The Self-Revelation of the Triune God
EXAMINATION
Answer one question
From the following questions, three will appear in the examination paper.
1. Present some of the salient points in the theology of Karl Rahner on the Trinity. What does Sebastian Moore see as noteworthy in the experiences of the early Christians? How does Francois Xavier Durrell connect the Resurrection of Jesus with the Trinity?
2. “No other event reveals Trinitarian life in such an absolute manner as the Paschal Mystery”. In the light of this, how do Hans Urs Von Balthasar and Jurgen Moltmann consider Good Friday and Holy Saturday?
3. Explain the following: economic Trinity, immanent Trinity, perichoresis, appropriation, extra ecclesiam nulla salus, paradidonai, apophatic spirituality, lex orandi est lex credendi, Unitarianism, koinonia, anaphora, epiclesis, and anamnesis.
4. According to Leonardo Boff, what are the implications of perceiving the Trinity as a social model for the Church? Present some of the inadequacies in his consideration of this. Reflect how our Trinitarian thinking influences the way we see the relationship between the Universal Church and the Local Church. Name some important principles that are utilised when we perceive the Church in a Trinitarian fashion.
5. Give a brief summary of Vatican II’s teaching on the link between the Trinity and missionary activity, and on the salvific efficacy of non Catholic Church institutions. What does Karl Rahner mean by ‘anonymous Christian’? Why did it prove so controversial?
6. What is the great challenge for the Church in her attempts at interfaith dialogue? How do Jacques Dupuis and Raimon Panikkar employ a Trinitarian perspective in their approach to understanding the salvific efficacy of other religions? What is the danger about which Dominus Iesus is concerned?
7. What attitudes should our belief in the mystery of the tri-personal God inculcate in our spirituality? Show how we are immersed in the mystery of the Trinity in our celebration of the Eucharist.
8. Present some reasons why it is important to preach about the Holy Trinity. What guidelines would you offer the preacher for his or her sermon on the Holy Trinity?
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Chapter 10 - Preaching
Chapter Ten Preaching the Trinity
Following the Feast of Pentecost in the liturgical calendar, the Feast of the Trinity admittedly stands rather oddly in the liturgical year. All other feasts celebrate what God has done rather than what God is. Still, a moment’s reflection reminds us that the Trinity is, at least implicitly, everywhere in Christian worship. We normally begin our Christian pilgrimage with baptism in the triune Name. When couples are married in the church, the name of Father, Son, and Spirit is invoked. The 'Gloria Patri' honours Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; the 'Doxology' praises them. We sing 'Holy, Holy, Holy', often called the finest of the trinitarian hymns, every Sunday, and many traditional hymns which refer in successive verses to the Persons of the Trinity. References to God in prayers shift readily among the Persons. Moreover, belief in the Trinity lies at the heart of every Christian feast and every celebration of the Eucharist. The most common benedictions are trinitarian in form: even that from Numbers 6: 24-26 indicates the Trinity by the threefold repetition of 'Lord'. It is not simply one mystery among others.
However, rarely will one hear explicit reference to the Trinity in Sunday preaching. This alleged deficit is scarcely surprising; since the term 'Trinity' is not found in the Bible, so a 'biblical' preacher cannot be condemned for failing to use it. Some would go further and argue vociferously that we ought to emulate Scripture's concreteness and modesty and not clutter our minds and speech with ancient Greek philosophical speculation. Surely, people's deep sense of the Trinity will be shaped primarily by devotional and liturgical practices in which the presence of the Trinity is, indeed, more often assumed than named. In this thinking, it would be a loss, not a gain, if the awe of encountering God in worship were exchanged for a studied presentation of our verbal formulas.
Besides the challenge of speaking on the Trinity is immense, so much so that once a learned professor advised his students not to speak on the topic of the Trinity for more than three minutes, for fear of speaking heresy! A Cistercian tract of 1230 on the Feast of the Trinity instructed the community that on this day the abbot was to celebrate the Mass solemnly in community, that there were to be three lamps on the altar, and that there was to be no sermon on so complex a matter! Even the great St. Augustine, when introducing De Trinitate, noted the extreme danger and difficulty involved in regard to matters trinitarian: "For nowhere else is a mistake more dangerous, or the search more laborious, or discovery more advantageous" (1.5). The prospect of danger and of labour has resulted in a real reticence and reluctance to speak of this great mystery of our faith. After pondering the possibility that discretion may indeed be the better part of valour in such matters, one may decide to avoid such rocky shoals altogether.
