A Place at the Table (May 26, 2024)

Isaiah 6:1-8; Psalm 29; Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17 (Trinity Sunday, Year B)

Jesus told Nicodemus, “No one can see the kingdom of God without having been born from above.” And Nicodemus asked, “How can anyone be born after having grown old?” Jesus told him, “No one can enter the kingdom of God without having been born of water and the Spirit.” And Nicodemus asked, “How can this be?”

In Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland,” Alice tells the Queen, “There’s no use trying. One can’t believe impossible things.” And the Queen responds, “I daresay you haven’t had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for a half-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!”

Sometimes the doctrine of the Trinity – that God is both One and Three simultaneously – feels like one of those impossible things that are very hard to believe.  For the more literal-minded among us, like Alice or Nicodemus, there seems little point in believing something that just doesn’t make sense.  And even if we are prepared to say, well, I may not understand it but it’s what we’ve been taught and so I believe it anyway – well, it’s hard to know what we gain by believing something we don’t understand.

To put it bluntly, what’s the cash value of believing that God is a Trinity?  Practically, what do we gain, what difference does it make, if we believe something (or agree to say to believe something) that we do not understand and in fact cannot understand?  What’s the point?

Especially because the New Testament is full of references to the Father and the Son and the Spirit – they are all over our readings today from Paul’s letter to the Romans and the gospel of John, and indeed in many places in the Scriptures – and yet it was not until the fourth century that anyone thought it necessary to have a formal theory of the Trinity or to assert that belief in the Trinity is part of what it means to be a Christian.  If the church got along without this formal doctrine for a couple of centuries, how important can it be?

Well, the development of this teaching came about as a response to the teaching of a man by the name of Arius.  Early in the fourth century, Arius was a priest in Alexandria – not our Alexandria, of course, but the original one, in Egypt, one of the main centers of early Christianity.  From what we know of him, Arius was rather literal and unimaginative, kind of like Nicodemus.

More importantly, Arius was aware that, in the fourth century, things were changing in the Roman Empire. The emperor himself had become a Christian believer (although he was not baptized), and all sorts of educated and well-off people were starting to become interested in what Christians believed.  And as a pastor, Arius wanted to explain the Christian religion in terms that people of his time would understand – even if it meant oversimplifying things a little.  I suppose Arius was kind of the Joel Osteen of the fourth century.

Arius knew that educated people in the late Roman Empire mostly had no problem understanding belief in one God – one transcendent being that is the cause of all that exists. A God like the God Isaiah saw in his vision, a God of mystery and power, far beyond our understanding and experience. This God is very different from human beings – God is perfect and we are imperfect; God is immortal and we get sick and die; God is all-powerful and we are weak, and so on.

And people in those days would have understood that, if God is up here and we are down here, there are all kinds of beings that populate the territory in between. Angels, perhaps. Maybe the gods of Greek mythology, or the Caesars who ascended to divinity. And so Arius explained Christianity by saying that we believe Jesus is as high up on this continuum as you can get. But definitely on the continuum, and definitely not quite God God. And Jesus came to help us to move higher up on the continuum, to get closer to God, more perfect, more immortal, more powerful, and so on.

Now this picture of Christianity might have made sense to people who had grown up with the assumptions of educated people in the Roman Empire. But the teaching of Arius also struck a lot of Christians as missing something essential about Christian faith, and perhaps even as having missed the whole point.  Because if Jesus was – as Scripture attests – both human and divine, both the Son of Man and the Son of God, then God and humans are not at opposite ends of a spectrum.

The whole picture that says God is up here and humans are down here is wrong – if humanity and divinity are both fully present in Jesus, then humanity and divinity are not opposites. Humanity and divinity are not in competition.  If you become more divine, you do not become less human, but more human, more who God made you to be, not less.  Jesus did not come to help us move away from earth towards the more noble realms of heaven; Jesus came to bring heaven and earth together – first in his own person and then in the community that is gathered in the Holy Spirit.

And if Jesus and the Holy Spirit are not just bringing us closer to the ineffable and almighty Father but actually bringing us into the life of God, then Jesus and the Holy Spirit are not –as Arius was teaching – created beings lower than God who can help us move up higher. No, Jesus and the Holy Spirit must be fully God, as much God as God can be, otherwise they cannot bring us into the life of God. And Jesus and the Spirit-breathed community must also be fully human, as human as human can be, otherwise they cannot bring us into the life of God.

