To the relief of many
but the disappointment of many more,
a legendary test was discontinued in 2010.
Until then, since 1932, All Souls College in Oxford
required applicants to write
a 3 hour essay on a single noun.
The unveiling of the word was so highly anticipated
that each year non-applicants gathered outside the college
waiting for news of “the word” to waft out.
Applicants discovered the word
by flipping over a single sheet of paper
where it sat there, all alone,
like a tiny incendiary device.
In some ways, this is similar
to my flipping the page of the lectionary
and finding the word Trinity
sitting there like a small TUXO: the abbreviation for
a theological unexploded ordinance
staring me down with a holy grin
daring me to explain this central yet inexplicable mystery.
So I turned to survivors of the Oxford word test
to see if any of their strategies would be helpful.
Historian Robin Briggs describes his essay on the word “innocence”
as an exercise in showmanship
to avoid answering the question:
an approach that, unfortunately,
too many preachers have attempted on this feast.
Another applicant, recalling his essay on “harmony,”
reported that “no matter what word I was given
I would structure my answer using Hegel’s dialectic.
Then, like a chef rummaging through
the back of the refrigerator
searching for unlikely soup ingredients
I added a little from the philosopher Emmanuel Kant
then finally an analysis of the vocal work
of Crosby Stills Nash and Young.”
Bravo: I love Crosby Stills Nash and Young!
Unfortunately he didn’t get in,
so why follow one failed attempt with another.
While some strategies may not be especially useful
when delving into the mystery of the Trinity,
the tactic of riffing on a theme
rather than explaining the inexplicable
might be more fruitful.
My poetic muse for this morning
is not Crosby Stills Nash and Young, nor
Hegel, Kant or some other philosopher,
but instead the theory of the Big Bang.
As most of us know, from popular science
or the hit comedy series of the same name,
the Big Bang is the most widely accepted hypothesis
explaining the origins of the universe.
The theory contends that 13.8 billion years ago
all the energy in the cosmos
was squeezed inside an inconceivably small space
tinier than an atom.
Then for some inexplicable reason
this cosmic seed exploded
expanding in all directions at the speed of light.
Scientists believe they can prove many things
about the birth of the universe from evidence like
its continuing expansion
and the abundance of light elements such as hydrogen.
Yet, the great mystery that remains unsolved,
and a fundamental challenge to this theory,
is: what existed before the Big Bang?
If all the known universe exploded out of
an unimaginably dense and hot and tiny seed…
Who planted the seed?
What existed before it?
What lit the fuse?
The state behind the Big Bang is called the “generative nothing,”
so, as one blogger asked:
before the Big Bang, what was nothing doing?
And what does any of this have to do with Trinity Sunday?
Ok … here’s my thinking:
before the New Testament, before Jesus,
His Jewish forebearers did not believe in a Trinity.
The Hebrew scriptures clearly declare the unity of God
and, while sometimes God sends an Angel,
and there is Old Testament language about the Sons of God,
Jewish scholars and teachers consistently reject
Christian teaching about the Trinity.
So here is where the history of the universe fits in:
consider Jesus as the Big Bang behind this mystery;
all of the theological density and energy
previous to that in Judaism
was metaphorically compressed into a divine singularity
which Jesus exploded in an ever-expanding revelation
radiating in all directions at the speed of God.
So the divine universe we now proclaim as Trinity was revealed.
In the process, as one preacher suggested,
Jesus actually “complicates” God. He continues,
“Many people thought they had a good grasp
of whom God was and what God is up to.
Then came Jesus
and listening to [him], watching him [minister,]
dying on the cross and rising from the dead
people had to … start revising
and complexifying their notions of God.”
And, just as Jesus overturned people’s notion
of whom God loved,
who was invited into his peaceable Kingdom,
and how we were to live driven by charity and not rules,
so Jesus’ Trinity revelation
subverted images of divinity and sacred authority
with a God-head revealed
in an eternal dance of mutuality and interdependence.
Recently I have been on a Walter Isaacson reading kick,
first having read – or more accurately listened to –
his autobiography of Einstein,
and now launching into his autobiography of Ben Franklin,
having just completed his autobiography of Da Vinci.