In addition to the counsels of discretion, contemporary homiletical wisdom, regarding the challenge of relating to an entertainment-oriented, fast-paced, personal-needs-obsessed culture, would not give much immediate encouragement to the preacher who senses a need for deeper theological roots both for his or her own preaching and for the congregation to which he or she ministers. Narrative preaching that draws hearers into the story and lets them draw their own conclusions without laying on anything 'dogmatic' in tone or substance; pop-psychological approaches oriented towards feeding self-esteem and fostering coping skills; 'mini-sermons' that will not tax the attention spans of those accustomed to fast-moving images rather than to 'talking heads'; endless personal anecdotes and rather indiscriminate or self-serving self-revelation that seek to keep everyone feeling secure and cosy in the same boat; even verse-by-verse studies that comfort fundamentalist hearers who want to be assured that what they are hearing is biblical – none of these exactly lends itself to the disciplined proclamation of Christian doctrine, especially doctrine on the Trinity. As a result, there is a great reluctance to devote homilies on the central mystery of our faith as Christians.
Still, since the doctrine on the Trinity expresses the central mystery of our faith there is an obligation to preach about it. The reason doctrine was developed in the first place emphasises even more the importance of this obligation. The question is just why we speak as we do, and why it could be dangerous even, or especially, to our life of devotion and worship if we were to come to speak quite differently. When clergy fail to be a bit diligent in the precision department, not only does language begin to slip, but the slippage tends to be cumulative. Over not so very great a period of time, the language of worship comes no longer to convey accurately what Christians have traditionally believed and so worshippers are no longer imbued virtually unconsciously with sound doctrine. This question of doctrinal precision is more critical today than it has been for a long time, for two reasons: first, persons in the average congregation are stunningly ignorant of Christian fundamentals, lacking anything faintly resembling the routine catechetical instruction of an earlier era; and second, interfaith dialogue brought on by day-to-day encounters with increasing numbers of persons from non-Christian traditions puts pressure on us to be clear about what we consider essential to our own understanding of 'God'. To fail in our preaching to give our people any intellectual tools to help them understand why Christians speak as they do, leaves them with good grounds to consider Christianity incoherent or at best sloppy in its fundamental structure and the Christian God as something no more recognizable than an ‘enigmatic blur’. Not least important, they are also left without means to give any sort of coherent response to those from other traditions who might ask them for an accounting of the hope that is in them (I Pet. 3: 15). Thus, preaching about the Trinity is important in fostering and deepening a personal appropriation of the Triune mystery. Preaching affords the precious opportunity to develop a sense of prayer, liturgy, and spirituality in more consciously and explicitly trinitarian ways.
Guidelines for Preaching about the Trinity
Trinity Sunday is surely the one time in the year when it is obligatory to preach about the Trinity. This Sunday in itself provides a great opening for preaching on the mystery of the Triune God. For example, Samuel Shoemaker began his sermon as follows: “On every Sunday in the year in some way the Church gives voice to its faith in the Holy Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; for that is the great center of her faith. But on this one Sunday in the year, Trinity Sunday, we make the reaffirmation of that faith the emphasis of the day. Together with the faith that God is one and yet in His nature three-fold so that the Father is Creator of heaven and earth; the Incarnation of Jesus Christ only showed us in time what was true in all eternity, and the manifestation of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost only expressed in history something which is of the everlasting nature of God, we also think today of the greatness and majesty of God. The inner richness of God, marked by our faith in the Trinity – the belief that, while in one sense God is indivisibly one, there is yet something like a community within Him – is also paralleled today by our faith in His wonder and greatness and glory.” (Samuel M. Shoemaker adapted). The Baptism of the Lord also provides a good opportunity for preaching on the Trinity.
