TRINITY SUNDAY 2005
The Rev. Barbara Schlachter

Do you remember a few weeks ago when I was going through the list of the special days in May and I alluded to that clearly understood and well-beloved Festival of the Holy Trinity—and expected you all to laugh?

Well, that day is here. The Trinity is not at all clearly understood, in fact it is puzzling to most people, and therefore it is hard to make it a dearly beloved occasion.   

The dance you have just experienced is an attempt to give you a visual image of three persons in one, moving together in relationship, a dynamic mutual self-giving of life and love. The Celtic Christians understood the Trinity as a knot, a pretzel shape, an interlacing, never ending eternal movement, of life and mutuality.

Our collect for the day affirms both the threeness and the oneness of God: the eternal Trinity and the Unity. Clearly this is not for concrete thinkers; it is abstract and dynamic.

Most of us are probably content to let it all go without going further than what we usually call the Trinity-- Father Son and Holy Spirit.

The week before last I was at a meeting of the Committee on the Status of Women. Part of what we do at each meeting is to have a session on Anti-Racism training. This time we had a teaching on White Privilege. We are fortunate to have an African American woman and a Latina woman on the committee, and they helped us see and feel what white privilege is like. You can’t see it; it is so ordinary and so accepted that most white people don’t realize it even exists. And so continually, once again, my eyes were opened to the fact that the way I experience the world is not the only reality.

This was proceeded by a conversation that I am much more familiar with and that is male privilege. Like white privilege is it so invisible, ordinary and accepted that many people, especially those who benefit from it, do not even realize it exists. One of the greatest or worst examples of male privilege in traditional theology is the naming of the Trinity as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as if there were no other names for God. And as if our names for God are not all metaphorical. God is, after all, beyond all understanding.

Steve Hall, the rector of St. Mark’s Church in Fort Dodge , had a good article in the Living Church a couple of weeks ago. It was about the Battle for God we are waging in the Episcopal Church. He took a humble and self-limiting stance, crediting Ronald Rolheiser in his book The Shattered Lantern, in helping him understand that if we can imagine God, the God whom we imagine is not worth worshipping. He says, “If I can imagine God, that is get my arms/mind around God, then what does that say about this God?  It says that such a God is smaller than I am.”    J.B. Phillips wrote a book years ago entitled: “Your God is too Small.”  Friends, God is Huge!

So often we are like my dog, whom I dearly love, and who is quite smart. But when I point at something, he does not look where I am pointing, he looks at my finger. So often we mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon. We mistake our ideas of God for God.

Yet, we know that God calls us to a relationship and we must find words in which to address God. And when we do find these words, sometimes they put us in conflict with each other because our experience and our need to understand God as part of our experience means that for each of us some words work and some don’t.

Women who have suffered abuse at the hands of their fathers or other men often have a hard time calling God “Father.”  Women who are feminist often find it difficult to affirm a Trinity that uses all male language and pronouns to refer to God: Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Clearly Father is male language and Son is male language. But even Holy Spirit is referred to as male in the Nicene Creed. Yet—the Spirit wind that moved over the deep in the reading from Genesis and was responsible for creation is Ruach, the breath of life, and it is feminine, as is pneuma, Greek for Spirit. The Orthodox churches understand Holy Spirit as feminine, so how is it that we in the West have decided the male pronoun applies?

Perhaps some of you have heard some of us referring to the Holy Spirit “she” when we say the Nicene Creed.

 The Episcopal Women’s Caucus prints a t-shirt that says, “God is not a boy’s name.”

All of us at some time in our lives have had the experience of being left out—being the one not chosen for a team, the one not invited to the party, the last to hear about something that we thought surely we would be told. It is not an easy experience. No one likes it. And it is not only not necessary when it comes to God language but is terribly important that it not happen if we are committed to being One in Christ.

It isn’t about replacing names for God; it’s about adding them, from the Biblical witness and from our experience. Strong Mother God loves all her children, Jesus loves all his brothers and sisters, the Holy Spirit desires to make us all one. And that is the point of the Gospel for today—not that people get divided into those who have been baptized and those who haven’t, but that all are made One in the love and spirit of God.

There is a children’s book by Sandy Sasso called In God’s Name. It is too long to read and the illustrations are so wonderful that I simply want to recommend it. People in the book have their own name for God based on their experience of God. That is fine. But then they each insist that they have the one correct name for God. They eventually come to a pond where they look in and see themselves and each other, all with different names for God. They all say their names for God and at that moment they realize that no name is better than another and that all names are One. The book provides an enrichment of our vocabulary of words for God and also permissiveness to try new names to develop our relationship with God. It affirms one’s own way of addressing God and at the same time encourages respect for others’ ways of referring to God.

We were all probably told by our parents at some point in our lives, “Watch your language.”  My hope is that we would all watch our language and what it might do to stunt our imagination in the development of our relationship with God and what it might do to limit others-- our girl children who don’t know why we don’t talk about God as female, our boy children, who know themselves as sons and someday to be fathers and receive an inflation of their self-worth. Let our language about God be balanced and far reaching.

Finally what matters is not only what names we use for God, but that we each hear God calling our name, and calling us each to our  place in the Oneness in the One in Three.

Amen.