Holy, Holy, Holy!

The Sacred Three

To save

To shield

To surround

The hearth

The house

The household

This eve

This night

O! this eve

This night

And every night

Each single night. Amen

This is a very old Celtic blessing from Scotland. Women would say this prayer as they banked their hearth fires for the night. The Celtic tradition had prayers for everything- going to bed, waking up, going to work, cleaning house, for children etc. etc. And all were in the name of the Trinity, the Three in One, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

For much of the history of Christianity, the Trinity has been more than an abstract doctrine. It has been a living aspect of the prayer and devotion of millions of Christians everywhere. But at various points in our history, we have become tangled up in trying to explain the Trinity, and we have wound up with an arcane philosophical doctrine that is separated from prayer and the sacramental life. Especially during the Enlightenment, theologians struggled to explain the Trinity in a rational and systematic way. But they didn't know what to do with the Holy Spirit, or the doctrine of the Trinity, because they are mysteries that cannot be entirely explained by reason. So, for several centuries, especially in Protestant circles, the Trinity faded in importance, even in the prayer lives of ordinary Christians.

The 20th century witnessed a revival of interest in the Trinity, as people began to realize the limitations of rationality, and the reality of divine mystery that lies beyond our power to explain.

So what about the Trinity? Where does that understanding of God come from and how do we relate to it today? The Bible doesn't specifically mention the Trinity or lay it out as a doctrine, but it is there implicitly. It flows naturally from our salvation story and from our experience of God. The doctrine of the Trinity is a shorthand way to express the whole Christian story-God created us, God redeemed us through Christ, God is making us a holy people through the Spirit. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.

The story that is compressed into the doctrine of the Trinity begins with creation.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, God is revealed as the creator of all that is. God spoke into the void and the world came into being-sun, moon, stars, and our own shining planet, filled with life. The more we explore the universe, the more awed we are by God's handiwork. The infinite reaches of space are filled with beauty and wonder beyond our wildest imaginings. And earth, our fragile island home, as one of our prayers puts it, is filled with a dizzying diversity of species that are constantly evolving and changing in an ongoing process of creation.

The Hebrew Scriptures also reveals God as One who specifically loves us. We are created in God's image, with the capacity to know and love God. We are created, some would say, with a God-shaped space in our hearts, that only God can fill. But loving God is our choice-we have free will. If it were not a matter of choice, it wouldn't truly be love.

The Hebrew Bible is the record of our relationship with God-sometimes we choose to love God, and sometimes we love our own way better. But God does not stop loving us. God remains involved with us at all times, in every stage of our lives. The central act of God's love recorded in the Hebrew Bible is the Exodus-when God heard the cries and saw the suffering of the Hebrews, enslaved by the Egyptians, and acted to liberate them and give them a new life.

God's love is also revealed in the writings of the prophets, who came to call people back to God when they had wandered away.

But the God who is Love was still not understood as Trinity until Jesus came into the world. People saw divinity in Christ and came to believe that he was God, come to save us from our self-destructive tendency to go our own way, rather than stay in relationship with God. The ultimate revelation of God's infinite love for us is Christ's willingness to live and die for us. Through Christ's resurrection, people realized that God's love is more powerful than our capacity for self-destruction and even more powerful than death.

Finally, when Christ returned to the God he called Father, his followers experienced God in yet another way-through the Holy Spirit. Somehow, though Jesus was gone, they still felt his power and presence. They still experienced God's unending love and the power of that love for healing, reconciliation, and transformation.

As the early Christians reflected on their threefold experience of God, they began to try to articulate it. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells his followers to go and make disciples of all nations, and baptize them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. And Paul ends the second letter to the Corinthians with "May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all." That threefold way of naming God became part of the prayer and worship of the earliest Christians. And, when they looked through the Hebrew Scriptures that they inherited from Judaism, they believed they saw evidence of this Trinitarian understanding of God. For instance, in the Isaiah passage for today, the seraphim worship God by saying "holy, holy, holy," which Christians believed was an acknowledgement of the three persons of the Trinity. In the same passage, God asks "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" which Christians also believed reflected God as both One and Three, because God uses both the singular and the plural subject form.

The doctrine was fully articulated in the 4th century at the Council of Nicaea, which was convened to combat a heresy that undermined the divinity of Christ, and therefore, his power to save us. That is why in the Nicene Creed, we say that Jesus is true God, of one Being with the Father. Since that time, the Trinity has been accepted as a cornerstone of Christianity, even when it receded into the background of scholarship and piety.

How do we relate to the Trinitarian understanding of God today? For some, the traditional language of Father, Son and Holy Spirit is a stumbling block, because it is largely masculine language and it seems to exclude other images of God. It is understandable to feel that way given the church's history with respect to women. But the Trinitarian formula, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, gathers up our experience of Christ, because it was Christ who called God Father, and related to him as a loving parent. For me, the Trinitarian way of speaking about God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is profound and precious, because it encapsulates our faith that 1. the same God who created us cares for us like a father (or equally, a mother), and 2. that God came into the world as Christ to save us, and 3. that God is actively at work in us as Spirit, transforming us and uniting us with God and each other.

God is ultimately a mystery, that no language can adequately express. The Trinity is not the only way of speaking about God-just one of many possible ways. There are many images of God in Scripture, and in our own prayers lives. For example, the psalm for today describes God as a mighty storm, full of thunder and flashing fire. Psalm 131 describes God as a mother holding her child to her breast. Ezekiel describes God as the sound of mighty waters, while I Kings speaks of God as the sound of sheer silence. In the Song of Solomon, God is pictured as a lover, delighting in the beloved. Jesus offers many beautiful and rich images of God, in himself, and in his parables and teachings. In my own prayers lately, God has seemed like a huge ocean or a waterfall.

God is love, and divine love reveals itself in countless ways, but the Blessed Trinity is a shorthand way of saying that we have set our hearts on Christ, and believe that God has acted to save us through Christ, in the power of the Spirit. In the words of one of my favorite hymns, Holy, holy, holy, merciful and mighty, God in Three Persons, Blessed Trinity!