June 4, 2004

Trinity

“It takes a mighty big stigma to beat a dogma.”

Dorothy Sayers said it. She was British. She was also a theologian, a mystery novelist, and a Dante scholar. So she knew, of course, what she was talking about. Even if I don’t.

She could have been talking about Trinity Sunday, the only time in the entire liturgical year that a dogma assumes front stage center and elbows all those majestic events like Christmas and Easter and Pentecost to the wings.

Preaching on Trinity Sunday makes me feel like the heart attack victim that called for a priest who, on arriving, knelt beside her and asked, “Do you believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost?” With great effort, the stricken woman replied, “Here I lay dying, and the Father is asking me riddles.”

Dogma, that’s doctrine with legs, seems always to be faith’s more or less futile attempt to make sense out of nonsense. Whereas faith, like love (and they’re not all that different), is about as exposed a position as a person can take and with very little reason to support it. It’s like getting caught with your hand in life’s cookie jar. It makes you feel like you need some kind of excuse. Dogma, on the other hand, gets you out of hock and offers an alibi.

I suppose it is not without purpose, then, that on this Sunday dedicated to a big piece of Christianity’s hard drive, the grand and eloquent creation story from Genesis wraps a security blanket around the whole thing. It says we are put here, you and I, to mind God’s creation, as Frederick Buechner put it, to give the universe something to talk with, to give God someone to talk to, and to give us somebody to talk about.

Genesis says that whatever we do about it, God thinks it is good that we are created, so good that we are made in God’s image, that is, that we and all the rest are gently and lovingly brought forth with cause out of the unfathomable depths of God’s ingeniously rich imagination.

Not as clones, but as beloved sharecroppers in whatever may be our capacity in all this exercise in fertility. And that, beloved, is very scary stuff. So scary, and yet, so enticing, that right off we blew it out of the garden and have needed the safety belts and airbags of doctrine ever since.

Doctrine, dogma, whatever, serves us well. We want everybody to buckle up. But never, we are reminded, at the expense of our imagination, for it is as we imagine that we are most as God creates us to be, incarnating our spirit into human being and walking the talk.

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