While there were many great ideas in the latter,
one of the most revelatory passages for me
was Isaacson’s description of Da Vinci’s deployment
of the painting style known as “sfumato.”
Derived from the Italian word “to smoke” (fumari),
this technique avoids distinctive or harsh outlines, and instead
employs a careful blurring, blending and smudging
that delivers a smoky atmospheric effect to a painting;
it is an effect on full display in Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
In contrast, Da Vinci’s younger contemporary and rival,
a kid by the name of Michelangelo,
used sharp, delineated outlines in his paintings,
so obvious in his breathtaking Sistine Chapel masterpiece.
Da Vinci rejected this approach to painting,
arguing that one’s sense of sight
does not perceive a world of hard lines and clear separations,
but images that are more
fused, blurred, indistinct and hazy.
This is precisely the technique which delivers
such an air of mystery to the Mona Lisa
with its eerie background,
sheer head veil,
and disarming smile.
While I don’t believe that Jesus is more a fan
of Leonardo’s style than that of Michelangelo,
his familial approach to God
and parallel approach to people
displayed what might be considered
a kind of sacred sfumato technique.
He didn’t draw bold lines between the pure and impure,
saints and sinners,
the able-bodied and the infirm,
Jews and Gentiles,
women and men,
or himself, his heavenly Father, and his abiding Spirit.
Rather, in his ministry he kept blurring the lines,
something quite upsetting to many teachers of the law
who expended considerable energies
reenforcing and intensifying social and religious boundaries.
Thus, maybe it was not so much
that Jesus complicated other images of salvation
or long standing images of God
as much as he subverted them.
Jack Zipes is a name with which you might not be familiar.
He taught German at the University of Minnesota
specializing in fairy tales.
His unique perspectives in these studies
is revealed in the titles of his many publications, such as:
- Don’t bet on the Prince
- The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding hood
- Why Fairy Tales Stink
- and his classic, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion.
A consistent theme in his writings
is that this apparently innocuous genre of writings
which generations deem appropriate for feeding their offspring
are in fact a powerful form of discourse
capable of destabilizing attitudes and behaviors.
Modern evidence for this appears in Broadway musicals such as
Into the Woods, with its seditious text:
witches can be right, giants can be good
Or Shrek, in the riotous showstopper,
“Let your freak flag fly.”
In his Tolkien Reader[i], the author of the Lord of the Rings
– one of the 20th century’s most powerful crafters
of timeless fairy tales – wrote that a fairy tale
“does not deny the existence of … sorrow and failure:
the possibility of these is necessary
to the joy of the deliverance;
[rather] in the face of much evidence
it denies universal final defeat.”
Jesus’ revelation of the Trinity
precisely does just that:
it denies the universal final defeat of Resurrection
and the hope of those who believe in it.
It denies the universal final defeat of human bonding
proclaiming that we are all children of a single parent God.
And it denies the universal final defeat of evaporating hope
in the face of so much personal and societal brokenness,
as the Holy Spirit continues to lavish its gifts
upon all those willing to collaborate
in anointing this bruised and hurting world.
The feast of the Trinity does not celebrate some obscure God doctrine,
but is a summons to live like the Trinity:
as a community of interdependence and love,
a community that rejects dominance and embraces mutuality,
a community that models subversive inclusivity,
a community that embraces the mission that the poet, Malcolm Guite, evokes:
In the Beginning, not in time or space,
But in the quick before both space and time,
In Life, in Love, in co-inherent Grace,
In three in one and one in three, in rhyme,
In music, in the whole creation story,
In His own image, His imagination,
The Triune Poet makes us for His glory,
And makes us each the other’s inspiration.
He calls us out of darkness, chaos, chance,
To improvise a music of our own,
To sing the chord that calls us to the dance,
Three notes resounding from a single tone,
To sing the End in whom we all begin;
Our God beyond, beside us, and within.
This is our fervent prayer to the Trinitarian God,
who loves, sustains and guides us forever and ever.
[i] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Tolkein Reader (New York: Ballantine, 1966), 68-69.