Sermon by Nanette Sawyer | June 4, 2023 | Fourth Presbyterian Church

Trinity Sunday
June 4, 2023

God Is...

Nanette Sawyer
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 8
Exodus 3:1–15

Today is Trinity Sunday. We reflect on this mysterious and potentially baffling idea that the One God is Three. Not three gods, but a oneness that has three … aspects? forms? ways of being? It’s difficult to even talk about.

As the concept of the Trinity developed over time, words to describe it began to center on the idea that God is three “persons” yet One God. We still have that paradox of three and one.

What helps me with this idea of “persons” is the English word persona. Think of an actor who can take on different personas, yet it’s always still just one actor. The three persons of the Trinity is kind of like that. We sang in our opening hymn today “God in three persons, blessed Trinity.” That’s very traditional, historic language.

People have used lots of other images to try to describe the Trinity. It’s like water, which can be gaseous steam or liquid water or solid ice. Or the Trinity is like a tree that has roots and trunk and branches. Or we can talk about the different actions God takes — sometimes creating, so God is the Creator; sometimes redeeming, so God is the Redeemer in Christ; sometimes sustaining and sanctifying, so God is the Sustainer or the Sanctifier in the Holy Spirit. Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer — the Trinity.

Metaphors can help us expand our minds and take us beyond either-or thinking. If the Trinity were a mathematical problem, we might use either-or thinking. God is either Three or One. God cannot be both.

But metaphors are not either-or thinking. They hold two contradictory things in tension (Sallie McFague, cited in Sandra M. Schneiders, Women and the Word, p. 27). There’s a kind of both-and thinking in a metaphor. We can say that God is the rock of my salvation. We know that God is not literally a rock. But God is a rock in the sense of providing solidity and stability to me, even in the midst of the high winds of life that send things into disarray. God is my rock.

A metaphor has power because it takes us beyond the literal and the limited. A metaphor can help us think in creative and expansive ways. A metaphor can help us think in relational and emotional ways. It can evoke reactions and change how we feel. A metaphor can be explored through a story that takes us into an experience.

I’ve been reading parts of a 2007 best-selling novel called The Shack. I’m guessing some of you have read it. It was self-published at first but spread like wildfire and became a New York Times bestseller and has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide (William P. Young, The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity).

The story is about a man whose daughter has been killed and his anger at God for letting it happen. He sinks into depression, and one day he gets a note from God to come and meet God. God wants to help him heal. And the God he meets is Trinitarian. He meets God in three persons.

God the Father is a Black woman, and the main character, Mack, calls her Papa. That’s what Mack’s wife calls God the Father — Papa, just as Jesus called God the Father Abba. Mack and Papa agree that he will call her Papa. He will call her Papa.

That idea shakes something up. It breaks assumptions we have about God and about gender. I grew up thinking of God as an old white man. That’s true of Mack as well. Papa is aware of it and says to him, essentially, you thought I was going to look like Gandalf, didn’t you?

In the book, Jesus is a Middle Eastern laborer, and the Holy Spirit is an Asian woman named Sarayu, which means “wind.” Just common wind, Jesus tells Mack. And it’s hard to see her. She kind of shimmers and fades in and out, like wind might if you could see wind.

When Mack meets these three, he asks them, “‘Which one of you is God?’ ‘I am,’ said all three in unison” (The Shack, p. 87).

It recalls God giving the Holy Name from the burning bush.

The novel was written by a pastor who wanted to tell people some things he believes about God. And the theology is surprisingly pretty traditional Trinitarianism, something I don’t expect to find in what seems like a pop culture book. The expression of the Trinity gets expanded in terms of race and gender, and that is the surprising and captivating part.

Something about this novel has captured the imaginations of 20 million people. It has touched their hearts. They have encountered the Trinity, who is three and one. And they have from this book an image of a deeply loving God who wants us to know how loved we are, especially in the face of tragedies and violence, injustice and despair.

I avoided reading the book for a long time. I assumed it was a fad, and I didn’t expect to find theology that would be meaningful to me. But eventually I wanted to know what the tremendous appeal was.

Finding the image of a Black, Asian, Middle Eastern, female/male God has a liberating effect on the holy imagination — or, in other words, it liberates our imaging of God. It provides an expansive image of God, one that breaks common expectations around gender and race. It expands how we think of who God is.

