On The Trinity, the Earth, And Theological Conflict

"On The Trinity, the Earth, and Theological Conflict"

John 16:12-15 – Trinity Sunday
May 30, 2010

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit
of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but
will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He
will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the
Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to
you.

It is December 24, in the year 361 AD, over three hundred years after Christ’s death
and resurrection, and it is midmorning in the city of Alexandria, in Egypt, one of the
early centers of Christian faith.

Richard Rubenstein gives us the rest of the story: By the time the men at the front of
the mob smashed through the prison gates, the crowd had grown until it overflowed the
square like water pouring over the sides of a full jar. Even for Alexandria, where riots
were as common as Mediterranean gales, this demonstration was unusually large.
More unusual still, the mixed crowd formed a unified mass. Instead of fighting among
themselves as they often did, pagan and Christian rioters stood side by side, bellowing
for blood.

A roar of approval greeted the splintering of the gates. Minutes later the invaders
reemerged from the prison bearing their trussed-up quarry on their shoulders like
hunters returning from the desert with a prize antelope or lion. Three prisoners, their
hands and feet still chained against the possibility of escape, were their catch. As the
demonstrators began to toss them about the square like toys, the helpless captives
squealed in pain and terror…

The mob’s prime target, however—the third man in manacles—was a figure of greater
importance than any civil servant, [of which two of the prisoners were.] This was
George of Cappadocia, the metropolitan Bishop of Alexandria and titular head of Egypt’
s huge Christian community.

Bishop George owed his recent preeminence and present agony to Constantius II, the
son and successor to Constantine the Great. Like Constantius, he was an Arian, a
Christian who believed that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, but not God himself….
The appointment was a disaster from the start. Replacing a native Alexandrian, [a man
who would be become famous, Athanasius] with a Cappodicean “foreigner” who could
not even speak Coptic, the language of the common people, was [the Emperor’s] first
mistake. His second was to name as bishop a militant Arian who considered it his duty
to persecute both pagans and Christians who opposed his theology. And his third
error was to allow the formidable Athanasius to escape the sanctuary of a friendly
monastery in the Egyptian wilderness. From his desert hideout, the popular ex-bishop
made a series of lightening undercover visits to the city to encourage his supporters
there, adding a bandit’s glamour to his reputation for dedication and brilliance.

Poor George! Even with the aid of imperial troops he could not establish control over
Alexandria’s turbulent Christian community. About one year after he took office he was
attacked by an anti-Arian mob at the Church of Dionysius and barely escaped with his
life. After that, he spent most of his time in the Balkans and Asia Minor attending a
series of Church councils called by the emperor to resolve the controversy over Christ’s
divinity that was tearing the church apart. When these councils declared his Arian
beliefs orthodox and Constantius promised him unqualified support, George decided to
return to his post in Alexandria. What he did not know, however, was that his imperial
patron had become seriously ill. Four days after he returned to Alexandria,
Constantius died of a fever…and the city exploded...

Punishment was duly administered. George and his fellow prisoners died in the prison
square, presumably as a result of lethal beatings. A fifth century historian reports that
after the rioters had killed their victims, they paraded their corpses through the middle
of the city. George’s body was on a camel, but the other men were dragged with ropes,
“and, when they had maltreated their corpses in this way, about the seventh hour [one
o’clock] they burned them. Burning their bodies was not only an insult to the deceased,
but a way of ensuring that their remains would not become relics to be preserved and
venerated by their followers. (Rubenstein, When Jesus Became God 1-3)

