2024.05.26 | God of Many Names
“God of Many Names”
Rev. Brenda Loreman
Designated Term Associate Minister
Eden United Church of Christ, Hayward, California
Trinity Sunday,
May 26, 2024
John 3:1-17
The writer and minister Debie Thomas tells a story about having a conversation one day with her young Jewish neighbor. (1) “I was watering plants on my patio,” Thomas recalls, “when my neighbor’s son — an 8th grader — peeked over the fence and started telling me about his recent Bar Mitzvah celebration. After we’d chatted for a bit about the party, the guests, and the ‘awesome’ gifts he’d received, he asked, ‘Your family is Christian, right?’”
Thomas replied that she was, and then her neighbor went on to earnestly ask, “Why do Christians believe in three gods?”
“We don’t,” Thomas answered. “Actually, we believe in the same God you do. Just… differently.” Thomas hoped this answer would suffice, even though it was obviously inadequate.
But her neighbor pressed on with his questions. “I mean the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost thing,” he said. “I don’t get it.”
What Debie Thomas wanted to say at this point was, “Honey, neither do I.” But her young neighbor looked so genuinely bewildered that she sighed and fumbled her way through all the inadequate explanations she’d heard as a kid: “God is sort of like water! Water exists in three states, right? Liquid, solid, and gas? God’s like that! Or, like an egg! The shell, the egg white, and the yolk? Three parts, one egg! Or, um, a three-leaf clover! Or a tree! The roots, the trunk, and the branches — but they make up one tree, right? Or… or a triangle!”
None of these explanations satisfied the youngster’s curiosity, and finally he blurted out, “What’s the point of believing in three gods? Why three? What difference does it make?”
Perhaps you, too, heard some of those inadequate explanations as a young person, or maybe even used them to explain the trinity to youngsters in your life; I know I’m guilty of that. And perhaps you have, as I have in my Christian journey, wondered about the same questions that the young neighbor asked: Why three? What difference does it make?
Today is Trinity Sunday, celebrated in Roman Catholic Churches and in many mainline Protestant denominations. Although the Trinity has been celebrated by the Christian church since the early years, it wasn’t until the 14th century that the date of a special celebration was established as the Sunday following Pentecost. Compared to all the other sacred festivals of the church, Trinity Sunday is a bit of an oddball.
Think about it. The special observances of the church—whether celebratory or solemn— commemorate happenings in the life of Christ or the life of the apostles. We commemorate Mary’s visit from Gabriel announcing the holy child she was to bear into the world. We celebrate the birth of Jesus. We celebrate the season of Epiphany, symbolized by the wise ones from the East arriving and recognizing Jesus as the child of God. We mark the watery baptism of Jesus, the confusion of the disciples at the Transfiguration, and Jesus riding triumphantly into Jerusalem with palms and cheers. We celebrate the empty tomb of Easter, and the chaotic coming of God’s spirit to the church at Pentecost all leading up to today, when we celebrate … a church doctrine.
As Lutheran author and minister Nadia Bolz-Weber puts it, “It’s like there’s this raucous party of Easter and Pentecost that comes to a screeching halt while an old crotchety man shuffles up to the pulpit, blows the dust off an enormous leather-bound book, and clears his throat ,saying ‘And now a celebration of church doctrine,’ causing the music to fade, and the last of the Pentecost streamers still floating to fall to the ground. Church doctrine Sunday.” (2) Trinity Sunday lacks the music and glitter of the rest of the church year. It’s abstract and, well, a bit boring, unless you’re a real church history nerd.
Very few passages in the New Testament refer to all three persons of the Trinity, and there’s a good reason for this. Trinitarian theology largely developed after the New Testament was written as a way to respond to the genuine confusion in early Christian communities about the relationship between Jesus and God, Jesus and the Spirit, and the Spirit and God. “We often read backward into the text,” Church historian Diana Butler Bass writes, “and we imagine there is clarity where there was not. Arriving at the doctrine of the Trinity was a genuine struggle for our theological forebears (and often remains problematic even now).” (3)
Today’s lectionary passage from the Gospel of John is one of the few stories in which all parts of the Trinity appear. “And it is a theologically messy [passage]. Few texts are more misquoted and misinterpreted than this selection from John — and yet few have been more widely influential. Since the First Great Awakening in the 1740s, it has been a key passage for evangelical Christians, usually quoted in revivals to convince ‘unbelievers’ to be ‘born again.’” (4)
Just as the Trinity is often inscrutable, this text from John’s gospel is also hard to understand; Jesus seems to speak to Nicodemus in riddles that leave us all puzzled. Like the neighbor boy asking about the Trinity, we are also sometimes left saying, “I don’t get it!”
In his book on the Trinity called The Divine Dance, Franciscan priest and theologian Richard Rohr argues that understanding the Trinity comes from starting in the right place: “Don’t start with the One and try to make it into Three,” he writes, “but start with the Three and see that this is the deepest nature of the One.” (5)
If we start with the Three, what do we discover about God’s character? If we learn to see “threeness” as the very ground and essence of God’s being, what do we discover about God’s personality, God’s priorities, and God’s reality?
