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One God, Three Roles Transforming the World
By Administrator | February 4, 2008
a sermon based on Matthew 17:1-9
February 3, 2008 at Palm Bay, FL
by Rev. Scott Elliott
Most of you know that I am one of the pastors here at Riviera United Church of Christ.
Although lately it sometimes seems otherwise, I have not always been a pastor. I have photographic proof that back in the days of polyester plaid pants, sideburns, huge Afros and platform shoes I was an undergraduate student studying drama at a small college in California called Stanislaus State.
As a drama major I had the opportunity to be in a lot of plays. In fact, exactly thirty years ago during the Winter term I found myself simultaneously in three very different plays. One was Shakespeare’s Macbeth. I played the role of MacDuff, a father who has lost his family to Macbeth’s reign of terror, and who composes a plan that eventually leads to Macbeth’s downfall.
In stark contrast to the weekday evening rehearsals of this dark Shakespearean tragedy, during the day I played the delightful role of Christopher Robin, the precious precocious son of A.A. Milne whose gentle words and compassionate example demonstrate to Winnie-the-Pooh and others in the Hundred Acre Wood how to live and play.
And just to make matters even more interesting on the weekends I was in a little known musical called The Boccaccio Rhythm Theatre. This play was a series of short bawdy sketches. To give you an idea why you may never have heard of this show, in one scene I sang a ballad to a beautiful queen that began with these memorable words: “You haven’t been riding since Tuesday. I haven’t even seen you since then.” Since the show was a series of stories the actors were a whirlwind ensemble that blew in and out of scenes in a rather fast paced play.
Like most actors I can only recall how great I was in each of these plays. I have no recollection of being confused during the rehearsals or performances about my roles. In other words, I deny any stories you may have heard that I appeared on stage mistakenly cooing “Oh Pooh” to Macbeth, or accosting Eeyore with the blood curdling line “Turn, hell hound, turn.”
Today is what is known as Transfiguration Sunday. The text that we read portrays Jesus transforming before the disciples very eyes into a sort of preview of what he would become after the cross and after the resurrection.
Our tradition tends to consider this story the Sunday before Lent as precursor to that journey to Palm Sunday, the handing over of Jesus to Rome, the Cross on Good Friday and the death and resurrection on Easter Sunday. For other traditions, like the Orthodox churches, a feast is celebrated in August with emphasis on this text and the revelation of the Trinity.
This text you see is pretty unusual as it has long been understood to refer to all three members of what we have come to call the Holy Trinity. God the Father calls out to Jesus the Son from the Holy Spirit appearing in the form of a cloud.
Most folks are not aware that the Trinity is a doctrine that is not really in the Bible, but rather has its origins with (wouldn’t you know it) a third century lawyer named Tertullian who put together in Latin the initial Trinity concept as an argument to defeat claims that one could not be a monotheist and believe in Christ as God and the Father as God at the same time.
Tertullian’s point was to show that Christians were not polytheistic, and to preserve monotheism (that is one God).
Tertullian’s argument has evolved into a rather esoteric sounding doctrine that there is One God made up of three separate persons, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
People have come up with a lot of complicated, even mind bending ways, to think about the Trinity and its impossible sounding 3 in 1 nature; but today I want to focus for a moment on what I think is one of the most practical ways of conceptualizing the Trinity.
Marcus Borg argues in his book The God We Never Knew that to understand the Trinity “we need to realize that the Latin and Greek words translated as ‘person’ do not mean what ‘person’ commonly means in modern English.
For us ‘person’ suggests a separate being (and thus suggests to many people that the Trinity is like a committee of three separate beings). But ‘person’ in the ancient texts refers to the mask worn by actors in Greek and Roman theaters. Masks were not for concealment, but corresponded to roles.”1
In other words, the persons in the Trinity can be thought of as three roles; like that Winter Term three decades ago at Stanislaus when this one person standing here before you literally had three very different roles, a father, a son and a really bad ballad singer – which to make the analogy work you’ll just have to use your imagination and pretend was a Spirit of some sort.
Or to make it fit your own life, it’s like being an employee, a parent, and a spouse, those are three roles that many of us act in our daily lives, as one person.
So if we take the idea of God’s Trinitarian roles as Borg suggests they were meant to be thought of and apply that role model to today’s verse we can see how God acts as the One in the role of Father –the Creator– who claims Jesus as Son.
We can also see how God acts as the One who is Jesus, the Christ, the very embodiment of God in humanity; an example in the Gospels of how to live and love and be.
And we can see God the Creator appearing on earth in an immanent, present form of God acting on earth as the Holy Spirit, in this story perceived as a cloud.
Today’s scripture can be read to justify the idea of experiencing God as a Trinity of roles. Father/Creator, Son/Human embodiment and Holy Spirit/ vehicle for God to otherwise be active on earth.
But notice how God is not divided into three separate beings. One God is acting as the voice, the cloud and through Jesus.
In the Christian tradition the three general roles by which we name our experiences of God’s thinking, feeling and acting in relation to the world are generally referred to along the lines of Creator, Christ and Holy Spirit and are collectively known as the Trinity or The Trinitarian God.