Now, I share that portion of Rubenstein’s book on this Trinity Sunday to give you a
small taste of how truly controversial the doctrine of the Trinity really was for the first
five hundred years of the church, and sadly, to remind us of how much blood was
spilled by both sides of the debate, the side of George of Cappodecia, and the side of
Athansius, whose side would eventually win the day. All of this violence, all of this rage
was made in an effort to get everyone to agree on the nature of who this Christ was
and is, and, ultimately the nature of God. One of the earliest historians of the church
recalled that if one went to the marketplace, it wasn’t unheard of to hear butchers and
grocers arguing vehemently over the spiritual nature of the Christ: was he God or
simply the most important messenger of God? Was he somehow of the same
substance of God, at least partially, or was he like us, us human beings, fully human,
since only God can be God? These arguments were not simply theoretical for the
Christians of the mid to late Roman Empire, but also a real split within the church, with
both the Arians, those who believed that Jesus was simply a man, though the most
important man the world has ever known, and those who believed that Jesus was God
incarnated amongst us, battling each other, sometimes literally, in various parts of the
slowly crumbling Empire. Sometimes you hear that the Arians were in a distinct
minority, but the evidence shows that Arians and what became the position we find in
the ancient creeds of the church, actually split the larger church down the middle on
the issue of Christ’s nature, and in some cases, the Arians were dominant in certain
parts of the Roman Empire during particular stretches of time. The argument wasn’t
good against evil, Christians against fake Christians, but simply a horrible, violent,
ungodly dispute about the meaning of Jesus, of which our doctrine of the Trinity
attempts to solve, in its gangly and imprecise way.

Now, why does it matter now, and what does our text today have to say about some
ancient argument that rarely crosses our minds in this day and age, in a time when we
can’t even imagine taking up arms against the Methodists next door over a difference
of opinion over the nature of Jesus? Well, it can say a lot of things, but probably the
most important is that these sorts of things aren’t as important to God as they seem to
be to us, to us human beings. When Jesus speaks of his relationship with the Father in
the Gospel of John, or, when the church speaks through Jesus in that particular
Gospel, I don’t think either one of those possible speakers could have ever imagined
that we would kill each other over our differences about what we believe about Jesus,
and his relationship with the Father, and the Spirit’s relationship between the two. All
that Jesus seems to be saying in these passages is that there is more to come, that
there is more truth than what could he share in his time with us, and so another way
that further truth will be told to them will be through this Spirit, this Christ within them,
this breathe of God within them, that would continue to speak his words to them. And
from there, the orthodox side of the great debate on the nature of the Christ could
argue that, even though the idea of the Trinity is never laid out by Jesus or anywhere
else in Scripture, you could say that the Spirit eventually gave us this idea of God being
manifested in three different ways, that even though God is one, God manifests himself
in three distinct ways: as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Now, look, I’m probably pretty traditional on this issue, because I actually buy the idea
of the Trinity, though I am not sure it really has anything to do with believing that
somehow this was God’s idea, as much as the Trinity is our human desire to try to
explain a fundamental truth about faith and life and experience and that is this: we all
experience God differently, we all stumble upon the presence of God in such different
ways, or with such particular and peculiar nuances that it makes no sense to say that
God is only this way or that way, because, frankly, each of us has experienced God in
our lives differently. The church was just grasping, in its typically heavy-handed way, at
the truth that for you, maybe God is more like your brother, like Jesus, someone you
can talk to you, who can walk beside you, support you, someone you can touch and
feel, in some incarnational way, in others. For me, perhaps, God is nothing, no-thing,
something I can never really touch and feel, but just is, the ground of being, the
Creator of all that is—always present, always shimmering everywhere, in nothing in
particular, but in everything in particular, like how the hand of the artist is found in their
artwork, traces of God everywhere, found in the creation. And for my mystical friends,
maybe God comes to them, not in the beauty of the world, but in the beauty and
stillness of their hearts, the traces of God they find in themselves and others, the Spirit
within them. Of course, it’s not one or another, or always one way or another, but the
point is that we do experience God differently, and that needs to be honored, and that
is what the doctrine of the Trinity tries to do, in its better moments, I think.