According to Father Rohr:
First, we’d see that God is not rigid and immutable. God does not exist in stasis. Rather, God’s self is dynamic and fluid. God moves. [...] God flows, and God is flow. God dances, and God is dance. Whether we learn to tolerate the surprise and discomfort of divine fluidity or not, we worship a God who is impossible to pin down, a God who is mysterious beyond reckoning. [...]
Secondly, we’d see that God is diverse. If God exists in three persons, then each person has his (or her) own way of embodying and expressing goodness, beauty, love, and righteousness. [...] Trinity affirms that there is an intrinsic plurality to goodness. “Goodness isn’t sameness,” [Rohr writes]. “Goodness, to be goodness, needs contrast and tension, not perfect uniformity.” If God can incarnate goodness through contrast and tension, then why can’t we? Why won’t we? Why do we fear difference so much when difference lies at the very heart of God?
Thirdly, we’d see that God is not a loner. Or as Lutheran minister Nadia Bolz Weber puts it, “This is not a ‘me’ God, but a ‘we’ God. God from the beginning is, not God as bad math, but God as community.” It’s one thing to say that God values community. Or thinks that community is good for us. Or hopes that we’ll build our own. It’s altogether another to say that God is community. That God is relationship, intimacy, connection, and communion. If God is both plural and interactive at God’s very heart — if Three is the deepest nature of the One—then what are we doing when we isolate ourselves from each other? When we decide to go it alone? When we hold ourselves back from intimacy and connection, and thus deny ourselves the expression and experience of God’s own self? If Richard Rohr is right, and if the Trinity really is much more than a bit of dusty doctrine the early Church fought over, then we dare not take lightly the life-changing power of the communal. God is Relationship, and it is only in relationship that we experience the fullness of God.
Lastly, we’d see that God is hospitality. In the 15th century, Russian iconographer Andrei Rublev created, “The Hospitality of Abraham,” also known as “The Trinity,” one of the most well known and well loved icons in Christendom. In it, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (depicted as the three angels who appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre), sit around a table, sharing food and drink. Their faces are nearly identical, but they’re dressed in different colors. The Father wears gold, the Son blue, and the Spirit green. The Father gazes at the Son. The Son gazes back at the Father, but gestures towards the Spirit. The Spirit gazes at the Father, but points toward the Son with one hand, and opens up the circle with the other, making room for others to join the sacred meal.
As a whole, the icon exudes adoration and intimacy — clearly, the three persons around the table love and enjoy each other. But it also exudes openness. There is space at the table for the viewer of the icon. For me. For us. As if to say, the point of the great Three-in-One is not exclusivity—God is not a middle school clique — but rather, radical hospitality. The point of the Three is always to add one more, to extend the invitation, to make the holy table more expansive and more welcoming. In fact, the deeper the love between the Three grows, the roomier the table grows. The closer we draw to the adoration of the Three, the wider and more hospitable our hearts grow towards the world. (6)
In my own faith journey, I have struggled with the theology of the Trinity. One of the reasons for this is the language that is traditionally used for the three persons of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Rather than being invited into the Divine Dance with the Trinity, I often felt myself excluded by the strictly male language for naming God. Richard Rohr’s work of opening the Trinity with new imagery is transformational for me. So is the understanding that, as Hebrew Bible professor Dr. Wilda Gaffney reminds us, “God is beyond numbering and naming. The scriptures use many more than three names or images to describe God and do not limit us to any.” (7) As we expand our understanding of the fullness of God, we can also expand the language we use to name the aspects of the Trinity. Here are some of the names that Dr. Gaffney uses in pondering God in three:
Author, Word and Translator;
Sovereign, Savior and Shelter;
Majesty, Mercy and Mystery;
Creator, Christ, and Compassion;
Parent, Partner, and Friend;
Earth-Maker, Pain-Bearer and Life-Giver;
Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer;
God who brings us to life, calls us to freedom, and moves between us with love. (8)
Friends, my prayer for us today is this: may we enter the dance with the God who is beyond naming and numbering. May we experience God’s fluidity, diversity, community, and hospitality. And may we, like the Triune God, open up the circle, making room for others to join the sacred dance. Amen.
Notes:
(1) Debie Thomas, “Start with the Three,” Journey with Jesus, May 20, 2018. https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/1785-start-with-the-three. Accessed May 24, 2024.
(2) Nadia Bolz-Weber, “Some Thoughts on the Holy Trinity,” Sojourners, June 1, 2012. https://sojo.net/articles/some-thoughts-holy-trinity. Accessed May 25, 2024.
(3) Diana Butler Bass, “Sunday Musings,” The Cottage, May 25, 2014. https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/sunday-musings-614. Accessed May 25, 2024.
(4) Ibid.
(5) Debie Thomas, ibid.
(6) Ibid.
(7) Wilda Gaffney, “Naming and Numbering: God of Many Names on Trinity Sunday,” Womanists Wading in the Word, May 17, 2016. https://www.wilgafney.com/2016/05/17/naming-and-numbering-god-of-many-names-on-trinity-sunday/. Accessed on May 20, 2024.
(8) Ibid.