Concentrate on a particular scriptural text with Trinitarian content, usually longer than a single verse, and expound how aspects of the doctrine come to life in that text with its own colour, particularity, and specifics of the text (grace, love, fellowship – 2 Cor 13:11-13). This approach does not entail a refusal to refer to any other passages though a tendency to scatter must be curbed; nor does it imply that one supposes the doctrine to be fully formed in a single passage, such that there is no need to have the broader context of the doctrine in mind. On the contrary, the person with some understanding of the doctrine will preach in a way that is consistent with that broader understanding and with recognised doctrinal teaching. It entails finding a way to help oneself not take on too much, and to give one’s sermon both scriptural integrity and the detail that effective sermons require. This approach also helps hearers see for themselves where aspects of key doctrine come from and it enables preachers to take up the doctrine from several angles without just being repetitious. If preachers were to take for several years running a different one of the lectionary texts for Trinity Sunday, and from it preach a sermon on the Trinity, preacher and congregation alike would be better informed about this foundational doctrine of Christian faith.
Risk the abstract and do not focus exclusively on the experiential aspects of Christian faith. Indeed, if maximum weight is given to experience, then it is reasonable to suggest placing Mohammed on a level with Jesus: apart from an essential Trinity, there is no reason why God might not manifest himself through any number of worthy prophets in different lands and at different times. Remember the traditional assumption that there is a truth, however imperfectly grasped and expressed, that lies behind the experiences. With respect to the Trinity, this means not completely losing track of the immanent Trinity in favour of the economic Trinity, while granting that most of one's exposition will probably deal with the latter. What is at stake is the question of whether God 'really is' who God reveals himself to be. If so, one can test one's experiences of God against that revelation, anticipate that God's ongoing activity will be consistent with his revelation, and stake one's life upon the character and faithfulness of God. People giving homilies today fear being condemned as 'abstract'. Unfortunately and sometimes with reason, this tends to be translated as 'obscure, irrelevant, and dull'. Do not resist abstract thought by scorning theological formulations. Such resistance to thinking theologically can have dire consequences. The preacher may easily assert confidently some groundless popular notions. For instance, that rephrasing the Trinitarian baptismal formula in terms of Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer changes ‘the language but not the meaning’ of the formula. This leaves those having an informed feminist consciousness but only modest theological sophistication asserting that preachers or theologians who resist this change are sexist or ignorant of modern trends. With no abstract input, the tendency for sermons to have an almost exclusive focus on the economic Trinity to the detriment of enriching the faith of the people in the immanent Trinity only grows.
Aim for good sermon structure and strong easy flowing movement. The sermon may be formed around God's successive self-revelation in history e.g. in creation, in Jesus, and at Pentecost, or around the three Persons, presenting a sense of God's fatherhood, God's revelation of his character in Christ, and God's gift of his presence and power in our hearts and consciences in the Holy Spirit. Sometimes, it may not be even necessary to refer to the Trinity by name and still make perfectly good and orthodox remarks about the three Persons, such that trinitarian thinking was clearly presupposed and would likely work itself into the consciousness of hearers. Still working with one Person at a time provides a challenge of achieving good movement in the sermon. The individual unitary model has the homiletical advantage of making clear that the character and will of the Persons is not divided. The social model better facilitates an understanding of God's nature as love and as relational and has the homiletical value of opening the way to exhorting people to love and to relate with each other as the Persons in the Trinity do. Please note that preachers tend to give a heavy and even disproportionate emphasis on the First Person as Creator; thus obscuring the apostle's John striking choice of 'love' as the defining characteristic of the Father. Plan the design of the sermon well so that there is easy graceful movement between the different elements.
Make the sound, clear and obvious observations about the Trinity. First, an insistence that Christians do not worship three Gods, that the oneness of God is a hallmark of the Judaism in which Christianity is rooted, so that anything resembling tritheism would have had enormous barriers to overcome. Secondly, the doctrine of the Trinity was not thought up by theologians with nothing better to do, but was founded in the experience of the first Christians. For example, ‘The whole idea of the Trinity came as a result of the incarnation, the impact of Christ's life, and the ensuing experience with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.’ Thirdly, the doctrine preserves an important mystery that points to the greatness of God. Fourthly, our strong belief that the way God has revealed himself to us in the life of Jesus and among the early Christians is the way God is actually in himself. Clarity in expression and in thinking will help the laity gain some grasp on the trinitarian mystery.
Realise that lay people are eager to understand their faith, provided doctrine is presented cogently and with its relevance elaborated. Many, however, have simply given up asking theological questions because they have become so accustomed to getting nothing enlightening by way of answers. Help the laity to rediscover that there are real joys of the intellect and that there are adventures to be had in exploring even that which is finally beyond one's grasp.
