Today is Trinity Sunday, the Sunday on which we celebrate and proclaim the co-eternal existence of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as "one God, one Lord, in Trinity of Persons and in Unity of Being." But before I get into the complexities of God, I'd like to get into the complexities of humans. I'll start with an excerpt from Jim Holt's article, "Of Two Minds," which I found in the May 8th edition of The New York Times Magazine:

"The human brain is mysterious-and, in a way, that is a good thing. The less that is known about how the brain works, the more secure the zone of privacy that surrounds the self. But that zone seems to be shrinking…
"…The human brain has two hemispheres, right and left. Each hemisphere has its own perceptual, memory and control systems. For the most part, the left hemisphere is associated with the right side of the body, and vice versa. The left hemisphere usually controls speech. Connecting the hemispheres is a cable of nerve fibers called the corpus callosum.
"Patients with severe epilepsy sometimes used to undergo an operation in which the corpus callosum was severed. (The idea was to keep a seizure from spreading from one side of the brain to the other.) After the operation, the two hemispheres of the brain could no longer directly communicate. Such patients typically resumed their normal lives without seeming to be any different. But under careful observation, they exhibited some very peculiar behavior. When, for example, the word 'hat' was flashed to the left half of the visual field-and hence to the right (speechless) side of the brain-the left hand would pick out a hat from a group of concealed objects, even as the patient insisted that he had seen no word.…In another case, a female patient's right hemisphere was flashed a scene of one person throwing another into a fire. 'I don't know why, but I feel kind of scared,' she told the researcher. 'I don't like this room, or maybe it's you getting me nervous.' The left side of her brain, noticing the negative emotional reaction issuing from the right side, was making a guess about its cause, much the way one person might make a guess about the emotions of another.
"Each side of the brain seemed to have its own awareness, as if there were two selves occupying the same head. (One patient's left hand seemed somewhat hostile to the patient's wife, suggesting that the right hemisphere was not fond of her.)…
"Pondering such split-brain cases, some scientists and philosophers have raised a disquieting possibility: perhaps each of us really consists of two minds running in harness. In an intact brain, of course, the corpus callosum acts as a constant two-way internal-communications channel between the two hemispheres. So our everyday behavior does not betray the existence of two independent streams of consciousness flowing along within our skulls. It may be, the philosopher Thomas Nagel has written, that 'the ordinary, simple idea of a single person will come to seem quaint some day, when the complexities of the human control system become clearer and we become less certain that there is anything very important that we are one of.'"

Mr. Holt entitled his article "Of Two Minds," but he could just as well have entitled it "Of Three Minds," counting that cable of nerve fibers that connects the two hemispheres as the third in a tripartite brain-a brain trinity, or a "brainity," if you will-of left hemisphere, right hemisphere, and corpus callosum. Perhaps I should have begun this sermon "In the name of the Right Hemisphere, the Left Hemisphere, and the Corpus Callosum. Amen."

All this is to say that if the finite, mortal creatures called human beings are so mysterious in the inner-workings of our minds, which along with our souls and bodies comprise the tripartite idea of the individual person, how much more mysterious are the inner-workings of the infinite, immortal God who created all things? Who can plumb God's depths? Who would presume to explain God as God is in God's Self?

On the face of it, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is highly presumptuous. Better simply to posit one God than to try to sort out the details of how Jesus and this "Holy Spirit" thing relate to our idea of God. The fourth century sect known as the Arians thought so, as do modern-day Unitarians. While reading up on Trinitarian theology over the past two weeks, I was reminded of the story of the first Unitarian congregation in America, King's Chapel in Boston. It's a great tourist spot today, but back in the 1700's, it was just a little Anglican chapel; the congregation had been organized in 1686, and after the Revolutionary War it became a congregation of the Episcopal Church. Things went along swimmingly until 1782, when the congregation called James Freeman as lay reader. He started preaching Unitarianism, defined by The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church as "a type of Christian thought and religious observance which rejects the doctrines of the Trinity and the Divinity of Christ in favour of the unipersonality of God." For his heterodox preaching, Bishop Seabury refused to ordain Freeman, whereupon King's Chapel left the Episcopal Church. (Freeman was promptly "ordained" by his junior and senior wardens.) The thing that most precipitated this split was that Freeman took a page out of Thomas Jefferson's book, so to speak, for just as Jefferson had excised the Gospels of any reference to miracles, Freeman cut out any references to the Trinity in The Book of Common Prayer-and there are quite a few! This bowdlerized version, revised even further over the years, is still in use at King's Chapel today.

I suspect that many people in the Episcopal Church, clergy and laity alike, are functional Unitarians, in that the doctrine of the Trinity really doesn't mean much to them, and as such has no bearing on their day-to-day lives. How can a doctrine affect the way we live if we don't understand it? And even if we do have a good understanding of it, that doesn't necessarily mean we can apply it to our own relationships with God and each other.

I think the best way to understand the doctrine of the Trinity and to appropriate it for ourselves is to find out how this doctrine came about in the first place. The earliest Christians began to speak of God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit of God in the time of Paul and the Evangelists. Second Corinthians ends with "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you." Matthew's gospel commands us to "go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…" In obedience to that command, we baptized two new Christians just last Sunday.

