the diversity of all the creation that the Holy Oneness set in motion billions of years ago and which continues to expand and come together to this day, to infinity and beyond! We are each of us embody this radical amazement which is built into our DNA and the delicate intricacies of our bodies and minds.

Trinity is a day for all creation to rejoice that there is not a sameness to everything or everyone. That life and reality are not static, but dynamic and still changing. That there is some of the Holy Oneness in us all if we will only take the time to be aware of that. And that the Holy Oneness wants nothing more than to Love all of creation, all creatures, you and me, and for us all to Love the Holy Oneness in return. We do that by continuing to change with the universe on one hand, and to allow ourselves to be brought closer to the Holy Oneness and one another in the Love with which set all this in motion.

One last thing to think about: my friend and companion in the way, Richard Chiroff, M.D., near the end of his life believed with all his heart and mind and soul that the Dark Energy that keeps the universe and all therein expanding is the Holy Spirit. Works for me. I know the Holy Spirit keeps expanding me in ways I never could have imagined. I would not be here right now without it! How about you?

In the end, it all comes down to this: That which we do not know, knows us! Let’s find ways to make time in our all too busy lives to know the Holy Oneness however it chooses to reveal and disclose itself to us!