The Divine Universe

A sermon for Trinity Sunday.

During the last six months we have celebrated the birth, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ and the coming of the Holy Spirit. Today is Trinity Sunday, so fasten your mental safety belts and ensure your seats are in the upright position because we’re scheduled to take off into the dizzy realms of abstract theology. The Trinity image of two men and a bird is, of course, metaphorical; the doctrine of the Trinity is an intellectual abstraction.

We like to see things in threes. In many mystic traditions three is an especially holy number. If asked for a definition including absolutely everything we would perhaps say, first, the natural or material world, second, the supernatural or spiritual world, and third, God. Many people believe in that trio without recognising its unity. They see it as a three things, not a trinity. We seem scared of the idea that there is a single unity of total being. Splitting something up into its component parts makes it easier to understand, whether we are talking about motorbikes or the universe, or God; but if you don’t put it together again it won’t work.

Often we just split things in two. It’s called dualism. God and creation is the ultimate dualism. Creation is a thing God put together. God is an entity out there, beyond the sky. That is our favourite dualism, but the doctrine of the Holy Trinity abolishes that.

The Holy Trinity was not invented to take God apart for analysis; it was invented to unite God with everything, the ultimate unity, the union of God and creation. For us Christians the key to this ultimate atonement (at-one-ment) is Jesus Christ

St Paul realised this. He wrote to the Colossians that everything is in Christ: not just Jesus, not even just the Church, but everything that exists. St John later said the same thing but differently, calling Christ the Logos, the Word, the utterance of God. “All things came into being through him,” he wrote, “And without him not one thing came into being.” And he, the Word, the utterance of God, is not something God made or did; it is God. The Word is the manifestation of God’s mind.

At this point we should note that ‘things’ did not just come into being, full stop. Every thing has a limited lifespan, including human beings. So creation, the “all things” that Paul and John refer to is not an inert collection of things; it is a process, an ongoing event, with things appearing and disappearing all the time. That is why we distinguish God from things. God is not a thing, an entity or even a person. God is eternal, not temporary. We distinguish between God and things, but we must not separate them. Every single thing is in God. There is no ‘outside’ of God; God doesn’t have a ‘skin’.

The Creed says we believe in one God, the Father, yet both the Son and the Spirit are equally God: not a trio but a trinity. People speak of the ‘incarnation’, the embodiment of God. Although some people still think that the incarnation just means Jesus, Paul soon realised it didn’t end there.

Jesus said, “In as much as you do it to the least, you do it to me.” He was referring primarily to other people, but we are now realising that we cannot separate humankind from everything else. We are part of a global organism, the biosphere, which spreads over the whole planet, and this emerged from the geosphere, the earth and sea. We have begun to speak of respect for the environment, both biological and geological, and to realise that what we do to our environment we do to ourselves and to God. Today Homo sapiens and many other species are at risk because we have failed to see our organic unity with the world around us. If we wound it, we wound ourselves. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity has very practical implications and important links to science.

Jesus also said, “I am the vine and you are the branches.” One of the most learned theologians of our time, Pope Benedict XVI, observes in a book just published that the vine is not just something God made or planted: if Jesus is God, then the vine is God. God dwells in us and in everything. The universe is not something God built in his workshop; God gives birth to it in a continuous act of procreation, it is his offspring, one flesh.

But we can’t stop there. The materialization of God, the cosmic Christ, is not all that God is. Humankind seems from the dawn of our higher consciousness to have been aware that the world is not only what the senses can perceive, the world of matter. Theoretical physicists are now talking about fields of energy beyond gravity, electromagnetism and two atomic ones, the four they’ve studied. And there may be many more than four dimensions. They recognise that reality extends beyond the observable and measurable, and they are exploring that discovery.

We know God through his embodied presence, but we also sense that there is a source of knowledge beyond the reach of our senses. Theologian, John Taylor, has called it the “Go-Between God”, the communicator of love, knowledge and understanding. Jews and Christians have called it the Holy Spirit, the spirit of love, the energy of creation. But the Holy Spirit is not all that God is any more than Christ is. It is the one Jesus called “Father” who is the whole of God. The 12th century German mystic, Meister Eckhart, said it beautifully: “God is everything, but everything is not God.”

If you feel a bit confused, wrestling with these abstractions of systematic theology, don’t switch off. I am deliberately trying to melt your ideas about God. I don’t want to leave you confused, but with a deep sense of awe, living within an ineffable mystery that cannot be analyzed or defined because we are inside it, part of it.

Though God cannot be analyzed or defined, we have seen that he can be partially known through his embodied presence in everything around us. But he seems to look so un-godlike – so ordinary, sometimes even scandalous. But if you want to know how God can be ordinary and scandalous, read the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth and death.

And God can also be known by simply spending time in the shade of the cloud of unknowing, waiting for him to take the initiative and open the conversation. And you may need to be very patient.