Be wary of presenting strictly doctrinal sermons because there is the temptation to take on too much and to become too abstract and academic in the counter-productive sense. Do not assume that the doctrinal sermon can take the place of a well-designed adult Sunday school class, in which a lecture format is appropriate and in which one can explore a doctrine in some depth and in an orderly way, without the ten to fifteen minute time constraint placed on the typical sermon in a Church. While it is important to cater for the needs of the intellect and the desire of the laity to learn doctrine, still sermons should not be mini-lectures, 'to be continued next week'. In fact, sermons should be sermons, with decent structure and movement, a measure of emotive power, and a sermonic purpose that goes beyond the simply intellectual.
Be reticent in making metaphors and illustrations the core of your sermon. The venerable practice of finding intimations of the Trinity in the created order has fallen on hard times. Not only can it, like allegorizing, lead to a certain excess of creativity; but also, it is vulnerable to the latest scientific discoveries. For instance, even if the figure of protons, neutrons, and electrons constituting one atom were not problematic for other reasons, it now leads an educated hearer to contemplate neutrinos, gluons, and quarks as objections at which point she is no longer listening to the sermon! Moreover, illustrative material and application understandably shows up weak spots. The problems with analogies in such a crucial and difficult doctrinal arena are that the preacher needs to say something about their limits if they are not to mislead; yet illustrations that must be explained lose much of their force as illustrations.
Write the sermon out. If Cardinal Newman, Ronald Knox and many other great preachers wrote out their homilies, who am I to offer a congregation an outline and the contents of the top of my head? If you have spent enough time writing it and gone over it enough, you will have to look down at it only about as much as you will have to look down at notes and you not lose spontaneity or eye contact. The advantages are so many that any congregation would gladly forgive you for looking down more often: 1) You will not talk on and on; for that alone they will kiss your feet. 2) It will smell of the midnight oil and the thesaurus; you will not insult them. 3) You won't ramble off on tangents or haul in old stories they have heard from you (and others) ten times before. 4) You will hear yourself talk. Read it aloud to find out if you still actually believe it and if you can be confident in your presentation. 5) The level of precision of statement required to avoid what the Church has considered to be doctrinal error is sufficiently great that many very good and well-informed preachers nonetheless can be found saying things that they surely would not wish to defend. Writing the sermon helps to avoid making heretical statements.
Curtail your expectations. Jesus was the greatest teacher who ever lived: “No man has spoken as He does." And yet He was a complete failure till 50 days after He had departed the scene. When He died, He had at best 100 disciples. Not very impressive. Of the 12 most committed, one turned Him in, His favourite denied even knowing Him (and not to a soldier with a knife at his throat, but to a waitress) and all the rest, save John, abandoned him, deserting Him at the precise moment when He most needed them. Even at the very end, at the moment of Jesus' Ascension, after three years of listening to Him teach, after having experienced the tragedy of the Crucifixion and the triumph of the Resurrection, their very last question to Him was: "Are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel now?" Despite all His hammering away at their selfishness, all His demands that they take the last place, that they look to serve and not "be served, they still want to know whether they can go shop for thrones and get measured for the gold yarn robes. Therefore, do not expect mass conversions and immediate understanding.
Be confident and humble. Humble in the awareness that you do not have all the answers, that your models are approximations, that your words can never fully present the mystery and that the only appropriate response to this great mystery is kneeling in silent adoration. Yet, be confident. Confidence is not arrogance; the root of the word "confidence" is "fides" (faith). As such, it's not just faith in oneself, as it is faith in the One who calls. Like Moses, David, Peter and all the other figures in the Bible who never suspected later generations would call them prophets, we have been called, no matter what our shortcomings. And the one who calls made a universe out of nothing, and the Son who guarantees our calling could work miracles. Peter, the model of all disciples, succeeded not because he was so brilliant but because he believed so intensely.
Occasions for Preaching
The following are a list of occasions with their scriptural references from which it is possible to present a sermon on the Trinity.
Trinity Sunday: Year A
Ex 34:4-6, 8-9 – God of tenderness of compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness.
2 Cor 13:11-13 – The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.
John 3:16-18 – God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes may not be lost but may have eternal life.
Year B
Dt 4:32-34, 39-40 – The Lord is God, indeed.
