This coming Sunday is Trinity Sunday, the day in which theologians around the world struggle to express the utterly abstract, unexplainable concept of the Holy Trinity. I was talking to a pastor at text study this week, asking how he preaches on it. He said, well, there are some metaphors you can use... the three states of water, an apple, an egg. I've heard some different ones over the years, but none of them really manage to capture the ethereal, otherworldy triune God. The metaphors fail, not for lack of faithfulness, theological understanding, or trying, but because ultimately trying to apply a concrete metaphor to something that is, by its very nature, not concrete (at least 2/3 of it is not concrete, anyway), is impossible. God is too vast to be summed up as an apple seed or egg yolk, and too real to be summed up as water vapor. So what do we do with this (ha) unholy paradox?
I was talking about the conundrum with my fiance, P, who is a huge nerd. He's actually a math professor, if you want to know, and studies really abstract stuff that I usually end up looking at like Rorschach inkblots. ("Oh, this diagram has pretty colors... it reminds me of a rainbow. This one looks like a pony!") Because he is who he is, he also has a passing interest in string theory (yeah, I know, don't we all?). When I brought this up to him yesterday he said something that I will try to explain: God is like the cosmos. God is immeasurable and incomprehensible in scale. God is the force that created everything, that designed a universe so vast we can't understand it, down to the quarks and strings and dark matter and whatnot. And yet somehow, that same God that created all of that vastness also very concretely created us, and gives a care about us, so much of a care that God actually came down in the most concrete possible form to us: Jesus, fellow human being. In the exact same way that God is involved on a macro scale with all of life and creation, God is also involved in microcosm right there in the form of Jesus. But in order for us to comprehend, it has to be to a scale that we understand. Distinct, human, having a will and person of his own, but also fully a part of that same cosmos and Being that is God. Now, he didn't have an explanation for where the Holy Spirit comes in, and my idea is in dark matter. Scientists estimate that only about 4% of the matter in the universe can be accounted for, which leaves about 96% mysterious stuff that somehow holds it all together--some sort of weird gravity that keeps the out there stuff and the in here stuff all stuck together. It's present, and everywhere, and without it we would fall to pieces.
Okay, so I'm not a physicist. Although this metaphor is, like all of them, far from perfect, it encapsulates a truth about God that the even more concrete examples fail the grasp--and that's the scale of God. This is a God that IS in those massive planets and black holes and mysterious empty spaces and supernovas and everything else, but is also inextricably linked to us. God is of a scale that we can't comprehend, and so in order to meet us, God became concrete like us in the form of Christ, to love us, walk with us, suffer with us, and redeem us. And the Spirit acts going between the out there and the down here, drawing near to us so that we can experience God even though God is beyond our imaginings. I think this touches on a truth that both allows us to use our feeble metaphors, and poke holes in them: God is in all, and so is represented in all of our silly ways, cosmic, mystical, concrete, apple, egg, state of matter, in nature, in us, between us, around us.
There is no good way to explain the Trinity, because we live here in a world limited by the laws of physics like gravity, linear time, single dimensions, and entropy. But in the same way that we experience our world and the universe and relationships with loved ones, we experience God in many different ways. God is a God who wants to reveal him/herself to us, and I believe is not above doing that in any number of ways. Sometimes it feels like almighty omnipotence, and sometimes it feels like Jesus-in-the-face-of-a-stranger, and sometimes it feels like the Holy Spirit rushing into a room like we talked about last week at our first week of Pentecost. Fundamentally, God is a God who is both cosmicly huge and minutely present in all of the tiny little moments of our lives. When we think of this, it can make us wonder like the Psalmist: "What is man that you are mindful of him?" And then know that the answer is simple: we are beloved, cherished, precious. Important as a star and tiny as an ant all at once. But only a God who is as great and vast as the universe could do what Jesus did for us, and care as much as that, and hold all our tiny lives and problems while also holding Jupiter and Andromeda. And so we sit back and fathom the mystery of a God who is this and that, here and there, with and away, tiny and vast, and try to live in such a way to work out whatever unimaginable, incredible plan that kind of God is working in our universe.
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