Why did the earliest Christians begin to speak in these terms? The simplest answer is: Because Jesus did. In John's gospel, Jesus called God his Father, referred to himself as the Son, and promised that after his resurrection the disciples would receive the Holy Spirit. He asserted that he and the Father were "one," and that the Holy Spirit would come from his Father. The earliest Christians adopted Jesus' own language in their worship. They prayed the Lord's Prayer, "Our Father, who art in heaven…" They experienced the outpouring of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. And they began to identify Jesus with God himself. Jesus began to be understood not merely as a human being sent by God, but as God in human flesh. People worshipped him, knowing full well that worship was due to God alone. For a pious Jew to worship a human being was blasphemy and idolatry. Yet the earliest Jewish believers in Jesus were moved not only to worship the God who had raised Jesus from the dead, but the God who had been raised from the dead in Jesus. Only by identifying Jesus with God could the leap be made from praising God for the Messiah and praising the Messiah as God.

This notion of the Messiah-as-God indicates to some critics the fatal turning point of Christianity away from monotheism, a terrible theological mistake. Volumes have been written on Christology, and they all come down to one central question: Was Christ God incarnate, or was he merely a human being, albeit one perhaps inspired by God?

The answer to that question within historic orthodox Christianity proclaims the divinity of Christ whilst also affirming his full humanity. It's a both/and kind of answer. This answer would make no sense if it were not for the experience of the Christian Church in worship-and even so, is an answer that is better participated in than explained. Paul S. Fiddes, of Regent's Park College at the University of Oxford, wrote a book entitled Participating in God: A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity. It is particularly enlightening on the origins and purpose of Trinitarian theology. He writes:

"When the early church fathers developed the doctrine of the Trinity…they were finding concepts to express an experience. That is, they were trying to articulate the richness of the personality of God that they had found in the story of salvation and in their own experience. It was not any longer sufficient to say 'the Lord' when they spoke a blessing in worship (Num. 6:24-6); they must speak of the love of the Father, the grace of the Lord Jesus and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit (2 Cor. 13:14), although they knew that the ultimate demand on their lives must come from one Lord. They began with God at work in salvation, healing human life. They had encountered God in the actions and words of a human Son, Jesus Christ; they found God revealed and active in this Son who welcomed outcasts into the Kingdom of God the Father and spoke the word of forgiveness on God's behalf. They found God in a new energy and guidance they experienced within their community, opening up relationships beyond the accepted social boundaries and opening up a hope for a future new creation; they could only speak of this in terms of the 'Holy Spirit' of God and they associated this Spirit in some way with the ongoing presence of Jesus Christ who had been crucified (2 Cor. 3:17-18).
"So the earlier followers of Jesus had to rethink their understanding of the being of God because of their experience of God's acts among them. They took a new and revolutionary path of thought that conformed neither to strict Jewish monotheism nor to the many divine principles of Hellenism, believing that the very being of God must correspond in some way to their experience of God as Father, Son and Spirit. We notice that this experience of God is not of three personal realities in isolation from each other, but of persons in relation…As people followed Christ through the experience of death to an old life and resurrection to a new one, they were baptised in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Mt. 28:19), and the baptism of Jesus himself is portrayed as an event involving a relationship like that between a Father, a Son and a Spirit who opens up the heavens (Mk 1:10-11)."

As Fiddes goes on to say, "the God who makes communion in the world must already be communion" and "the God of salvation lives eternally in relationship."

The doctrine of the Trinity is the product of sustained theological reflection on the Christian experience of God's saving acts in history. This doctrine lends language to our worship of God, and, at its best, helps us to participate ever more deeply in the divine lovelife of the Holy Trinity. As we enter into God's own life, journeying toward the Father through the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit, we may find that, in a mystical yet utterly practical way, all of our relationships become infused with this participation. When we seek and serve Christ in each other, we participate in God's life. Let me be clear, however, that finding Christ in each other is very different from finding "the god within." It has nothing to do with pantheism or even panentheism: we're not God. God is God. But God is with us, and we can, by God's grace, be with God.

Paul refers to God in the book of Acts as the One "in whom we live and move and have our being." The Greek Orthodox have a rather radical word for this experience of relationship: they call it theosis, meaning "divinization." This does not mean that we become gods, but it gets at the truth that, as the Fathers wrote, "the Divinity became human so that humanity might share in divinity." This sharing, this participation, this relationship begins now and continues for all eternity. Most importantly, perhaps, this participation in God's life is far from being an individualistic thing. Our participation in God's life increases in direct proportion to our participation in each others' lives, for as we find God present and at work in our brothers' and sisters' lives, we are moved to point it out to them. So, too, we must rely on our brothers and sisters to point out to us when God is at work in our lives, because we may be too involved in the cares and distractions of the world to notice for ourselves. So often, God has been at work in my life and I would not have know it had not someone else noticed it first and then brought it to my attention. The community of the Church as a whole participates in God's life by mutual upbuilding; as our relationships with each other are strengthened, so are our relationships with God; conversely, as our relationships with God are strengthened, so are our relationships with each other, so much so that we are moved to go out into the world to seek and serve Christ in all of creation.

In sum, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is about getting involved with God, and through God, with each other. Or, conversely, about getting involved with each other, and through each other, getting involved with God. This, after all, is what Christ Jesus did for us, and what we, too are called to do for each other, to the glory of God and the service of God's people, as we "walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice unto God."

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.