The Gold in the Seam

This coming Sunday is Trinity Sunday, the transition between Pentecost and Common Time in the liturgical year. The Trinity is a doctrine that has caused controversy for nearly two thousand years. As a preacher and a follower of the Jesus Way, I have been wrestling with this construct for decades, not as a puzzle to be solved, but as a claim about the character of God that keeps refusing to sit still in me.

What we inherited

In the early centuries of the church, there was a shared floor. The bishops who gathered at Nicaea in 325, and again at Constantinople in 381, were trying to say something the church had not yet found words for: that the Son is homoousios, of one substance with the Father — true God from true God — and that the Spirit is the giver of life, to be worshiped together with the Father and the Son. That is the Nicene Creed in a nutshell. 

And yet what came after that creed was the continuation of the wrestling that I still feel today.

In the fourth century, the Greek-speaking church gave us the grammar most of us still use. The Cappadocian fathers — Basil, and the two Gregorys — landed on a formula that has held ever since: one ousia, one essence, in three hypostases, three persons. Later Eastern theologians, especially Maximus the Confessor in the seventh century and John of Damascus in the eighth, reached for something closer still to what the Three are doing with one another. They called it perichoresis: the mutual indwelling of each in each, the eternal unbroken dance of God.

The Latin West said it differently — una substantia, tres personae — and Augustine, in the early fifth century, reached for the inner life of love: the Lover, the Beloved, and the Love between them. I love that image. The West also added a single small word to the creed — that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, the filioque. One little word that festered for centuries, and in 1054 it helped formalize the split between Eastern and Western Christianity.

Then there is the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church which has existed since the fourth century, eventually parting from the wider Chalcedonian tradition in 451. The Tewahedo (which means made one) Church holds the same co-eternal, co-equal Three as the rest of the Nicene world, and yet they have never shared the West's nervousness about depicting the Three. Their icons of the Selassie, the Trinity, often show three identical figures: three faces that are one face. I find those images evocative.

The Reformers of the sixteenth century inherited the Nicene faith and largely kept it, though the modern period reopened everything. In 1774, the English minister Theophilus Lindsey resigned his Anglican parish and opened the first openly anti-Trinitarian chapel in London. The Unitarian movement that grew from there refused the doctrine outright. Two centuries later, theologians like Jürgen Moltmann turned the Trinity from a metaphysical riddle into a community — a God whose very being is relationship, and (in his Crucified God, 1972, and Trinity and the Kingdom, 1980) a God who, on the cross, is capable of suffering.

What is emerging in me

I keep returning to that last thread, because it is where my own understanding is moving.

I have come to a deeper understanding of the Parent who aches: a Father, a Mother, grieving over nine billion children and over all the rest of a wounded creation. This is contested ground. The older traditions guarded God's impassibility, the conviction that God cannot be moved or wounded. I understand that concern. But the God I meet in Scripture and in prayer, in my life, is not unmoved. A love that cannot suffer does not feel like love to me.

The Child, the Son, is the embodied answer; the one who came, and keeps coming, to show that there is a way to be more loving, more kind, more compassionate, simply better with ourselves and one another. He is the resource made flesh.

And here is what I have started to feel in this current moment of personal and collective suffering: each Person of the Trinity is limited to their place in the dance. The Parent aches but does not force. The Child shows the way but cannot make us walk it. Their love runs up against the same edge as ours, bounded by the limits of their role.

Which is why the Spirit matters more than we tend to admit in our Word-centric tradition. She is like water, a shape-shifter, able to move into places the others cannot reach. She is the helper, the knower, the power that makes the work of the Parent and the Child possible at all. And the astonishing thing is that they trust her. They hold their own suffering, and they trust their partner in the dance to do what they cannot. To trust the Spirit — even for God — is a radical posture of humility.

The same dance, in us

And I believe we all live inside this reality.

We watch people we love — our children, our partners, our parents, our friends — suffer, and we offer what we have: our presence, our hands, our embodied resources. And then we hit the edge of what we can do. Something beyond our understanding has to be

trusted to tend the cracks and the broken places we cannot reach.

Kintsugi

This is where the Japanese art of kintsugi comes into play for me. In this art form, when a bowl breaks, the pieces are rejoined with lacquer and the seams are dusted with powdered gold. The break is not hidden. It is lit up. The mended bowl is often considered more precious than it was before it broke.

The crack is not intentional. No one breaks the bowl on purpose. The fractures come the way our own do: from accidents, from broken relationships, from systems that fail the people inside them. They are not chosen, and they are not erased.

I think of the risen Christ here, how he came back still carrying his wounds and showed them to Thomas. Resurrection did not sand them smooth. The wounds remained — visible, real, the record of everything that had happened — and they had become the proof of love rather than the proof of defeat.

That is the Spirit's work. Not to pretend we never broke, but to fill the seam with gold: to take the limits the Parent and the Child have to live with, and our own limits too, and glue them together into something more beautiful — not in spite of the break, but through it.

Can we let the limits of God and of Christ be held together by the Spirit? Can we trust her to do her work beyond our sight? And can we pray that same Spirit into the broken and suffering places in us, so that they might be filled with the gold of life and light?

As Trinity Sunday approaches, that is the God I am learning to trust: a Parent who aches, a Child who keeps showing the way, and a Spirit whom we all — even God — have to trust to do what only she can do.

With you in the dance,

Pastor Robin