But I suspect you can hear some hesitation in my voice about this doctrine of the
Trinity, some ambiguity about it, and that is because, even though I am a Trinitarian, I
still grieve the loss of my fellow believers who simply could not go where some in the
church were going—and were subsequently harassed, persecuted, and sometimes
killed because of that unwillingness to buy the idea of the Trinity, as we heard in earlier,
in my little history lesson from the fourth century. Of course, the violence and
intolerance came from both the orthodox and Arian sides, and so no one came out
smelling like roses, or being particular ethical and Christian about in the ways they
behaved with those they disagreed with. The fact of the matter is that we all lose when
one part of the church starts drawing a circle in order to distinguish between theological
insiders and theological outsiders, and it is a sin that we have never been able to rid
ourselves of, this desire to be each other’s judges, and this desire to be one the
drawing the circle, rather letting than God do that sort of thing, if that is what God
actually does.

Instead of all this harping and arguing and circle drawing, this insider/outsider stuff,
maybe we ought to pull back a bit, and start giving a damn about things that really
matter to God, like what is happening to God’s piece of artwork called the human
planet. The oil spill in the Gulf has shadowed me the past few weeks, which has
surprised me, because, well, frankly, I’m not all that environmentally conscious, being
fairly self-centered about these sorts of things, worried more about things being easy
and convenient than worrying about the environmental impact I might be having on God’
s creation. But there is something about this wound underneath the sea, as if the earth
was bleeding from a cut we have given it, that has just haunted me, and reminded me
once again of those things that really matter to God, and thus they should matter to
me. If this beautiful earth reflects the hand of the Creator, the Artist, then this is a God
who loves beauty, and yet, in our drive for cheaper fuel, and because of our never
ending consumption of things, of more and more of things that don’t really matter, we
keep scarring and scarring God’s creation. What God has created is bleeding and we
have inflicted the wound, and, folks, THAT matters more than senseless arguments
about who God is, and who Jesus was and is.

Don’t get me wrong, friends: I love my theology, and right now I am in the midst of Gary
Dorrien’s dense second volume about American Liberal Theology, some 600 pages of
it in 9 point type, and I love every word of it! I love to hear the great theologians talk
and argue about who God is; I do and I always will, and I think it’s important to speak
and discern the nature of God, which things like the doctrine of Trinity tries to do. But,
in the end, those ideas, those arguments, they don’t matter, not really, and the idea
that we would kill each other over whether or not Jesus was God or not…its sheer
madness, no matter the important theological concepts behind those differences. What
really matters is how we treat each other, how we love each other, which is really all
about how we treat God’s creation, and, that, that treatment, it goes beyond how we
treat humans to how we treat the other parts of nature, like the sea, like the earth, like
the air. Too much blood has been spilt on what so often does not really matter,
whether in the 4th century in Alexandria, or even nowadays, in our religious wars, or
our political wars—there have been too many good men and good women put into the
ground too early because we could not agree to disagree, and just walk away. And
now even the earth bleeds, as if it too is trying tell us something, as if we somehow
hadn’t gotten the message that it has got to stop, or we will bleed ourselves, or our own
children, to death. And yet, we can do something, we can help to stop the bleeding,
our own bleeding and the bleeding of the earth. I feel like I am at a turning point, in
some odd way, and I think we as a country, maybe as a world, are at a turning point.
Let’s do something about it, let’s change the way we live and change the way we love,
let’s pay attention to God in this world, and to the Christ, who meets however he meets
us, and let’s do it—and let’s let go of the arrogance of words about God that seem so
often to divide us from our fellow children of God. This is God’s good but imperfect
world, and we are God’s good, but imperfect children, and we can make a difference—
so, I invite to care a bit more about the way you treat God’s good planet, and to care a
bit more about how you treat those you disagree with, and to care a bit less for what
does not matter ultimately, like the particularities about how we understand God. We
are created in God’s image, you, and me, who have the power to make a difference in
this wonderfully beautiful and fragile world, which is so often the way of it with any piece
of art, even one made by God. Amen.