Trinity Sunday: The Discarded Image of God

 

The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

Lectionary Readings

Happy Father's day. Today we celebrate the feast of the Most Holy Trinity. God the Father is a father active in his children's life. God the Son, is the expression of that Father made human. God the Spirit is the love between Father and Son that we are invited into through the Sacraments and the Scriptures. The doctrine of the Trinity teaches that God is one in unity, three divine persons. St. Augustine, a Father of the Church, taught that such unity was like the unity of our minds, we can remember, we can think and we can will, yet it is all one mind. He admitted that this is an imperfect metaphor, but the purpose is to help illustrate how relationship is the basis of unity between us and God and between us and one another. How we think about God matter. 

Deism: the absentee Father
The doctrine of the Trinity has been discarded by some notable Americans. Thomas Jefferson, a Deist, thought it was useless. For him God was an absentee Father who exists, but has nothing to do with day to day life. Jefferson went through the bible and deleted all of the miracles of Jesus, including the resurrection, and reduced Jesus to being a teacher of elevated morality. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Emerson also thought how humans thought about God was irrelevant. If God did exist, he was not involved in human affairs in any meaningful way.  What has been left in the wake of the discarded Trinitarian image of God is any rational method of thinking about God that helps the larger American community negotiate life in any way that finds meaning beyond consuming things and personal pleasure. Why is how we think about God important?
 
The God that prefers one child over another
In addtion to Deism, some ways of thinking about God in the past posit a very violent understanding of what it means to be a human being. It is as if God prefers one child over another. In the Old Testament, the people of Israel found the child sacrifice to Moloch practiced by other cultures to be deeply repugnant. In the akkedah, the story of Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac, the people of the book were instructed that God did not require sacrifice of children. Gen. 9.  The human tendency to sacrifice future generations to present happiness is the trait of human beings under great stress.
 
The Thugee or Thugs of India were robbers who would strangle their victims, rob them and then bury them. They were both Muslims and Hindu. Both found justification in their religious beliefs about Kali (Hindu). The Muslims also took a Hindu deity and fitted into their monotheistic Muslim beliefs. In either event, God was used to justify and ritualize their criminal behavior. In Sonora, Mexico, the image of Santa Muerte, a skeleton wearing a cloak and carrying a scythe, fits the same religious way of thinking. You can buy statues of Santa Muerte in Tucson. Religion does not create human violence, but it can empower our darker tendencies when our image of God is corrupted by our desire for power. The god of Radical Islam apparently countenances violence against those who do not accept the prophet Mohammed. 
 
Christians and the Trinity: We are all called to relationship with the Father
How we think about God is formed by how Jesus talked about God. Throughout the four Gospels, Jesus describes himself in divine terms. [i] In John’s Gospel, Jesus is explicit; he uses the phrase “I Am” to describe himself. That is the very way God described himself to Moses in the burning bush. Ex. 3. In the Gospel today, Jesus describes the Holy Spirit in a divine way.
 
"I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth. He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears, and will declare to you the things that are coming. He will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you. Everything that the Father has is mine; for this reason, I told you that he will take from what is mine and declare it to you." Jn. 16:12-15.
 
Jesus is the Wisdom of God made human. The Spirit is the Wisdom of God present in his Creation. God the Father is the Creator.
 
God and Relationship
Our Trinitarian understanding of God comes to us from how Jesus spoke about the Father and the Spirit. God loves us, but more importantly, God is love. The Fathers of the Church, like St. Athanasius, formulate our understanding of the scriptures.  We don’t come to God by sacrificing future generations or through power. We come to God by recognizing him in the human community. Human thriving cannot be found by sacrificing future generations or taking from others. Instead, we rest in peace with God when we look out for the good of others.
 
Why is what we believe about God important? Because what we think about God is what we think is most important in life. What we think is most important in life is the most important factor in the choices we make in our life. The choices we make in our life affect not our own lives, but the lives of all those in our community. The moral confusion in America is rooted in the idea that Jesus Christ is just one among many other moral teachers. If we all believe in the same God, then all of our life choices ought to look the same or similar. But they don’t. Our American community runs on the fumes of a Christian past.  The belief that there is one God, three divine persons has been replaced by a belief in over 300 million, individualistic little gods in the United States.