“The Trinity Doesn’t Make Sense”

Sermon by the Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

First Congregational UCC of Manhattan, KS

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

June 12, 2022

This is a sermon about what we don’t know. 

A sermon about how our confusion is not a bad thing. 

A sermon about the Trinity. 

Because it’s Trinity Sunday. 

In the church calendar, we have three Sundays in a row: Ascension Sunday, when we remember that weird and wonderful story about the resurrected Christ floating away into the clouds.

Followed by Pentecost Sunday (that was last week), when we hear the story of how the gift of the Holy Spirit was bestowed upon our spiritual ancestors in Jerusalem. 

Followed by Trinity Sunday, when we finally settle once-and-for-all all of the centuries-long debates about the true nature of our Triune God.

Wait. No. That’s not what we’re doing today. 

Trinity Sunday comes after Pentecost because it’s sort of a Pentecost Part Two. Having received the gift of the Holy Spirit, we’re meant to pause and linger a bit on this third person in the Trinity, I suppose.

Which is why it’s kind of funny that the text for today seems to be about someone else entirely: Lady Wisdom - Sophia. 

Wisdom in the Hebrew Bible is personified as a woman and Christians over the years have called her Sophia, Greek for wisdom. 

Sophia stands at the city gate, in the crossroads. She’s down at Dara’s buying a lottery ticket and sitting in front of Manhattan Brewing Company having a drink. She’s directing pedestrian traffic on College Avenue right before a K-State Football Game and you might catch a glimpse of her this summer at City Park Pool. My guess is she can even be found in the ether - at those digital crossroads of Facebook and Twitter - crying out, making her voice known, shouting for our attention. 

She’s everywhere all at once. There’s nowhere we can go to get away from her. What’s so important that she has to yell for our attention?

She says:

To you, O people, I call,  and my cry is to all that live.

The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago.

Ages ago I was set up, at the first,before the beginning of the earth.

When there were no depths I was brought forth…

When God established the heavens, I was there…

when God assigned to the sea its limit…

then I was beside her, like a master worker;

and I was daily God’s delight, rejoicing before them always,

rejoicing in their inhabited world and delighting in the human race.

Wait. What? She was there at the first? Before the earth? She was there when God made the heavens and the earth? How can Sophia be this important and most of us have hardly heard anything about her?

But there it is, in black and white. Sophia sounds an awful lot like the Word in the beginning of the Gospel of John, doesn’t she? “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God….”

I remember when I first learned about Sophia in seminary and my thought was, “Wait. Is there a fourth person in the Trinity? Why has no one ever told me about this before???”

Theologians haven’t been quite sure what to do with Sophia. Many folks have equated her with the second person of the Trinity: Christ. Since the description of her is so much like the description of the Word made Flesh in John 1, the idea is that Sophia and the Word are the same. They are the experience of God that came to earth in human form as Jesus. That Christ Force that moved into the neighborhood as an infant human, grew in wisdom and stature, spoke in parables, died at the hands of the Roman government, and somehow continued on in ways we can scarcely comprehend. 

Christ, Sophia, the Word made incarnate in Jesus. And for those paying attention to gender, yes, this means that our tradition holds that Christ is both masculine (the Logos, the Word) and feminine (Sophia, Wisdom). 

Other people have equated Sophia with the Holy Spirit. This is probably why we’re hearing about her today on this Pentecost Part Two. The Spirit has long been understood as feminine and not just in fringe parts of Christianity. In fact, one of the earliest writings about the Trinity doesn’t mention “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Instead, Theophilus of Antioch, writing in the first century, refers to the Trinity as God, the Logos (Christ), and Sophia (Wisdom). [1]

So is Sophia the Holy Spirit? Or is she the feminine aspect of Christ? Or a fourth part of the Trinity? Or something else entirely?

We don’t know. 

Now you might be thinking, “Okay, preacher. This might help me when I’m watching Jeopardy but what does it have to do with my faith life?”

Well - everything, really. 

Because this confusion, this confounding, this not knowing is at the core of what it means to be followers of Jesus. And on this Trinity Sunday, I want to suggest that the good news of the Trinity is that this weird and mind-blowing concept invites us into communion with a God that defies explanation. A God that refuses to be contained in a neat-and-tidy-box. A God who is beyond our wildest imaginings. 

I went through a very long period where the Trinity made me angry. I even wondered if I could still be a Christian because I didn’t believe in the Trinity. Newsflash: you CAN still be a Christian without believing in the Trinity. Many folks around here are, in fact, non-Trinitarian Christians. 

I didn’t like the Trinity because it felt too constricted. It felt like someone was trying to tell me, “Here. THIS is the way God is. Father, Son, Holy Spirit. That’s it.”

And when I listened to people try to explain all the ins-and-outs of how one person can somehow be three but also still just one, my head was spinning and I thought, “This just doesn’t make sense. At all. This can’t be it. God’s got to be bigger than this.”

But in the past few years, the Trinity has come to mean something else to me. It’s felt more like an invitation than a doctrine. Sophia standing there in the street, beckoning, inviting us to step into a more expansive vision of the Divine that defies our definitions. 

Perhaps the puzzle of the Trinity isn’t meant to be solved at all. Perhaps it stands there, like Sophia at the crossroads, as a testament to the vast, inexplicable nature of the Holy. Perhaps Sophia reminds us that it is wise, indeed, to remember that we don’t know anything, that we can hold onto knowledge with a lighter touch, and that our Stillspeaking God created us with open hearts and minds, ready to learn and grow.

“But how can we have a relationship with something we don’t understand?” you might be wondering. 

Well, we all have relationships with people and things we don’t understand every single day, don’t we? I don’t understand how my voice is amplified so that you all can hear it, or how my image is floating through the ether to those of you on Zoom. 

And none of us can truly understand the people we love. Even when we know them well, we can’t ever truly know them fully. Understanding someone is not necessarily a prerequisite for being in relationship with them or even loving them. Those of us who are cisgender, for example, can love and appreciate our nonbinary and transgender friends wtihout needing to fully understand their experience. We don’t have to understand someone in order to fully love and respect them. 

The same must be true for the Holy. Though the experience of God might feel a bit like trying to catch a cloud in a jar, we can still be in relationship with the One who calls the worlds into being, stands at the crossroads proclaiming the goodness of creation, comes to us in human form, and is present with each and every holy breath we take. 

This is what Sophia testifies to. Wisdom says that she was with God before the beginning and that they delighted in one another, rejoicing always, and rejoicing in the earth as it was being formed, and delighting in the human race.

Sometimes, prayer - sometimes, our relationship with God - sometimes, our faith - is not at all about having the answers. Sometimes it is simply about being aware of God’s gentle, loving gaze. Sophia is there delighting in us. Like a mother whose eyes sparkle every time her child walks into the room. Like a dog who leaps for joy when her humans come home from a trip. Like a tree that offers shade on a hot day and the sun that kisses our cheeks.

The God who we call Father, Mother, Holy Parent; Wisdom, Sophia; the Word, Christ, Logos; Holy Spirit, Paraclete, Advocate, Comforter delights in us. 

Even when we don’t understand. Thanks be to God. 

NOTES

[1] https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/theophilus-antioch