Rom 8:14-17 – You received the spirit of sons and it makes us cry out, ‘Abba, Father!’
Mt 28:16-20 – Baptise them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Year C
Prov 8:22-31 – Before the earth came into being, Wisdom was born.
Rom 5:1-5 – To God, through Christ, in the love poured out by the Spirit.
John 16:12-15 – Everything the Father is mine, all the Spirit tells you will be taken from what is mine.
1 January – Gal 4:4-6 – God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts: the Spirit that cries ‘Abba, Father’.”
Sacred Heart – Year B – Eph 3:14-17 – I pray, kneeling before the Father… that he gives you the power through his Spirit for your hidden self to grow strong, so that Christ may live in your hearts.
Baptism of our Lord – Mt 3:13-17, Mk 1:7-11, Lk 3:21-22.
20 Year B – Eph 5:18-20 – Be filled with the Spirit… Go on singing and chanting to the Lord in your hearts, so that always and everywhere you are giving thanks to God who is our Father.
Following the Feast of Pentecost in the liturgical calendar, the Feast of the Trinity admittedly stands rather oddly in the liturgical year. All other feasts celebrate what God has done rather than what God is. Still, a moment’s reflection reminds us that the Trinity is, at least implicitly, everywhere in Christian worship. We normally begin our Christian pilgrimage with baptism in the triune Name. When couples are married in the church, the name of Father, Son, and Spirit is invoked. The 'Gloria Patri' honours Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; the 'Doxology' praises them. We sing 'Holy, Holy, Holy', often called the finest of the trinitarian hymns, every Sunday, and many traditional hymns which refer in successive verses to the Persons of the Trinity. References to God in prayers shift readily among the Persons. Moreover, belief in the Trinity lies at the heart of every Christian feast and every celebration of the Eucharist. The most common benedictions are trinitarian in form: even that from Numbers 6: 24-26 indicates the Trinity by the threefold repetition of 'Lord'. It is not simply one mystery among others.
However, rarely will one hear explicit reference to the Trinity in Sunday preaching. This alleged deficit is scarcely surprising; since the term 'Trinity' is not found in the Bible, so a 'biblical' preacher cannot be condemned for failing to use it. Some would go further and argue vociferously that we ought to emulate Scripture's concreteness and modesty and not clutter our minds and speech with ancient Greek philosophical speculation. Surely, people's deep sense of the Trinity will be shaped primarily by devotional and liturgical practices in which the presence of the Trinity is, indeed, more often assumed than named. In this thinking, it would be a loss, not a gain, if the awe of encountering God in worship were exchanged for a studied presentation of our verbal formulas.
Besides the challenge of speaking on the Trinity is immense, so much so that once a learned professor advised his students not to speak on the topic of the Trinity for more than three minutes, for fear of speaking heresy! A Cistercian tract of 1230 on the Feast of the Trinity instructed the community that on this day the abbot was to celebrate the Mass solemnly in community, that there were to be three lamps on the altar, and that there was to be no sermon on so complex a matter! Even the great St. Augustine, when introducing De Trinitate, noted the extreme danger and difficulty involved in regard to matters trinitarian: "For nowhere else is a mistake more dangerous, or the search more laborious, or discovery more advantageous" (1.5). The prospect of danger and of labour has resulted in a real reticence and reluctance to speak of this great mystery of our faith. After pondering the possibility that discretion may indeed be the better part of valour in such matters, one may decide to avoid such rocky shoals altogether.
In addition to the counsels of discretion, contemporary homiletical wisdom, regarding the challenge of relating to an entertainment-oriented, fast-paced, personal-needs-obsessed culture, would not give much immediate encouragement to the preacher who senses a need for deeper theological roots both for his or her own preaching and for the congregation to which he or she ministers. Narrative preaching that draws hearers into the story and lets them draw their own conclusions without laying on anything 'dogmatic' in tone or substance; pop-psychological approaches oriented towards feeding self-esteem and fostering coping skills; 'mini-sermons' that will not tax the attention spans of those accustomed to fast-moving images rather than to 'talking heads'; endless personal anecdotes and rather indiscriminate or self-serving self-revelation that seek to keep everyone feeling secure and cosy in the same boat; even verse-by-verse studies that comfort fundamentalist hearers who want to be assured that what they are hearing is biblical – none of these exactly lends itself to the disciplined proclamation of Christian doctrine, especially doctrine on the Trinity. As a result, there is a great reluctance to devote homilies on the central mystery of our faith as Christians.
