The Trinitarian Life

A Sunday School teacher prided herself on her biblical expertise, on her innovative teaching methods, and on her promptness. One Sunday she was running behind schedule and speeding in her car to get to the church on time. Just ahead, she witnessed a hit-and-run accident and the victim lay bleeding on the side of the road. The Sunday School teacher faced a dilemma and she responded immediately. She drove even faster to compensate for the delay the accident had caused. She chose to speed on to church rather than waste time with someone who was probably already dead. Her attendance record remained unblemished.

In some ways, that's a perfect story to describe the challenge we face today. Today we celebrate a doctrine -- the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. We honor and thank our Sunday School teachers, and we welcome Jim Lang into our family of faith through the Sacrament of Holy Baptism in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the Triune God, at 9:30. Today is unusual because today we celebrate a doctrine. This is the only Sunday of the year we focus on a docrine rather than on an event (though our first lesson and Psalm focused on the event of creation). Sometimes we call that doctrines dogmas and sometimes we confuse dogma with dogmatism. The writer and sculptor Edward Robinson points out that the word "dogmatic" as used today means, ironically, to have abandoned the original spirit of dogma. We could say that the Sunday School teacher who cared more about her attendance record than about helping a victim bleeding on the side of the road was dogmatic. And she somehow abandoned the original spirit of dogma. In the early church, [Edward Robinson says,] dogma simply meant acceptance, or consensus, what people could agree on. The Greek root from which 'dogma' comes means 'what seems good, fitting, becoming' So, rather than doctrine or teaching, the word 'beauty' might be a more fitting synonym for what dogma really means.

For Christians, dogmas represent what is basically agreed on as the foundation of the faith. They are a restatement of the Christian mysteries, like the Holy Trinity. As such, they're probably not foremost in your minds when you come to church. Dogmas undergird our faith. They constitute the primary content of the creeds, they surface in worship when a creed is recited aloud. All the creeds deal with this central dogma of the Trinity. They are divided into sections or "articles" according to the three parts of the Trinity. They tell the mystery of Jesus' coming, death, and resurrection remarkably quickly and in simple language.

All these thoughts about dogma come to us from the writer Kathleen Norris. She was a rather agnostic poet living in New York who moved to rural North Dakota when she inherited her grandparents' farm. She became involved in the small Presbyterian Church of her grandmother there and was converted to Christianity. Subsequently she became affiliated with a Benedictine Monastery and writes and speaks about making sense of Christian faith in our time and context. She says, Friends who find my religious conversion inexplicable, if not annoying, ask how it is that I can live with dogma. It's not that difficult, I tell them, because dogma is not dogmatism, which [in the words of Gregory Wolfe,] results when 'theological systems become calcified and unreal.' Dogma in this dogmatic sense is peripheral to my concerns. If I do get caught up in fretting over one of the mysteries of the faith that is expressed as a dogma, it's usually a sign that something else is wrong, something I need to sit with for a while and pray over so that I can see the problem clearly. But when dogma is in its proper place as beauty, she says, it appeals to my poetic sensibility, rather than to my more linear intelligence. I have a hard time, in fact, separating 'dogma' out from the sheer joy of worship. At its best, the sights and sounds of worship, its stories, poems, hymns, and liturgical actions, are beautiful in the sense of 'good, fitting, and becoming.' (p. 325)

And so the dogma or doctrine or teaching of the Trinity is not about "getting it right" or "understanding it correctly," or "doing it right or even "being right" and priding ourselves on that the way the Sunday School teacher prided herself on her unblemished attendance record.

