ST MATTHEW-IN-THE-CITY
ANGLICAN CHURCH AUCKLAND NEW ZEALAND
Trinity: A Way of Communion
June 3, 2012
Glynn Cardy
Trinity Sunday
Video available on YouTube, Facebook
Last week I went to the stage show Godspell. Written in the 70s it sets the Gospel of Matthew to music. It debuts songs like“ Day by Day” and “Prepare ye the way of the Lord”. Produced by Dilworth, and including also girls from Diocesan, they integrated the humour and style of New Zealand’s multi-cultural environment.
Dilworth is a boarding school that only accepts boys from straightened familial circumstances. I mention this because as a parent of a cast member I attended the ‘thank you’ speeches following the finale. Jesus, also known as Hato, spoke last. He talked about the community – especially the community that the 'disciples' had built with each other. Without I suspect knowing it, Jesus concluded with an adaptation of a biblical verse: ‘I no longer call you friends, for we are now family’.
‘Family’ can be a loaded word, used to erect a fence around nuclear heterosexual norms and reject outsiders. Yet it also can be used in a way that breaks boundaries and includes outsiders. I can think of three instances of this latter sense. It was used by the Gay community in the 70s to express their solidarity in the face of persecution. It is used by the Maori community to encompass all relations and relationships – the good, the bad, and the beautiful. It was also used to describe the early Church.
The early Church was made up of people who didn’t fit into the normative understanding of family. Jesus had spoken against and flouted the rules of the patriarchal family, which was the dominant familial pattern. His movement attracted people who didn’t fit with patriarchy, or whom patriarchy had despised and rejected. So women who didn’t want to marry, or were abused in marriage, or widows… found the movement a safe place. Those who were considered ‘sexually suspect’, like eunuchs or prostitutes, also found a safe spiritual place. So too for slaves, disenfranchised younger sons, and rebels. To use the words of Dom Crossan, the early Church was a collection of ‘nuisances and nobodies’. They were a bunch of misfits, following the teachings of a misfit.
As the verse Hato alluded to infers, the early Church came to see themselves as more than just disciples following a master, but as friends. They came too in time to see themselves not just as friends, but as brothers and sisters in the same newly constituted ‘family’. But it was a radically different type of family.
In this family they would no longer have or need a patriarch to order them about and demand obedience. They now only had one parent, and that parent was God. They struggled to develop participatory leadership patterns to reflect that and, ultimately with the rise of monarchical episcopacy, they failed.
It was in this early Church that the notion of the Trinity developed. As with any idea, Trinity was shaped by experience – in this case the experience of the church community as it supported, interacted, and cared for each other. Beginning with the experience of knowing God in and through the ideas, person, and ministry of Jesus, and feeling his presence still with them as they met, ate and talked together, they developed a very radical notion of God as communion in the midst of their community.
God was relational. God was multiple. God was ineffable - not bounded by any form, metaphor, or speech. [i] God was a way for them to be in community.
However that notion, like with participatory leadership, got caught up in and ultimately subverted by the predominant cultural pattern of patriarchy which demanded that God be the ultimate Father or Patriarch, and Jesus and the Spirit, also divine, form a triumvirate of power and glory to rule the universe. Monarchical hierarchy triumphed over participatory community.
Also last week was the annual Robb lecture series at the University of Auckland [ii]. This year Dr Alison Gopnik, a naturalist philosopher, spoke about what we can learn from children under the age of five. One of the more interesting experiments [seen on video] was when an assistant brought a complicated toy into the room, handed it to a four-year-old and left. The child then spent half an hour exploring everything that toy could do. This was compared with the same assistant bringing the same toy into another room, handing it to another four-year-old, but this time explaining that if you squeezed one part of it the toy would honk. The child then spent half an hour honking the toy, and failing to find out how it did anything else.
Sometimes I think that’s what the Church has done to God. We’ve told people that God is like a toy that makes a honking noise. You squeeze and God honks [or vice versa?]. Whereas, I think, God is far bigger and far more interesting than any one depiction, any one formulation. That’s why I like the Trinitarian idea of God as a communion in which we are participants.
A number of my progressive colleagues are privately dismissive of the notion of the Trinity. If God is simply three monarchical beings who share socks and spend time working out schemes to defeat evil and save the world, then they have a point.
But if, in the words of Carter Heyward, God is ‘the power of mutual relation’, if God is not a being but rather a transformative relationality, then I want to embrace a very big concept, like Trinity, and have it embrace me. For Trinity points to the dance [rather than the dancers], the love [rather than the lovers], the communion [rather than the communicants], into which all humankind is invited. In Trinity I catch a glimpse of the mystery of mutuality and its power to change the world for the better.
This mystery and power was discovered by those early Christians as they shared bread and wine, their lives and their hopes. God is experienced in communion, in community, in our mutuality.
This morning we will baptize two young children, Lara and Vinicius into that communion. Every child is welcome here to be baptized regardless of belief, or the beliefs of their parents, because the Love called God unconditionally embraces all.
Yet, that said, the Love called God we believe in and that nurtures and challenges us, is known in the mutuality of community. In order to experience the fullness of God we need each other, we need to practice mutuality, and we need to walk the self-giving, other-affirming, way of communion. Then, day by day, we will be known in God and God in us.
[i] Modern writers on the Trinity have spoken of the same as multiplicity, relationality, and unknowability [Polydoxy: Theology of multiplicity and relation Catherine Keller and Laurel C. Schneider eds., and Participating In God: a pastoral doctrine of the Trinity Paul S. Fiddes, Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000]