Reflections for Sunday (5/30) Pt. IV

On May 30 I will be preaching at Luther Memorial in Des Moines, Iowa. This particular Sunday of the church year is focused on the Holy Trinity.

On this post I am inviting any and all thoughts about the Trinity.

What does it mean to you?
How do you describe the Trinity?
How does the Trinity relate to your faith?
Does the doctrine of the Trinity matter?
What do you understand about the Trinity?
What don't you understand about the Trinity?
What resources have you used to help understand the Trinity? Are the helpful, or confusing?

I invite you all to share, and help me reflect about preaching at Luther Memorial. I am particularly interested in what any members at Luther Memorial might be thinking. Preaching is a communal activity, and I am excited to utilize the internet to strengthen our bond as sisters and brothers in Christ.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Comments

  1. AnonymousJanuary 25, 2010 at 7:25 PM

    I really like what you said in your sermon--we can't "explain away" the mystery of the triune God. However, we must own and acknowledge it--why else would we have a special "Trinity Sunday"?

    Over Christmas break, I had a random conversation with my brother, who articulated to me the Trinity as he understood it. With no theological classes/training beyond confirmation, he basically said that he understood God to be three persons but one being (at which point I seriously questioned the depth of my more formal studies).

    My point is that we are capable of owning the mystery, of letting God be felt, understood, and experienced in all three persons without needing to have an ideal universal metaphor. The doctrine of the Trinity does matter, we need all three persons, but I don't know if any of us can wrap it in a nice neat little word box with a bow on it. Every analogy can be pushed too far and become either inadequate or heretical. Also, like you said, explaining it away doesn't work. Why would we want to explain away God?

    I'm sure that's less than helpful, but perhaps it's a random idea for some congregational member who may be in your church that morning, if nothing else.

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  2. AnonymousMarch 5, 2010 at 11:15 PM

    I was telling a Lutheran pastor I've been working with closely about some of the insights that I find very helpful, like learning to treat yourself as both a Will and a Process, or to slip easily between Calculation and Intuition, or between Sacred and Secular explanations of things, between God as Transcendent and God as Immanent. There were so many Twos like this, that I started writing them up on the whiteboard, and it became helpful to write them as Fours, to show how these Twos develop each other. Ended up with these Fours with some mysterious One in the middle, like "Who does the work? Me, God, Me because God allows me, God because I allow Him, Me because God allows me to allow Him, God because I allow him to allow me, etc." and it had a dove in the middle.

    I mentioned how these could all decay into petty versions, and doctrinal extremes that people could take up, and he asked, "What do you think makes that happen?" I thought and said, "The points around the outside not loving each other." He said, "You'd like the Athanasian Creed." I looked it up, and the only thing I think it's missing is that it should be the Athanasian Essay, be expanded to cover everything in the world, and change from being addressed to some heretical Other to cycling gently through its own internal contradiction. It could be itself in the form it's talking about, could sit there a verbal representation of the trinity.

    ReplyDelete

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