When we're baptized, as Jesus commands us to do in today's Gospel, we're baptized into the name of the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In our ELCA document on "The Use of The Means of Grace, this is one of the principles of Baptism. Baptism into the name of the triune God involves confessing and teaching the doctrine and meaning of the Trinity. (Principle 24) The name is a summary of the power and presence of the triune God and of that teaching which must accompany every Baptism. (Background 24B)

I invite you to abandon the dogmatism you might associate with the Trinity and jump in to the beauty of what this means for your life -- for Trinitarian living. Implicit in being baptized in the name of the Trinity is participation in community and relationships. Baptism is initiation into a community of faith, a community of people who are in relationship with one another and God, much as the three-personed God is in community and in relationship with itself. And so therefore, baptism takes place within the corporate worship of the Church. It is not a private affair. Baptism is not about "me and God." It's much more about US and God and the interplay in all that.

Eugene Peterson, the translator of The Message, says that baptism into the name of the Triune God is a participation in the being and work of this three-personed, relational God. Imagine a folk dance, he says. A round dance, with three partners in each set. The music starts up and the partners, holding hands, begin moving in a circle. On signal from the caller, they release hands, change partners, and weave in and out, swinging first one and then another. The tempo increases, the partners move more swiftly with and between and among one another, swinging and twirling, embracing and releasing, holding on and letting go. But there is no confusion, every movement is cleanly coordinated in precise rhythms, as each person maintains his or her identity. The beauty of it is that the movements are so swift it is impossible at times to distinguish one person from another: the steps are so intricate that it is difficult to anticipate the actual configurations as they appear. And this dance is the perfect expression of the interplay of that GRACE of our Lord Jesus Christ, the LOVE of God, and the COMMUNION of the Holy Spirit that we invoke each time we begin worship together.

But this dogma, this beauty, is not to be confused with a dogmatism that is "out there," apart from who we are. It is not about a cramped or flat world of calcified and unreal concepts -- concepts that require us to abandon our intellects in order to be included in this community, or to "check our brains at the door" in order to belong. This is a dance into which we have been welcomed when the water is poured and the words are invoked and the community embraces us as the new creation in Christ we have become. And how we live out that Trinitarian dance depends on the unique ways that God has gifted us. How we live out that Trinitarian dance depends on the ways in which our relationships -- in the dance of our community as a family of faith, shape us and form us.

And so we begin this Trinitarian life in Baptism. We continue this Trinitarian journey in the dance of community. We continue on in the life to come. We nurture the Trinity in our selves as individuals, made up of body, mind, and spirit. We live out the Trinity in our community, exercising the interplay of grace, love, and relationship that are ours because we have been washed in the baptismal bath in the name of this Triune God. It's not "out there," this Trinity stuff. It's in HERE. It's AMONG US. As Kathleen Norris says, the dogma is less a matter of what I believe than who I am. It's in the singing and celebrating, and the homilies, in the stories about how beautiful, how generous and fruitful we are, only because of WHOSE we are.

One final story about another Sunday School teacher: This teacher was speaking with a group of children. A visitor who happened to be a soap maker attempted to embarrass him. "How can you claim that religion is good and valid when there is so much suffering and evil in the world? What good are all the doctrines and dogmas that your religion has produced?"

The teacher motioned to a small child to move through the crowd. "This is Eric," the teacher said. "He is three. He is also dirty. I ask you, what good is soap when Eric and hundreds of children like him are dirty? How can you pretend that soap is effective?"

"What a foolish argument," the soap maker protested. "If soap is to be effective, it must be used."

"Precisely." If the dogmas of the church are to be effective, they must be used."

And so it is with the dogma of the Holy Trinity. The beauty of the Holy Trinity. It's real! Not only must it be used, but lived and celebrated and yes, even danced! The beautiful grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit dance with us and between us and among us always! [Welcome, Jim, to the Trinitarian life!]

Pastor Dana Runestad
The Holy Trinity
22 May 2005
Holy Cross Lutheran Church
Livonia, MI

Sources:

• Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, New York: Riverhead Books, 1998, "Dogma," pp. 324-327.
• Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places, Grand Rapids, Wm B. Eerdmans, 2005, pp. 44-47; 305-309.
• The Use of the Means of Grace: A Statement on the Practice of Word and Sacrament Adopted for Guidance and Practice by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Minneapolis, Augsburg Fortress, 1997, Principles 21 and 24.

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