Metaphors for God can enliven our spirituality, and there are many metaphors in both testaments of our Holy Scripture. Some of the metaphors are inanimate. God is like a rock, a pillar of cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night, or a cloud around Mount Sinai when Moses met God there. God is like wind, water, light, bread, like a vine on which we grow.

Some biblical metaphors use images of other animals. God is like a mother bear, an eagle, a mother hen gathering her chicks, or like a roaring lion.

And some of the biblical metaphors for God are human, both male and female. Patriarchy is well-represented in the Bible, and many metaphors for God are male images. But not all of them.

God is like a shepherd, a king, a counselor, or an advocate. God is like a potter. But God is also like a midwife, like a mother, like a woman who lost and found a coin. God is like a baker woman mixing yeast through all the bread.

We tend to anthropomorphize God, to imagine God as a human, because we want to have a relationship with God. It’s hard to love a rock, a pillar of fire, a cloud, a gate, a light, a vine. Maybe it’s easier to love a king, a shepherd, a nursing mother, or a baker woman.

The human metaphors are easier to relate to on a personal level, but we sort those into hierarchies too. Why do we see the shepherd with the lost sheep as an image of God but not the woman who lost a coin and rejoiced when she found it? These two stories are told side by side in the Bible. Why do we lift up the idea of God as king but not the idea of God as a baker woman mixing the leaven throughout the world to create the reign and realm of God (Sandra M. Schneiders, Women and the Word, pp. 38–40)?

What captures our imaginations? We can become constrained by what we have known in the past and habits we have developed about how we speak of God and how we even think of God. Metaphors become idols when we can’t think beyond them.

In our scripture reading this morning God tells Moses the Divine Name. How do we imagine a God whose name is I AM? Biblical scholars tell us that this name can be translated as I am what I am, or I am that I am. It could even be read in the future tense: I will be what I will be.

There is some kind of pure existence expressed in this, an existence that defies description or surpasses our limited capacity to understand. This is my name, God says to Moses. I Exist. I Am. Jesus uses this name for himself when he says, “Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). The verb tenses don’t line up, and that seems purposeful.

This is perhaps the most expansive and non-limiting way of talking about God. But how do we have a relationship with Pure Existence?

Over twenty years ago I was living in Boston and contemplating going to seminary. I was talking with the executive presbyter there about women’s leadership roles in the church and male and female images of God.

She said that her mind was so trained to think of God as male that she gave herself a yearlong project. She decided to flip the script and for one year refer to God only using female pronouns or no pronouns at all. To free her mind she needed to give it something new to hold on to, something new to envision, something new to relate to.

People play with the ideas of the Trinity in various ways. Some people think of the Father and Son as male and the Spirit of God as female. In this way there is male and female in the Trinity.

Franciscan priest Richard Rohr has written that while he imagines the three persons of the Trinity in male terms, he thinks of the relationship between the three as female or feminine, so that male and female, masculine and feminine are intertwined throughout the identity of God (Richard Rohr, The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation, p. 94).

And William P. Young, who wrote The Shack, gives us an image of God the Creator, the first person of the Trinity, as a Black woman who is strong and all-wise and who laughs uproariously and dances along with the second person of the Trinity, a Middle Eastern Jesus, and the third person of the Trinity, an Asian woman Holy Spirit made of wind, the breath and spirit of God.

Papa says to Mack, “To reveal myself to you as a very large, white grandfather figure with a flowing beard, like Gandalf, would simply reinforce your religious stereotypes, and this weekend is not about reinforcing your religious stereotypes” (William P. Young, The Shack, p. 94).

What God wanted to do for Mack that weekend, and what I think God wants to do for all of us, is show up in a way that we trust, to draw close to us in a way that is healing and uplifting.

I know that some of you pray to Mother-Father God, or Father-Mother God. And some of you pray to Mother God. Some of you pray to your beloved Father God. And that’s good too. Mostly what I want to give you today is permission — permission to see yourself reflected in God, because you are, you all are, created in God’s image.

God is a loving parent, a beloved child, and an ever-present source of love, healing, forgiveness, help, and compassion.

She is a mother bear, a protective eagle, the light of the world, a baker-woman, a source of joy. She is also a shepherd of lost sheep, a potter who shapes us, a rock who gives us stability, and so many more things. Meditate on these ideas and know that you are never alone.

What new experiences of God might we have if we open ourselves to expansive language for God and inclusive language for God’s people? May God help us to embrace the exuberance of God’s creation. May it be so. Amen.