Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Trinity Sunday, 2007
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
Episcopal priest Robert Capon once commented that when we human beings try to describe God, we are like a bunch of oysters trying to describe a ballerina. This is particularly true on Trinity Sunday when the preacher’s task is to describe our God who is three in one, one in three.
And so today all over the church, oysters like myself are climbing into pulpits trying to describe an indescribable ballerina. And in our perplexity we preachers are focusing on things like the ballerina’s history or how the ballerina’s arms and legs, though different from one another, move and belong to a unity. What we miss, of course, and what is in fact difficult to communicate, are other important things—how the ballerina captivates us and fills us with awe, how her movement reflects and informs our own, and how she catches us up in her dance.
So a few background comments about the Trinity—from one oyster to another: The Trinity was a teaching within the Church that was forged under fire, when the Church was an adolescent trying to discover and assert who it was and how to express its unique experience of God. This adolescent church was challenged mostly from the inside with a series of counter-hypotheses about God, all of which demanded that this adolescent church say what it believed about God, and to do so with some definition.
What emerged was the image of the Trinity: the Trinity, an image eschewing narrowness and expressing a holy diversity and richness within God that was at the same time grounded in a commonality. God, the one God, was Father, and Son and Holy Spirit. God, the one God, was Creator, and Redeemer and Sustainer, or as St Augustine put it, God the one God was Lover, and Beloved and Love itself: Three in One and One in Three.
And to communicate this complexity, the Church came up with symbols to represent the idea: three intertwined and intersecting circles, something called a “trefoil” which is really a stylized shamrock and the ever-familiar triangle. All these were a way to say, our God contains three distinct diversities of being, but these diversities have a common ground and purpose: the common ground and purpose of love.
But not all have appreciated these symbols or the Trinitarian language of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. For them, the symbolism was either too dry and abstract or reflected a kind of hierarchy in God that flowed over into a hierarchical way of viewing life. For them, the Trinity meant God was some kind of heavenly troika who lorded it over the rest of us, a hierarchy of power that was distancing, even destructive. Coming from this was an up/down notion of God and human beings: God as up and human beings as down, God as out there and human beings as left alone here, left alone in the reality of our lowly, pedestrian lives, very much like Capon’s oysters: in the muck, wistfully glancing up at a heavenly but imperious ballerina who danced far above us.
This is not, of course, the view of the Trinity I want to leave you with today. No, instead of wrestling out loud with how some oyster might try to describe a ballerina, I want to describe the experience of a child of God under pressure trying to make sense of the beauty and complexity of God in the same way that our pilgrim and adolescent church sought to do so many years ago. As you will see, the pressure this child of God is under is not related to sincere counter hypothesis. Rather, the pressure comes from the church’s own impulse to settle things too much, to shut down exploration, to quiet questions.
In his book entitled The Spiritual Life of Children, Robert Coles sets out to learn about how children think about and experience God. To get at this, Coles conducts over 500 interviews with Christian, Islamic and Jewish children as well as children with no religious affiliation. In these interviews Coles asks children to create a picture of God and to talk about God as they create their picture.
In a working class white neighborhood in Boston, Coles interviewed Tommy, a nine-year-old boy brought up in a Roman Catholic family. When asked to draw his picture of God, Tommy first said that he had no idea what God looked like or how to draw God unless he copied pictures of God he had seen in church. He related the following story to Coles:
“In Sunday School the nun showed us a picture of Jesus and asked us to copy it. She told us to be very, very careful, because it’s God we’re copying. My friend asked if God and Jesus looked the same. The nun told us they are the same! I wanted to ask some more questions, but I could see she wasn’t liking us asking any. She told us to ‘get down to business,’ and we sure did, right away! She carried this (blackboard) pointer around with her, and if she didn’t like what you said or the way you questioned her, she’d slam it down on your desk, and you knew what she was telling you: next time, it’ll be your hide! My dad has told me: never fight with a nun! My mom says they’re the toughest people on the whole face of the earth.”
After telling this story, Tommy paused, seemingly lost in thought. Then Tommy said: “Maybe God looks like a star. Maybe (God) looks like a planet. Maybe (God’s) the one who is the toughest face on the earth.”
Coles paused and asked Tommy to explain what he meant by his last comment. Tommy replied: “The nuns told us God rules the whole world, every place in it. (God) must be all over the place. Maybe (God’s) not someone like us; maybe (God’s) in hiding and…looks different. Maybe (God’s) big, as big as the moon or our whole planet. I’m sure my mom would agree (God’s) tougher than the nuns!”
And then no more words. Tommy took three crayons out of the set and began to draw. First he drew a large circle in the middle of the page and then another yellow circle, smaller and above the first. He then took another crayon and made faces on each—round eyes, a thin line for a nose, another thin line for a mouth, and then capped each face with a black head of hair. Then he reached back into the crayon box and took out crayons of many colors—purple, blue, red and green and told Coles “I decided to save these, so I can draw a rainbow; it can be seen all over the whole universe!” He then drew a massive rainbow that bracketed and sheltered both faces he had drawn.
Tommy then sat back, looked at his drawing and said: “I thought I would give us God the father and God the son. The sun is the father and the earth is the son. You see?” The rainbow is the Holy Ghost maybe. Well you see, God has a face and so did Jesus. The nun told us that they were the same, but the priest told my mother that’s not true, that they are different. I’m with the priest! Then there’s the Holy Ghost, and I never figured it had a face…the rainbow is one face the Holy Ghost might have. There could be others, maybe there could. I asked my uncle how the Holy Ghost comes down—because he would tell us it does….Maybe some birds carry the Holy Ghost down to us. Once I saw some birds sitting on a telephone wire outside our house, and one of the birds flew near us and then flew off. It might have had a message for someone, my uncle said. He told me never to forget that God has (a) way of reminding us that (God’s) around!”
In response to this, Coles wrote: “Tommy was trying with all his might to visualize the complex, tripartite deity he was learning about in his classes…who are, he pointed out to me several times “all together, but they’re separate (too).” His drawing was for me revelatory in its originality, in its dense symbolism, all tendered to the viewer with a disarming simplicity. His vision—the sun as the face of God, the earth (where Christ arrived, the incarnation) as the face of the son of God, and a rainbow (which is what we see on earth and owes its existence to the sun) as the Holy Ghost—was a thing of overarching beauty.”
Robert Capon’s comparison is all wrong. Though we may have a hard time describing this complex, rich Trinitarian God of ours, we are nothing like hapless mollusks who cannot reach beyond their murky world. For we are nothing less than the sons and daughters of the Most High. Sons and daughters of the Most High who under pressure in every generation are forever expressing what we have heard, what we have seen, and what we have known as the faces our God: a God who has blessed our lives in creation, who has graced our lives by living as one of us and who has inspired our minds, our hearts, our hands and our tongues to tell of God’s grace.
Works Cited or Consulted
Robert Capon quoted by Barbara Brown Taylor in “Three Hands Clapping,” The Living Pulpit, April-June 1999
The Spiritual Life of Children by Robert Coles