The Trinity is a way of picturing how our One God does things, it is a metaphor for explaining the otherwise unexplainable.
For example, a traditional way to think of the Trinity is expressed by Daniel Migliore: “[t]he love of God comes originally from the one called ‘Father,’ is humanly enacted for the world in the sacrificial love of the one called ‘Son,’ and becomes a present and vital reality in Christian life by the one called ‘Spirit.’”2
But there are other ways to consider the Triune nature of God, for instance our Puritan ancestors thought of God the Father as choosing who would be saved, God the Son as accomplishing their redemption and God as Spirit making it effective.3
Another example is modern theologian John Cobb’s view that one could think of God as being experienced as the Creator who has made all things, as Christ the embodiment of God in creation, and as Holy Spirit as the embodiment of God’s Reign that we aim to bring about.4
Or perhaps more simply one could think of the Trinity as God experienced in the past (Christ), present (Spirit) and future (Creator/Mother/Father).5
There are many ways to use the metaphor of the Trinity to understand God and how we experience God. You get to choose what works best for you.
What is most important when thinking of the Trinity is to never forget that any experience of what we might call one or more members of the Trinity is always an experience of the One we call God.6
Today we fittingly celebrate communion. Where we pray to God the Father/Mother/ Creator in thanks for the life and lessons and love of Jesus –God’s embodied example given to us to show us The Way.
At this table we call upon the Holy Spirit to be active in the bread and cup so that we might experience Christ as we remember and reenact Jesus’ open and inclusive table, The Way that he started in response to the call from the Creator to love all creation – and in particular all humans.
The bread and cup through each member of the Trinity can be seen as in a sense transfigured from ordinary food and drink to vehicles that let us mindfully celebrate, honor and remember, through the power of the Holy Spirit working in us today, the sacrifice Jesus made for us by laying his life down in such a powerful way that he lives on even today; his life of love and broken body and spilt blood long vindicated by God, while those in power who tried to stop him are forgotten or remembered as having opposed God’s way.
The bread, body, cup, wine, blood become for us mindful metaphors: The Bread of Life. The Body of God. The Cup of Christ’s Blessing. The Spirit of God. The Life-blood of Creation.
We experience Communion as a table, a re-enactment and presentation of God’s open table first given to us by Christ where today through the Holy Spirit’s magnificent works anyone – anyone– is welcome just as they are.
This table provides a sacrament that mediates experiences of God’s presence. Very much like Jesus mediated God’s presence through his transfiguration on the mountain long ago and a life lived in communion with God.
In fact this table reminds us not just of actions by Jesus two thousand years ago, but that humanity is capable of great things though a life lived focused on God. We remember that when we are mindful of God, when we answer God’s call to righteousness, justice and love amazing things can and do happen.
Alicia, our senior pastor, is a great example of this. Not so long ago at a time when women pastors were not the norm she bucked the norm and went to seminary. She graduated twenty years ago this spring.
I graduated two years ago this spring and people on the Eden campus, professors and staff still remember Alicia from way back when. As you know from her twelve years of ministry at this church, the Spirit runs deep in Alicia, so it should not be surprising that folks remember her. She has lived her life answering God’s call to righteousness, justice and love–and teaching us to do the same. Her amazing ministry at this church is proof of that.
The love that you have been pouring out for her in prayer and concern while she has been away is proof of that. The lovely way that this church has cared for one another and the staff and me during her absence is proof of that.
Of course there have been many great ministers and saints in history some remembered in books, but, most are remembered by unnamed ripples in time– the waves of affects one person has on others that move through generation to generation to generation.
In a sense transfiguring the future through words and deeds in the past and in today. Jesus certainly did this. St Francis, Martin Luther, Harriet Tubman, Sister Teresa, Martin Luther King all did this too. But I venture to guess that most waves of affect that are passed on through the generations have been started with lesser known saints.
People like Alicia, people like you and me, acting in our communities in response to God’s call to righteousness, justice and love on earth. People living and working to transfigure the world one step at a time.
It’s not written in the Bible, but I have no doubt God is
saying of such folks:
“These are my Daughters and my Sons, my Beloved,
with whom I am well pleased!”
AMEN.
— ENDNOTES—
1. Borg, Marcus, The God We Never Knew, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, (1997), 98
2. Migliore, Daniel, Faith Seeking Understanding, (Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004), 69.
3. Noll, Mark, The Old Religion in a New World, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans (2002), 38
4 This interesting view of the Trinity was culled from John Cobb’s Christ in a Pluralistic Age, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, (1975) 259, 261-262.
5 .This notion finds support from Christian theologian John Riggs, whom I understood in 2005 to explain in a course on Baptism and Supper at Eden Theological Seminary that the Trinity boils down to explaining Christian understandings of the One God in the past, present and future.
6.Cf., Borg, 98. Prof. Borg asserts that the “persons” of the Trinity in the ancient Greek and Latin texts refers to masks worn by actors to “correspond to roles,” not to individual persons. “To speak of God and three persons is to say that God is known to us wearing three different ‘masks’ – in other words three different roles.
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