The SubStance of Trinity

“The Substance of Trinity” – Rev. Tony Romaine – June 7th, 2020

​Richard Rohr in an article in the magazine Sojourners said in 2016, “The widespread Christian failure to understand and experience God as Trinity has provided a breeding ground for both implicit and explicit racism.”[1]  And so to help us understand the “Substance of Trinity,” I thought it best we talk about diversity and unity within the Trinity.

As a UCC and UMC church, we believe that we should be united and uniting.  As such, theologian Randi Jones Walker says, "The essential questions facing United and Uniting Churches center on the question, for what purpose are we united?”  And answering her own question, she states, “In a world filled with people who, in the eyes of the world are poor, unworthy, guilty, unlovable, shameful, or oppressed, the Church is called to offer family."[2] 

The family we are called to offer is Trinitarian in structure.  We are called to God's vision for humanity, the united difference that exists within the Trinity, and we are called to re-visit our sources of faith to rely on the Holy Spirit, not our own human ability.  As such, we are called to venture into our doubts and fears and rely on our ability to be a covenantal people in union with those we encounter.  As we strive toward being more welcoming for those of different races, genders, sexes, etc. we will not always have all the answers.  In fact, most of the time we will not have any answers, and this is okay.
But to help us understand better and perhaps grasp at some answers, Richard Rohr when talking about how God as Trinity dissolves racism once said, “To understand a sin (racism) that is as old as history, it is helpful to go back to one of the oldest questions of human inquiry.  How can there be any primal unity to reality when what we see is so much obvious and seemingly conflicting diversity?  Is there any unifying pattern to “the ten thousand things” that overwhelm our horizon?”[3]

Rohr then further explains, “Let’s look at one of the very destructive effects of a diminished image of God on the ever-present issue of racism. Today, most Christian notions of the Divine are much more formed by pagan and Greek conceptions than by the central Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Even the Latin word for God, Deus, is a direct reformulation of the Greek word for the head of the gods, Zeus. I believe racism is often rooted in this distorted view of divinity; rather than reflecting the One who created all things in God’s own image and likeness, we instead make God into a mascot who, as Anne Lamott brilliantly quips, hates all the same people we do.”  In essence, we make God out to be a white, male, authority figure and from this viewpoint, stems the systemic racism which pervades our humanity, theology, and history.  We make God to fit inside our box and look like us, instead of being the Omnipotent, Triune God.

Instead, what our Trinitarian beliefs are calling us to be; what the church needs to be to the world, is a witness to the fact that difference does not have to delineate.  That in this ever-diversifying world, Christianity can come together and celebrate the diversity within its broad arms without hate speech, judgment, or degrading those who are different.  In this manner, the church will return to its roots of being on a mission Jesus led us toward during his lifetime.  We will be on mission to love our neighbor as ourselves and in so doing demonstrate love to a world that needs it desperately. 

The  Korean theologian Chun-Hoi Heo writes, “The price of peace is not the elimination of differences.”[4]  In other words, as we come together in a new and multicultural context, our differences should be lifted up as a strength of a broader community, not lifted up so as to create walls of segregation.  Or as Rohr says, “God is precisely one by holding together very real difference.  The Triune Godhead itself maintains separate identity between Three, with an absolutely unique kind of unity, which is the very shape of Divine Oneness.  God’s pattern and goal has never been naïve uniformity, but radical diversity, maintained in absolute unity by “a perfect love” that infinitely self-empties and infinitely outpours—at the same time.”[5]

But herein lies the problem.  See, we humans, we like infilling, we like ourselves to be connected and in tune with God.  But we do not like outpouring and we do not even know how to make room for that infilling we say we want!  Thus, the historical and theological problem that prevents us from truly understanding the Trinity.  And the eternal spiritual problem that prevents us from moving beyond denomination and race and gender and class.  Our inability to understand and love one another as the outpouring of God’s love; is in and of itself, racism, sexism, classism, ageism, lookism, homophobia, transphobia, imperialism, patriarchy, and all that our tradition refers to as “sin.”

So, brothers and sisters, what if instead we focused on what brings us together in diversity instead of what separates us?  I am not arguing for a blanket unity where one cannot be different from one another, rather the utopia I am dreaming is Trinitarian; one where, we hold each other’s differences in unison with what holds us all together, not a blind uniformity, but radical diversity bonded in the perfect love of God.  A love which is eternally filled via God, a love which we are called by God to pour out unto the world.

A love which Rohr describes as why Jesus had to dramatically come.  Jesus had to, “personally exemplify the entire path of self-emptying to us, making room for the diversity within God’s creation, and had to teach us how to love one another.   Because, the Jesus path is a constant visible lesson in both allowing in and handing on, receiving and giving away what is received.   Jesus makes the Trinity visible and attractive, so we can trust this always-daring process ourselves, so we can trust that indeed God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit; even though diverse and unique, are also God.”  So we can trust that differences unite us and unity is diverse!

For only when we fail to see difference as something that fractures our society, only when we stop seeing uniqueness as something which prevents unity, only when we end the historical cycle of delineating and power pyramids and social classification based on race, sex, gender, or creed; only then will we finally celebrate the diversity within God’s creation, within our world, and within ourselves.  And only then, will we finally comprehend and live “The Substance of Trinity!”
 


[1] Richard Rohr, https://sojo.net/articles/how-god-trinity-dissolves-racism, August 25, 2016.

[2] Walker, 44.

[3] Rohr, https://sojo.net/articles/how-god-trinity-dissolves-racism, August 25, 2016.
 

[4] Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, From Times Square to Timbuktu: The Post-Christian West Meets the Non-Western Church, (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2013), 105.

[5] Rohr, https://sojo.net/articles/how-god-trinity-dissolves-racism, August 25, 2016.