Trinity Sunday

Hello Friends,

The readings for this week are here.

            As a pet owner, I find that I personify all the time. I take characteristics of human beings and assign them to my unknowing dog. Sometimes it’s silly, like when I think my dog is secretly a republican, and other times it is less purposeful and more a misunderstanding of how little he is like a human being. We tend to learn about personification sometime in elementary school. It’s usually during a study of poetry. We lean about simile and metaphor and then a week or so later, personification. And surely our homework assignment that night was to write five sentences that use personification.  And maybe once you finished the writing that the stars danced in the sky, and the wind sang as it swept over the fields, maybe then you tried to personify a quality, like hunger sat by the side of the road, waiting for my return.

            And elementary school is actually a good place to have visited this morning since our first reading comes from the book of Proverbs. It is a book best known for its maxims and sayings. It is at times like a book of fortune cookie fortunes, “Anxiety weights down the human heart, but a good word cheers it up” or maybe “all the days of the poor are hard, but a cheerful heart has a continual feast.” And it contains some of those time honored sort of sentiments like, “ Those who spare the rod hate their children, but those who love them are diligent to discipline them.” And mixed in with all of these sayings and truisms is our passage for today.

            What kind of scriptural text is this, you might ask? And what are we meant to take from it today? It might be helpful to know a little more about the book of Proverbs first, to begin to lay some groundwork for answering these questions. Proverbs is a collection of texts that are similar to many other ancient Near-Eastern texts, especially a few found in Egypt. These texts were used by young men in scribal school to copy and learn how to write, but also to gain some knowledge as they wrote and rewrote each line. It was a little like a handwriting workbook. The book is addressed to a child, and begins with a treaty on the value of learning. It says that it is a book for the simple and “for gaining instruction in wise dealing, righteousness, justice and equity.”  So it’s a moralistic handwriting workbook. And the moral of the story is this: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.” In fact, this line occurs 14 times in the book of Proverbs.  Normally fear is not something I particularly associate with wisdom. But I wonder if the emphasis on fear and it’s connection to wisdom and learning has something to do with the fact that this book is written for students.  I remember fear of authority figures (teachers, parents, God) being a big motivator in getting work done while I was a small child. So if we drop out the fear aspect of this line, it still reminds us of the connection of God to wisdom. I want to take a few minutes to focus on our passage from today, which is one of three poems about Wisdom in the book of proverbs. It also comes right after a chapter instructing boys to be wary of strange women. And before we got too excited that wisdom is personified as a woman, it is good to note that in the next chapter, folly is personified too, and she is a woman as well.  

            Scholars think that these poems about wisdom were shoehorned into Proverbs since the subject fit the with the learning theme. But who is wisdom? And why is she speaking? And what does it mean that she is a woman? Most Biblical scholars now think that Wisdom was probably a goddess in ancient Israel. Yes the Israelites became monotheists, but it is clear throughout the Old Testament that they were not always monotheists, and while some of them held God, YHWH to be the supreme God, they were not always very good at not worshiping other gods too. Think of when Moses goes up to get the 10 commandments, and he finds that the Israelites have created the golden calf and have once again gone back to worshiping other gods. This passage then is a remnant of when wisdom might have been a separate entity, her own self, but as the Israelites became true monotheists, their sacred texts began to reflect that. And so then instead of this being a poem about the wisdom goddess, it becomes a poem about a personification of a virtue that scribal students, and later young readers of this text would seek to obtain. Wisdom had to be re-rendered not as a goddess, but as a virtue—and I am wondering this morning about the connection of this action to the creation of the doctrine of the Trinity. This morning is of course, Trinity Sunday. A Sunday especially reserved for talking about the theology of the Trinity.

            The word Trinity does not appear any where in our scriptures, because it is a doctrine that developed in the first three hundred years or so of Christianity. The early Christian thinkers wanted to remain monotheists, and so they needed a theology that would allow a God in three parts, yet was only one entity. And the concept of the Trinity helped them to explain it.

            What made those ancient Israelites and Early Christians desire to be monotheists? When scholars study the ancient world they find that monotheism was really an anomaly. It was a very strange thing. And I don’t think it is so much that these people desired to be monotheists, but that their God required it of them. Certainly their belief in only one God made them a unique people. And it is likely that it helped them maintain their identity through oppression and exile. And for the Early Christians, it kept their movement linked to Judaism and retained the unity of God.

            I want to turn back to our text. As we read this text as 21^st century Christians, I think our tendency is to try to relate wisdom to one of the three parts of the trinity. I think as tempting as it is to connect wisdom with the Holy Spirit, a better connection is to the second part of the trinity, the Son. If we use the connection of the divine word, being with God at the beginning of creation, then when we hear wisdom say, “When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep” we think of that word being with God. At the end of our passage, Wisdom says that she was “rejoicing in his inhabited world

and delighting in the human race,” which sounds startling like Jesus made flesh, come down to be with us, to love us, to delight in us.  This poem in proverbs then provokes me to think of Jesus, before he was incarnate through Mary, before he was known to us as the Son, crying out in the streets of Jerusalem, as a goddess, begging for those passing by to listen. That might be a pretty radical thought to have on a Trinity Sunday.

            There is a way in which I feel that the Trinity, and even monotheism as a whole provide humanity with the opportunity to construct ideas, and to come up with structures and doctrines to make things they know are true about God true. At it’s core what we understand to be true about God is this: that God is a unity. God is one thing. God is made up of three parts, which are distinct but not independent. And each part of God has a different way of relating to humanity. And this is the other true thing we know about God, that God delights in humanity, that God reaches out to humanity. The three part aspect of our God suggest that we have a God that is always in relation, the three parts to the other parts, as well as each of the parts to us. Tertullian, a second century Christian theologian, used the language of theater, and arts to describe how God functions, he described each of the parts of God being like masks an actor dons, but included the other two parts of the trinity in the action by saying that they were dancing around. I like this image of a dancing, spinning, turning God. I think I like it because it reflects that unity of God, which we know is true, we feel it’s true, we hear God saying it is true through the scriptures. And God calls us into a unity as well, and we are made that unity week after week by sharing in the Eucharist. We become the one body of Christ. For this we give God thanks and praise. AMEN.