Riddles
Trinity Sunday 7vi09
“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, a poet, and a Dante scholar. So she knew, it’s safe to say, what she was talking about, whether I do or not.
She could have been talking about Trinity Sunday, the only place in the entire liturgical keeping of time that a dogma assumes front stage center, can leave a stigma all over one’s preaching, and elbows all those majestic events like Christmas and Easter and Pentecost to the wings.
Preaching on Trinity Sunday can make one feel like the heart attack victim that called for a priest who, on arriving, moved the gathering crowd aside, knelt beside her, and asked, “Do you believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost?” With great effort, the stricken woman addressed those surrounding her, “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, not unlike 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, as well, with an alibi.
It somehow makes me mindful of that grand and eloquent creation story from Genesis that wraps a security blanket around the whole idea (Gen 1.1-2.3). It reminds us that we are put here to tend God’s creation by giving the universe something to talk with, giving God someone to talk to, and giving us somebody to talk about (cf Frederick Buechner).
And further, Genesis says that whatever we do about it, even to the making of enigmatic riddles, God thinks that it is good and makes us unconditionally in God’s image. Which is to say that we and all the rest of us — and them and it — are gently and lovingly shaped and brought forth with cause out of the unfathomable riches and depths of God’s ingeniously fecund imagination.
And not as mere 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 air bags of doctrine and dogma ever since.
But dare not overlook that doctrine, dogma, and all their theological progeny serve us well. We want everybody to buckle up. But be aware, as well, we are reminded — and warned — too much of this good thing can be at the expense of our imagination and worship. Such insight as that is perhaps no more obvious than in the turn of phrase at the very heart of the collect for Trinity Sunday, as we pray, “Almighty and everlasting God, you have given to us your servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of your divine Majesty to worship the Unity… ” (BCP p 228)
We acknowledge doctrine. We worship God. We’re not to confuse these. For it is in the imagination of our worship that we are most godlike, most as God creates us to be, imagining and incarnating our spirit into human being — and what is more leading us forth to walk the talk.