God Beyond the Box

Proverbs 8:1-4 & 22-31

Trinity Sunday, June 15, 2025

Holy Trinity Cathedral

God Beyond the Box

Today is Fathers’ Day.  I could preach about God our Father.  It is also the day after an unprecedented week in American politics, with rallies across North America protesting “no kings” to dictate to the people.  I could preach about God our King.  Both Father and King are true images for the Divine, but they are not the only ones in Scripture.  When we humans rely on our own experience to try and describe God, there is a danger of stuffing the One beyond these names into too small a box.  Wisdom calls us into a deeper understanding.  And so, for all the arguments and confusion that it has brought the Church, there is a doctrine that helps us see further.  Today is the festival of the blessed and undivided Trinity.  God is revealed to us as three in one: ineffable (meaning not knowable), yet knowable through the persons shown to us in Scripture, tradition, and experience. 

I am going to put aside any simple metaphor to pin down God. No shamrock, no phases of water, not even Neopolitan ice-cream as an example.  Instead, come with me into the dance of the Trinity, and find faces of the Divine.  There is more to discover than ruler or patriarch. 

Early theologians used rhetoric and logic to explain.  In the first Article of Faith, 1662, Anglicans agreed “there is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible. and in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”  That’s easy to grasp, isn’t it?  Maybe not. And logic isn’t the same as knowing God.  If you close your eyes, who do you see?  Do you imagine a shining deity in heaven, looking down at us?  Do you see the healing hands of Jesus, touching others with compassion, or wounded with the nails of the cross?  Do you see the shadowy form of the Holy Spirit- wings or wind or fire sweeping into the room?  All of these are part of God.  So why, when we pray, do so many refer to God as first person male?  God as Father.  God as King.  God as He. 

Part of the problem is the limitation of English.  In the words I have to use, persons usually get assigned as male or female by pronouns.  Those pronouns convey a gender expression.  Now this is being challenged and stretched to try and find non-binary ways of expressing a range of gender identities, but English doesn’t help much.  We struggle with “it” or “them” instead of “he” or “she”, and those admittedly fall short of what we mean.  God gets “He” as a default pronoun even though we say that God is beyond the human sense of male or female.  It’s what we have to work with whenever we open the Bible and need a pronoun for the Divine. 

This isn’t the same in some other languages such as Greek, Latin, or Hebrew.  Each of the classes of nouns can have pronouns that are masculine, feminine, common, or neuter depending on the word and its use.  Even then, the gender of the pronoun is only loosely associated with distinctions of sex.  When these more nuanced descriptors get translated into English, we lose the association of the original and end up with a more reduced view of God. 

The faces of the Trinity are implicit in the pages of scripture.  Take the first chapters of Genesis.  The word used for God is “Elohim”, which is a plural noun.  We hear of the Word spoken by the Creator to bring the cosmos into being, and the Breath of God upon the waters stirring them into form.  Here is the Trinity at work without being formally named.  Yet when the Bible was translated, God became “He” because we know there is only one God.  When the book of Proverbs tells the story of creation through the voice of Wisdom, it is the emanation of the Holy Spirit describing the work.  Wisdom in both Hebrew and Greek is feminine, so is “she”.  So is the Holy Spirit.  The God who made the first people male and female in God’s image has elements of male and female and cannot be reduced to a single gender expression.  To this point, the second commandment is not to make any idols that take the place of God.  When we see the divine in only one way, we risk diminishing God to our own making.  The Trinity is a corrective to this.

What about Jesus?  Jesus is the closest we get in seeing the fullness of God’s love. But not, I would stress, exactly what God looks like.  In coming among humanity, God had to be contained in a mortal form.  God couldn’t be everyone; God had to choose one person.  Through a human mother and the work of the Holy Spirit, a human male was born named Jesus of Nazareth.  His sex wasn’t the main characteristic of God’s embodiment; in fact Jesus was celibate and displayed more feminine attributes than man men of his day.  He healed and taught, he broke bread, welcomed strangers, laughed, and cried with his friends.  He spoke about the coming of the reign of heaven.  His disciples saw him as the Messiah, God’s anointed one.  They watched him die a painful human death, and buried his body.  But divine love conquered death and rose again, and the fullness of God started shining through.  The resurrected Christ promised a Spirit of power to those who believe, that same Spirit that was present in creation.  And once Christ ascended to be joined again to the Creator, this Spirit is released to sustain the faithful.  Jesus plays a role in the dance.  We see his footsteps on earth, but the one we call the Word of God has a part before and after his brief time as a mortal. 

We call God the Father and Jesus the Son because those are terms Jesus used to describe the intimacy of their relationship in words his listeners could understand.  But God is not all male, just as God is not all female either.  God is not without gender either, or sex-less, but exists beyond our urge to find the right box to stick God in.  Each person is a small reflection of a larger reality.  We each share a part of God’s image and glory.  Where we run into trouble is thinking that one part is more reflective of God, or is more important than another.  If we only see God as the Creator, we miss the redemptive work of Jesus.  If we only see God as Jesus, we forget the mission of the Spirit.  If we only see God as Holy Spirit, we diminish the particularity of the Christian way.  The good news is that each person of the Trinity points us to the others.  Each is a window to glimpse the Trinity at work.

I remember instruction on how to dance in high school.  We had mixed physical education classes.  The teacher divided us up- girls along one wall, boys along the opposite.  (Those who didn’t fall into binary categories had to choose one).  Then we were paired off.  Most of the boys didn’t want to participate.  The girls had to drag them onto the floor.  We were told that the males had to lead, but it ended up that the only ones who bothered to learn the steps were- guess who?  What resulted was a lot of people stepping on each others’ feet.  Instead of being co-equal and trying to discern our partner’s movements, the pairs wrestled to take control.  The boys felt they should lead, because they were male, and the girls resisted following. 

How different is the divine dance of communion!  Each person of the Trinity encircling and taking turns to come into our awareness.  We are invited to join and learn new steps.     Sometimes the Spirit leads us, sometimes Christ, sometimes the Creator. If you have trouble seeing God in a single image, go beyond.  Take the hand of one of the other persons of the Trinity.  Wisdom will show us the way into the very heart of God.  Amen.