This is the reason the church gradually coalesced around the understanding of God as Trinity – because this became the only way to really communicate what that salvation we have found in Jesus really means.  When Arius said Jesus was very close to God but not quite God, he may have been trying to make Christianity more understandable for his place and time.  But the judgment of the church was that, in fact, Arius was obscuring the full radicality of the gospel – which is that we are being called into nothing less than the very life of God.

Look at Isaiah in the first reading today. Isaiah has a vision of God in heaven, and his first reaction is – I don’t belong here, I’m a sinner, I’m way too far down the hierarchy of Being to see what I am seeing. And what does God do? God reaches down, God touches Isaiah with coals from the fires of heaven so that Isaiah can be clean and therefore belong where he is. And then Isaiah finds himself called into the mission of God in the world.

Look at Paul, writing the Romans in the second reading today. When we pray to God as Father, Paul writes, it is the Spirit speaking within us, it is the Holy Spirit calling upon the Father bearing witness that we, also, are children of God, and that makes us siblings of Jesus and heirs along with Jesus.  In other words, when we pray in the Spirit to the Father in the name of Jesus, we are participating in the life of the Father and the Son and the Spirit – and when we do this we find ourselves being shaped into Christ and participating in the mission of Christ to redeem the world.

The model of Arius – concerned to keep God and humanity at a distance, even as we hope Jesus can help us shorten that distance – might be a more common sense way of speaking.  It was, in the fourth century and also in some ways today, appealing to a lot of people to think of the universe as arranged hierarchically, with God up here, and then spirits and gods and holy men, and then human beings, and then animals and plants and rocks below.  It’s especially appealing to people who want there to be a hierarchy within human beings, where some people are closer to God than others and therefore entitled to lord it over their inferiors.  Pastors and priests and popes over lay people, men over women, Christians over pagans, people who look like us and share our beliefs and culture over the barbarians who do not – and on and on.

I like to think of the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 A.D., which rejected the theology of Arius, articulated the full divinity of Jesus, and set the framework for the emergence of the full doctrine of the Trinity over the next couple of generations, as the first and most successful Reformations in church history.  It is one of those moments when we have recognized that the common-sense, popular understanding of Jesus is not communicating the gospel but hiding it – the gospel is much better news than that.

The doctrine of the Trinity, like the teachings of the later Reformation that we are much more familiar with, are not meant to explain all things for all time.  Their value is to remind us that what we are being called into as Christians is far more amazing and much more far-reaching than we might have supposed.  The classic icon of the Holy Trinity in the Eastern Orthodox tradition does a great job of this – there’s a version of it on the front of this Sunday’s bulletin and an even better version on the back, and if you really want to see all the details in full color, take the bulletin home and search Rublev’s icon of the Trinity.

 This icon is based on the three mysterious visitors Abraham received in the book of Genesis, who shared his table and announced the promise of a child and descendants to both Abraham and Sarah.  The three figures in the icon are all equal, all gathered at the table, all engaged in conversation, and they have made room at the table for the viewer.  They have made room in their communion for you.

 You are not invited to climb a rung up the ladder to get a step or two closer to the divine majesty, or a step or two above your neighbor.  You are being invited to have a seat at the table where God’s communion is already being lived, where God’s blessing and promise are already being pronounced.  And we know that our neighbors are also being invited to share at this table, and this invitation must inevitably affects the way we must think of them and share with them.

 And so we gather this morning, also at a table, where each one of us is called to take our place. Where we serve one another as fellow guests at the table of God, where the Son truly gives his presence to us, where the Spirit truly breathes the life of God into us, where we are – like Isaiah – made worthy to participate in the life of God and the mission of God in the world. This table is as far from the hierarchical vision of Arius as can be imagined, and that’s a good thing. And it doesn’t matter if we can fully understand and explain exactly what it is that happens it. It matters that we experience it, and that we live it. That we take our place at the table as the Father sends the Son and breathes the Spirit and brings us into the very life of God.