GOD WANTS TO PLAY WITH ME
Author:
June 16, 2019
I believe in
my great grandmother, Martha Burns Byron. I have visited her grave on several occasions at St. Mary’s Cemetery in
south Minneapolis, where she’s been for 80 or 90 years now. I believe in her as a kind of concept, a
name, an article of history. But I have
no idea who she was, really, what was her personality, in what she took
pleasure or what she found difficult. Because I never met her in this world.
In a sense I
have to believe in her, because her son—my grandfather—had to come from somewhere
(or rather someone), and him I did know pretty well in my youth. Human beings come into this life as the
result of other human beings. So it’s
only logical that she must have existed, and that I carry around reflections of
her legacy every day. But her name,
honestly, doesn’t do very much to stir up my heart. When I see her name on the grave stone, I
understand—but I’m not really moved.
I think that
might be kind of an apt analogy for thinking about today’s annual liturgical
feast of God who is named as the Most Holy Trinity. Even though this is probably the most
foundational and important doctrine of Christian faith—on which absolutely
everything else depends—it is at high risk of being really boring and abstract,
and I thought of it that way for a very long time. It can threaten to become one of those
catechism teachings to which we’re all supposed to nod and agree and say “yes,
yes” but we don’t really get why it matters.
God is
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Ok. Fine. So what? And somehow in our
theological history the more we tried to explain it with charts and
distinctions the more boring it got.
Until I had
to teach the Trinity course to the deacons at the St. Paul Seminary, and I was
made actually to find answers to those questions. And the lights started to come on. At that very time I remember being at a
theology conference at which a scholar was droning on about an obscure
theologian’s educated ruminations about how all this “one God in three persons”
theory ought to be understood and published about, and I recall sitting there
in the seminar room and thinking, “what if absolutely nothing being said here
is true? Would it affect anything about
my life or ministry or church?” And my
honest answer was “no.” That’s a pretty
brutal indictment—not about God or our big theological tradition—but about the
guy at the presenter’s table. He had
transformed the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity into a dry theory, something
like the gravestone of my great grandmother. A curiosity, but not a passion. But the whole point of venerating our God as Trinity is passion. It’s about love! It’s about eternal relationship, endless community. There is no such thing as a God who is prior
to and apart from self-offering passion. Because God in God’s very essence is a communion of persons, not just a
vague life force or a principle of origin. God isn’t merely a cause of things. God is a lover of things and of people. That’s why we’re here at all. That’s why anything is here.
Did you hear
the conclusion of today’s 1st reading (Proverbs)? It is the voice of God’s very own wisdom
saying, “I was his delight day by day, playing before him all the while,
playing on the surface of his earth; and I found delight in the human
race.” “Playing,” it says-twice. How often do you think of God playing—for the
sheer delight, the raw joy, that comes from being in love?
We mere
mortals, for now, have to seek out others when we want to play and share in the
ecstasy of living—but God doesn’t have to do that. That’s Trinity. For us now it is possible to be both alive
and solitary, but not for God. This is a
feast day that holds up not only the endless love of God in himself or between
God and us. It also shows us who we are
and what we are summoned to be, if we wish to be truly happy and truly alive,
together.
We are all
created in God’s own image, and that very image is community, the self-offering
and grateful receiving of a lover. That’s a far cry from charts and theories
and theological nitpickiness. That’s about
living in relationship with every other created thing—as Proverbs says, with
the sky, the sea, the mountains, the fields, the earth, and our brothers and
sisters. When we do that, we are like
God.
The Most
Holy Spirit is not a theory to be studied or a nugget of history to be
recalled. It’s not like my great
grandmother Byron in that sense. It is
passion to be encountered and engaged. It is profoundly personal and immediate. Our Triune God is here to be known and engaged never more so than when
we gather around this Eucharistic table. Let us do so with glad thanksgiving, and welcome the God who wants to
play with us.
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