Still, since the doctrine on the Trinity expresses the central mystery of our faith there is an obligation to preach about it. The reason doctrine was developed in the first place emphasises even more the importance of this obligation. The question is just why we speak as we do, and why it could be dangerous even, or especially, to our life of devotion and worship if we were to come to speak quite differently. When clergy fail to be a bit diligent in the precision department, not only does language begin to slip, but the slippage tends to be cumulative. Over not so very great a period of time, the language of worship comes no longer to convey accurately what Christians have traditionally believed and so worshippers are no longer imbued virtually unconsciously with sound doctrine. This question of doctrinal precision is more critical today than it has been for a long time, for two reasons: first, persons in the average congregation are stunningly ignorant of Christian fundamentals, lacking anything faintly resembling the routine catechetical instruction of an earlier era; and second, interfaith dialogue brought on by day-to-day encounters with increasing numbers of persons from non-Christian traditions puts pressure on us to be clear about what we consider essential to our own understanding of 'God'. To fail in our preaching to give our people any intellectual tools to help them understand why Christians speak as they do, leaves them with good grounds to consider Christianity incoherent or at best sloppy in its fundamental structure and the Christian God as something no more recognizable than an ‘enigmatic blur’. Not least important, they are also left without means to give any sort of coherent response to those from other traditions who might ask them for an accounting of the hope that is in them (I Pet. 3: 15). Thus, preaching about the Trinity is important in fostering and deepening a personal appropriation of the Triune mystery. Preaching affords the precious opportunity to develop a sense of prayer, liturgy, and spirituality in more consciously and explicitly trinitarian ways.
Guidelines for Preaching about the Trinity
Trinity Sunday is surely the one time in the year when it is obligatory to preach about the Trinity. This Sunday in itself provides a great opening for preaching on the mystery of the Triune God. For example, Samuel Shoemaker began his sermon as follows: “On every Sunday in the year in some way the Church gives voice to its faith in the Holy Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; for that is the great center of her faith. But on this one Sunday in the year, Trinity Sunday, we make the reaffirmation of that faith the emphasis of the day. Together with the faith that God is one and yet in His nature three-fold so that the Father is Creator of heaven and earth; the Incarnation of Jesus Christ only showed us in time what was true in all eternity, and the manifestation of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost only expressed in history something which is of the everlasting nature of God, we also think today of the greatness and majesty of God. The inner richness of God, marked by our faith in the Trinity – the belief that, while in one sense God is indivisibly one, there is yet something like a community within Him – is also paralleled today by our faith in His wonder and greatness and glory.” (Samuel M. Shoemaker adapted). The Baptism of the Lord also provides a good opportunity for preaching on the Trinity.
Concentrate on a particular scriptural text with Trinitarian content, usually longer than a single verse, and expound how aspects of the doctrine come to life in that text with its own colour, particularity, and specifics of the text (grace, love, fellowship – 2 Cor 13:11-13). This approach does not entail a refusal to refer to any other passages though a tendency to scatter must be curbed; nor does it imply that one supposes the doctrine to be fully formed in a single passage, such that there is no need to have the broader context of the doctrine in mind. On the contrary, the person with some understanding of the doctrine will preach in a way that is consistent with that broader understanding and with recognised doctrinal teaching. It entails finding a way to help oneself not take on too much, and to give one’s sermon both scriptural integrity and the detail that effective sermons require. This approach also helps hearers see for themselves where aspects of key doctrine come from and it enables preachers to take up the doctrine from several angles without just being repetitious. If preachers were to take for several years running a different one of the lectionary texts for Trinity Sunday, and from it preach a sermon on the Trinity, preacher and congregation alike would be better informed about this foundational doctrine of Christian faith.
Risk the abstract and do not focus exclusively on the experiential aspects of Christian faith. Indeed, if maximum weight is given to experience, then it is reasonable to suggest placing Mohammed on a level with Jesus: apart from an essential Trinity, there is no reason why God might not manifest himself through any number of worthy prophets in different lands and at different times. Remember the traditional assumption that there is a truth, however imperfectly grasped and expressed, that lies behind the experiences. With respect to the Trinity, this means not completely losing track of the immanent Trinity in favour of the economic Trinity, while granting that most of one's exposition will probably deal with the latter. What is at stake is the question of whether God 'really is' who God reveals himself to be. If so, one can test one's experiences of God against that revelation, anticipate that God's ongoing activity will be consistent with his revelation, and stake one's life upon the character and faithfulness of God. People giving homilies today fear being condemned as 'abstract'. Unfortunately and sometimes with reason, this tends to be translated as 'obscure, irrelevant, and dull'. Do not resist abstract thought by scorning theological formulations. Such resistance to thinking theologically can have dire consequences. The preacher may easily assert confidently some groundless popular notions. For instance, that rephrasing the Trinitarian baptismal formula in terms of Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer changes ‘the language but not the meaning’ of the formula. This leaves those having an informed feminist consciousness but only modest theological sophistication asserting that preachers or theologians who resist this change are sexist or ignorant of modern trends. With no abstract input, the tendency for sermons to have an almost exclusive focus on the economic Trinity to the detriment of enriching the faith of the people in the immanent Trinity only grows.
Aim for good sermon structure and strong easy flowing movement. The sermon may be formed around God's successive self-revelation in history e.g. in creation, in Jesus, and at Pentecost, or around the three Persons, presenting a sense of God's fatherhood, God's revelation of his character in Christ, and God's gift of his presence and power in our hearts and consciences in the Holy Spirit. Sometimes, it may not be even necessary to refer to the Trinity by name and still make perfectly good and orthodox remarks about the three Persons, such that trinitarian thinking was clearly presupposed and would likely work itself into the consciousness of hearers. Still working with one Person at a time provides a challenge of achieving good movement in the sermon. The individual unitary model has the homiletical advantage of making clear that the character and will of the Persons is not divided. The social model better facilitates an understanding of God's nature as love and as relational and has the homiletical value of opening the way to exhorting people to love and to relate with each other as the Persons in the Trinity do. Please note that preachers tend to give a heavy and even disproportionate emphasis on the First Person as Creator; thus obscuring the apostle's John striking choice of 'love' as the defining characteristic of the Father. Plan the design of the sermon well so that there is easy graceful movement between the different elements.
Make the sound, clear and obvious observations about the Trinity. First, an insistence that Christians do not worship three Gods, that the oneness of God is a hallmark of the Judaism in which Christianity is rooted, so that anything resembling tritheism would have had enormous barriers to overcome. Secondly, the doctrine of the Trinity was not thought up by theologians with nothing better to do, but was founded in the experience of the first Christians. For example, ‘The whole idea of the Trinity came as a result of the incarnation, the impact of Christ's life, and the ensuing experience with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.’ Thirdly, the doctrine preserves an important mystery that points to the greatness of God. Fourthly, our strong belief that the way God has revealed himself to us in the life of Jesus and among the early Christians is the way God is actually in himself. Clarity in expression and in thinking will help the laity gain some grasp on the trinitarian mystery.
Realise that lay people are eager to understand their faith, provided doctrine is presented cogently and with its relevance elaborated. Many, however, have simply given up asking theological questions because they have become so accustomed to getting nothing enlightening by way of answers. Help the laity to rediscover that there are real joys of the intellect and that there are adventures to be had in exploring even that which is finally beyond one's grasp.
Be wary of presenting strictly doctrinal sermons because there is the temptation to take on too much and to become too abstract and academic in the counter-productive sense. Do not assume that the doctrinal sermon can take the place of a well-designed adult Sunday school class, in which a lecture format is appropriate and in which one can explore a doctrine in some depth and in an orderly way, without the ten to fifteen minute time constraint placed on the typical sermon in a Church. While it is important to cater for the needs of the intellect and the desire of the laity to learn doctrine, still sermons should not be mini-lectures, 'to be continued next week'. In fact, sermons should be sermons, with decent structure and movement, a measure of emotive power, and a sermonic purpose that goes beyond the simply intellectual.
Be reticent in making metaphors and illustrations the core of your sermon. The venerable practice of finding intimations of the Trinity in the created order has fallen on hard times. Not only can it, like allegorizing, lead to a certain excess of creativity; but also, it is vulnerable to the latest scientific discoveries. For instance, even if the figure of protons, neutrons, and electrons constituting one atom were not problematic for other reasons, it now leads an educated hearer to contemplate neutrinos, gluons, and quarks as objections at which point she is no longer listening to the sermon! Moreover, illustrative material and application understandably shows up weak spots. The problems with analogies in such a crucial and difficult doctrinal arena are that the preacher needs to say something about their limits if they are not to mislead; yet illustrations that must be explained lose much of their force as illustrations.
Write the sermon out. If Cardinal Newman, Ronald Knox and many other great preachers wrote out their homilies, who am I to offer a congregation an outline and the contents of the top of my head? If you have spent enough time writing it and gone over it enough, you will have to look down at it only about as much as you will have to look down at notes and you not lose spontaneity or eye contact. The advantages are so many that any congregation would gladly forgive you for looking down more often: 1) You will not talk on and on; for that alone they will kiss your feet. 2) It will smell of the midnight oil and the thesaurus; you will not insult them. 3) You won't ramble off on tangents or haul in old stories they have heard from you (and others) ten times before. 4) You will hear yourself talk. Read it aloud to find out if you still actually believe it and if you can be confident in your presentation. 5) The level of precision of statement required to avoid what the Church has considered to be doctrinal error is sufficiently great that many very good and well-informed preachers nonetheless can be found saying things that they surely would not wish to defend. Writing the sermon helps to avoid making heretical statements.
Curtail your expectations. Jesus was the greatest teacher who ever lived: “No man has spoken as He does." And yet He was a complete failure till 50 days after He had departed the scene. When He died, He had at best 100 disciples. Not very impressive. Of the 12 most committed, one turned Him in, His favourite denied even knowing Him (and not to a soldier with a knife at his throat, but to a waitress) and all the rest, save John, abandoned him, deserting Him at the precise moment when He most needed them. Even at the very end, at the moment of Jesus' Ascension, after three years of listening to Him teach, after having experienced the tragedy of the Crucifixion and the triumph of the Resurrection, their very last question to Him was: "Are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel now?" Despite all His hammering away at their selfishness, all His demands that they take the last place, that they look to serve and not "be served, they still want to know whether they can go shop for thrones and get measured for the gold yarn robes. Therefore, do not expect mass conversions and immediate understanding.
Be confident and humble. Humble in the awareness that you do not have all the answers, that your models are approximations, that your words can never fully present the mystery and that the only appropriate response to this great mystery is kneeling in silent adoration. Yet, be confident. Confidence is not arrogance; the root of the word "confidence" is "fides" (faith). As such, it's not just faith in oneself, as it is faith in the One who calls. Like Moses, David, Peter and all the other figures in the Bible who never suspected later generations would call them prophets, we have been called, no matter what our shortcomings. And the one who calls made a universe out of nothing, and the Son who guarantees our calling could work miracles. Peter, the model of all disciples, succeeded not because he was so brilliant but because he believed so intensely.
Occasions for Preaching
The following are a list of occasions with their scriptural references from which it is possible to present a sermon on the Trinity.
Trinity Sunday: Year A
Ex 34:4-6, 8-9 – God of tenderness of compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness.
2 Cor 13:11-13 – The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.
John 3:16-18 – God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes may not be lost but may have eternal life.
Year B
Dt 4:32-34, 39-40 – The Lord is God, indeed.
Rom 8:14-17 – You received the spirit of sons and it makes us cry out, ‘Abba, Father!’
Mt 28:16-20 – Baptise them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Year C
Prov 8:22-31 – Before the earth came into being, Wisdom was born.
Rom 5:1-5 – To God, through Christ, in the love poured out by the Spirit.
John 16:12-15 – Everything the Father is mine, all the Spirit tells you will be taken from what is mine.
1 January – Gal 4:4-6 – God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts: the Spirit that cries ‘Abba, Father’.”
Sacred Heart – Year B – Eph 3:14-17 – I pray, kneeling before the Father… that he gives you the power through his Spirit for your hidden self to grow strong, so that Christ may live in your hearts.
Baptism of our Lord – Mt 3:13-17, Mk 1:7-11, Lk 3:21-22.
20 Year B – Eph 5:18-20 – Be filled with the Spirit… Go on singing and chanting to the Lord in your hearts, so that always and everywhere you are giving thanks to God who is our Father.
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