The Poetry of the Trinity

The post today is an altered version of a talk I gave at Otter Creek's contemplative service on Wednesday night. Judy Thomas told me I had to post it, and well, I always listen to my blogmom.

The Scriptures I refer to are Exodus 3:1-6, Romans 8:12-17, and John 3:1-16 That'll help with some of the context.

The Scriptures above are all ones intended to cast our minds toward the Trinity, as this coming Sunday is Trinity Sunday according to the High Church Calendar.

Because of this, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Trinity and how it seems to work both in our theology and our practice. Ever since the doctrine of the Trinity was officially recognized in 381 by the Council of Constantinople, I think that Christianity has looked at it as the final call on the matter, which I believe it is. Although historically some churches, including some churches of Christ, have not deemed it so. For instance, the song Holy, Holy, Holy has had lyrics changed in some of our hymnals from to "God over all, and blest eternally" from "God in Three Persons, Blessed Trinity," which is especially peculiar considering that Holy, Holy, Holy was written specifically for Trinity Sunday, but…

What I would like to bring up is how we think about the Trinity. As I stated before, I think that we’ve thought about the Trinity as the final answer on the nature of God. He exists simultaneously as the overall Creator God the Father, Jesus Christ the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit of God, the Comforter who remains with us in this time before eternity. I had the book 3 in 1 as a kid, that used an apple with the peel, the meat, and the core to illustrate the Trinity. Good as far as it goes, but even comparisons like that can break down.

However, this can sometimes be a very cold way to think about God. We split him up into pieces and parts and relegate each part with a function and everything fits into its nice and neat section. But honestly, I don’t think the Trinity works that way. I think the Trinity works like poetry.

Have any of you ever wondered why there is so much poetry in Scripture? I don’t know this for sure, but I would imagine that anywhere from 30 to 40% of the Bible is poetry, mainly in sections that we skip over like the prophets and the longer Psalms, but if we think about it, poetry must have some meaning for it to be so prominent in our Scripture.

In a section of his book, Searching for God Knows What, Donald Miller talks about the use of poetry in Scripture. One of his assertions is that poetry allows God through the writers to express ideas and feelings and emotions that cannot be expressed any other way. He says:

I began to wonder if the ancient Hebrews would have understood this intrinsically, if they would have sat around watching plays and reading poems knowing this is where real truth lies, and if our age, affected by the Renaissance and later by the Industrial Revolution, by Darwin and the worship of science, hasn't lost a certain understanding of truth that was more whole. If you have a girlfriend and you list some specifics about her on a piece of paper—her eye color, her hair color, how tall she is—and then give her this list over a candlelight dinner, I doubt it will make her swoon. But if you quote these ideas to her in a poem:

She walks in beauty like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes …

… she is more likely to understand the meaning, the value inferred by your taking notice of her features. The same ideas, expressed in poetry, contain a completely different meaning. She would understand you were captivated by a certain mystery in her aspect, in her eyes and her stride and the features perfectly met upon her face. And while our earlier conceived list of features might have been accurate, it certainly wouldn't have been meaningful.

It makes you wonder if guys like John the Evangelist and Paul and Moses wouldn't look at our systematic theology charts, our lists and mathematical formulas, and scratch their heads to say, Well, it's technically true; it just isn't meaningful.

I think so many parts of our life work like this, and if we open ourselves to the poetry of life, we open ourselves to meaning and the joy and sadness and anger and energy that comes from all of that. Poetry is hard to understand. It takes thinking and considering and pondering. Many things that are not currently commodities we take the time for. That’s one of the reasons I love the music of Rich Mullins. He was someone in our time that I think could capture a bit of God with the lyrics and music that he made. Listen to the lyrics of the songs sometime and try to work in that. (From Sometimes By Step: Sometimes I think of Abraham/ And how one star he saw had been lit for me.... Or from The Color Green: And the moon is a sliver of silver/ Like a shaving that fell from the floor of a carpenter's shop....)

The Trinity is the same way. It’s not intended to be a systematic solution to the issue. It’s poetry. It’s the Father and the Son and the Spirit working together as one God. How? I don’t know, I don’t understand. But it’s not up to me to figure out how it works. It simply is. It’s poetry. It’s Love and that Love drives me to follow the Master and not simply espouse belief in him but do his teachings. It’s also a call to unity. For all of our disparate parts to come together in unity for the passionate pursuit of the Kingdom: Male, female; black, white, and every color in between; free thinking, anal; forceful, kind. For all of those to come together in a mission: the mission of sharing the love of God which is the good news of the Kingdom of God. The Trinity is our model for unity. May we strive to live out that poetry in our own lives.

So I ask you, gentle readers, what is the poetry in your lives? What do you do to try to find poetry in your lives?