The Rev. Dr. John Tamilio III, Pastor
© 2024, Dr. Tamilio
As an ordained minister, I often find myself in curious conversations. Let’s say I am at some event, or a party or a get-together, and I am just relaxing or engaged in a casual conversation, the minute someone finds out what I do, they either get very quiet (as they ruminate about what they just said hoping I will not report their misgivings to “my boss”), or they defend what the believe (mind you, I hardly ever never ask), or they want me to prove the existence of God, or they have a burning theological question and they want to know what I think about it. How was the virgin birth possible? Did Jesus really rise from the dead? What happens when we die? One of the queries I often have lobbed at me is How can God be a Trinity? Actually, it is more of a fastball than a lob.
This is a question that has vexed the faith since Jesus ascended to Heaven and the New Testament was written. How can one being (God) be three persons and how can three persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) be one? Makes no sense.
I have preached upon this before. I do every year at this time. We revisit some of the best explanations that have been offered by theologians throughout history. At the end of the day, they all fall flat, because they deal with a type of human logic and a constructive metaphysical projection that cannot possibly encapsulate the nature of God. All human thought and language fall short of God. Theology is always a stab in the dark. It is built upon human language, and anyone who has ever studied postmodern literary theory will tell you that language always fails. It cannot encapsulate the intricacy of what we feel or what we think, even about everyday things, so how much less effective or accurate are our words when speaking of divine things?
Maybe it is all about love. I mean this in a subjective, analytical sense. Love is one of those things that I cannot define or explain to you. You know it when you feel it, and the feeling is almost impossible to translate into words. Maybe the Trinity is the same way.
Augustine tried to explain the Trinity using love as an example. He said that the Father is the one who loves (the lover), the Son is the beloved, and the Holy Spirit is the love that exchanged between them. That is a wonderful explanation, but it fails miserably because it assumes a sort of separation between Father and Son. Plus, this isn’t where I want to go with this sermon, and it is not what I mean by love.
In order to understand love, you have to experience it. You cannot define it. Again, language fails. Words can give you a sense of what love is, but you have to feel it to know it. That is how I think about God and the Trinity.
You remember how I started this homily. When I am at those gatherings people sometimes ask me to prove God. When it is a smug atheist who wants to get into an argument, I am prone not to take the bait. However, when it is a genuine argument, my honest response is, I can’t prove God, just like you cannot disprove God. But that is the beauty and the point of faith. If I could prove God, like some mathematical theorem, then God would become a matter of fact not a matter of faith, draining it of all its beauty and mystery, its glory and grandeur.
Which is why I return to love. You have to feel it to know it. It cannot be taught. You can teach people about God and the Christian faith, so I guess that is different, but you truly need to experience God to understand God — and the same is true of the Trinity. It is not a problem to be solved. It is about love and a relationship.
So here is how I explain the Trinity to the curious party-goer.
Like the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes, I believe that God put the idea of himself in us. It is not something we manufactured, contrary to what Marx or Freud said. God, as the late 18th/early 19th-century German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, has imbued us with a sense of absolute dependence. We are absolutely dependent on a higher power for our very lives and everything that sustains them.
The Father is the Creator of Heaven and Earth — of all that lives and breathes or is still. That is the first person of the Trinity: the demiurge as some philosophers call him. Without God there would be nothing. Scientists say the universe is 13.8 billion years old. The earth has been around for 4.5 billion years. Human beings have only been around between 100,000 and 200,000 years, so let us split the difference and say 150,000. The universe is too perfect to be the result of a random explosion that came from nothing. Nothing comes from nothing, so it makes more sense that there is a designer behind it all.
Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, is the one through whom God came to the earth in person to redeem it. The world fell far short of the paradise God intended it to be, because we used our free will to try to do it our way. When human beings try to do it their way, it usually ends poorly. Jesus came to show us the way. Jesus came to save us from ourselves.
But being a person has its limits, even though Jesus was fully human and fully God. A human cannot remain here forever. Something would have to become of Jesus’ human body if he was not executed when he was 33. After he ascended into Heaven, he gave us the Holy Spirit, which we discussed last Sunday. The Spirit is the presence of God in our lives now — guiding and sustaining us, blessing and inspiring us, filling us with a sense of the sacred and calling us to be and see and find more of God. As Augustine also said, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee, O God.”
Each of these different aspects are manifestations of the One true God. This should not sound that strange. Each of you have relationships with different people depending on who, what, or where. For example, you could be someone’s spouse, someone’s parent, some’s sibling, someone’s friend, someone’s neighbor, someone’s employer or employee, and you’re definitely someone’s child. That’s a lot. All in one person. Makes God three in one seem a little more possible, doesn’t it.
I know. God is one being in three persons. That’s different. It is. But God is God and always will be. God is above all. He is the one to be praised. He is love — and it is the same love through which he created the world and the same love through which Jesus saved it, and it just so happens to be the same love that the Holy Spirit uses to guide it and sustain it and sanctify it.
In the end, I cannot explain it. You have to experience it, and that is easy to do, because it is everywhere. Everyone looks far and wide for it, but it is closer than you realize. You can find it here every Sunday. How do I know that? I can give you dozens of examples. Here’s one. My favorite part of every worship service occurs once a month: Communion Sunday. It is when we pass the peace. You guys pass the peace like you are on spiritual steroids! It is amazing. People walk all around to give hugs and to even chat. You can’t even wait for coffee hour before chatting.
But that’s what a family does. It’s certainly what Italian families do. There’s lots of hugging, and kissing, and catching up — and that’s just when you come through the front door, and, when we get to the kitchen, there’s lots of eating. I think you might all be Italian.
And maybe God is, too. You’d think so, because of all the love. And that’s how we experience God: through his love, poured out as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen