• Isaiah 6:1-8

Isaiah describes his call to be a prophet for God.  The experience is so powerful it produced a vision of heaven, yet so personal he felt it on his lips.  The role of a prophet as a troublemaker for the religious, social and political status quo inevitably  generates a backlash to his or her message and requires deep personal costs for the rest of her or his  life, yet it  is off-set by  certainty of accepting God’s irresistible call.

• Psalm 29

The psalmist presents another vision of God “enthroned” in God’s “palace,” whose “voice in power” is likened to some of the most violent upheavals in nature, yet paradoxically inspires “peace.”  (This psalm is frequently cited as an example of how the followers of Yahweh adapted religious texts from neighboring religions, sometimes verbatim, to describe their experience of God.)

• Romans 8: 12-17

In this excerpt from Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, he articulates their new status:  “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.”  Alluding to the tradition inaugurated by Jesus of addressing God as “Abba,” Paul extrapolates that it is the “Spirit of God” speaking to our “spirit” that imbues the readers of his letter with their status not only as “heirs of God,” but “joint heirs with Christ.”  They should, therefore, understand life’s inevitable challenges, especially those they might endure for their faith, through the prism of Christ’s death and resurrection.  He writes: “if, in fact, we suffer with him… we may also be glorified with him.”

• John 3: 1-17

What begins as a conversation between a respected Pharisee, Nicodemus, and one honored with the title “rabbi,” Jesus, becomes a crucial monologue in John’s narrative.  Jesus prefaces what he is about to say by noting it requires a unique “testimony.”  He characterizes his entire public life, and then seems to refer to his coming crucifixion before he proceeds to the heart of this soliloquy:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but have eternal life.  Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

This is the “testimony” of those “born of the Spirit.”

The custom of observing “Trinity Sunday” on the first Sunday after the Feast of Pentecost first appears in Western customaries in the tenth century in Liege and was adopted in Rome officially in 1334; the East observed an “orthodoxy Sunday” as early as the ninth century.  It seems to serve a summing-up function in the church’s liturgical calendar.  Having observed the major dominical feasts of our Lord– birth, death, resurrection and ascension– and the outpouring of the power of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the church now pauses to consider what is the source and the linkage among these events.

In his contribution to the Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, David Cunningham paints distinctions between “modernist” and “postmodernism’s” approaches to “The Trinity” in very broad strokes.  He writes:

“In contrast to the modernist penchant for division, isolation and classification, postmodernism posits a much more interdependent approach.  Individual instances are not so much sorted into discrete categories as they are set in relation to other instances.”  “In postmodern perspective, a much more appropriate metaphor is a complex network of relationships… in which every element is, potentially, directly related to each and every other element” (p.189)  “So a doctrine of the Trinity… cannot be simply a matter of choosing the right (eternally orthodox) words…. Rather, it is a matter of examining how people are motivated when they believe (or claim to believe) certain things.” (p.195)

Cunningham shifts interpretation of the Trinity from the abstract to the concrete; from the conceptual to the kinds of action certain beliefs produce;  from the systematic to the personal; from a single perspective from somewhere outside human existence to what might be called a kind of “double-vision.”

Each in its unique way, the readings and psalm and the gospel read on this Trinity Sunday, describes how the faithful have a kind of “double-vision: that is, the capacity to see beyond this world so clearly it changes how one sees this world!  Isaiah’s dramatic vision of heaven turns his understanding of justice in this world upside-down and inside-out.  The psalmist meditates on the seemingly random violence in nature– thunder, the brute force of the ocean, earthquakes, floods– and discovers in them the voice of the Lord, who, paradoxically,  gives strength and “peace” to God’s people.  Paul boldly asserts that when we finally realize that because of Christ we are “children of God,” and that God’s Spirit speaks directly to our spirits, it completely alters how we see  life’s inevitable gains and losses.  In his conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus alludes to the essence of his mission, but then cautions that understanding the real meaning of his words and actions requires a decision, a  very particular “testimony,” “born of the Spirit.”

In an outpouring of highly original writing, Jean-Luc Nancy returns frequently to this kind of “double-vision,” which is the human capacity to sense something beyond this world that alters radically how we understand ourselves in this world. Which requires a decision.   He connects this capacity specifically to faith.  Drawing a sharp distinction between belief, which fusses with concepts, lives in the head and produces endless arguments, as distinct from faith, which is closer to personal trust and results in decisive and constructive action, he writes in his wonderful little book,  Noli me tangere:

“Faith consists in seeing and hearing where there is (seemingly) nothing exceptional for the ordinary eye and ear.  It knows how to [really] see and to [really] hear.” (p.22)  “To be a human being is to be open to infinitely more than simply being a human being.” (p.82)  “What does it mean to be oneself as much as possible and thus to be as much of a human being as possible?  It means nothing other than being faithful to… this infinite going beyond of the human by the human”  “Fidelity does not consist in believing and thus supposing, in accordance with what we believe.  Fidelity means not at all knowing about this.  When one is faithful to someone, one does not know what he or she will become later in life.  But if one is faithful to him  or her, one is faithful without knowing.” (p.84)

How can we experience God?  As Creator of this sometimes violent and other times achingly beautiful universe, and all that is in it, including myself and all others.  As God’s obedient “Son,” through whom God revealed the unfathomable depths of God’s love for all.  As “Spirit” that “speaks to my spirit.”  All these experiences are consistent in the same way– they invite faithful relationship (not private obsession with concepts).  And, as with any relationship, there is a personal investment that cannot know ahead of time where this relationship will lead, but it cannot be resisted.  And, as with all other meaningful relationships, this relationship alters our lives if we enter into it.  There is a decision to be made.