Proverbs 8:22-31
Psalm 8
Romans 5:1-5
J. Robert Oppenheimer would later recount that on seeing the results of his greatest achievement, the world’s first atomic blast, words from the Bhagavad Gita immediately came to mind. “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.†But Hinduism was not the only religion on Oppenheimer’s mind, for the test itself was code-named Trinity. When asked why, he stated that he had been thinking of John Donne, the great 17th century English poet, dean of St. Paul’s, and member of Parliament.
Though the verses on Oppenheimer’s mind when asked to name the project made no specific reference to the Trinity, Donne was explicitly Trinitarian in his thought and theology. The poem normally listed as number 14 in his Holy Sonnets begins:
Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.
And there it was, on July 16, 1945, a mushroom cloud breaking, blowing, and burning in the desert, the destroyer of worlds. It is fitting that the desert in which the test site was located was known locally as Jornado del Muerto, the journey of the deadman.
If it is unclear how Oppenheimer, who had poetry and myth and a tremendous amount of science running through his brain, landed on this key term of Christian theology at that precise moment when he was asked for a name, it is equally unclear how we landed on the idea of Trinity itself, though it may be fitting that you cannot look directly at an atomic blast, which would be blinding, and we cannot look directly at the Trinity, despite two thousands years of attempting to put Divine Mystery in a tidy box, for the bow never stays tied.
The traditional trinitarian formulation, the named Father, Son, and Holy Spirit of our baptisms, occurs at the end of Matthew, though we suspect this is a fairly late addition. A sort of proto-Trinitarian thought seems to be just behind the scenes in works like today’s reading from Roman’s and in the John tradition, both the gospel and the much later letters.
The Hebrew Scriptures, especially the Wisdom literature like today’s reading from proverbs, provide the image of a personified wisdom, feminine, Sophia in the Greek. Sometimes God’s agency in the world, God’s power, is described as spirit, but that doesn’t necessarily help us, for the presence of the divine in the Hebrew Scriptures is often imprecise. The Jews of the first century were rightly scandalized by the idea that Jesus was an incarnation of God, the sort of polytheism they had worked so hard for centuries to purge from their culture, against which the prophets railed.
The early Christians had not quite worked out an understanding of Jesus Christ, those debates would come a couple of centuries later. They were happily ignoring the challenge of his claims to be an experience of God, right up until the Spirit became a theological issue. It was how to understand the Spirit that drove the development of Trinitarian theology, the idea that God was both one and three.
Humans being humans, the things we argue about the most are the things that seem to matter the least, so it is not surprising that the details of Trinitarian theology became a great battle ground between orthodoxy and heresy, often leaving in its wake a wasteland as bleak as that radioactive desert of Operation Trinity.
The Trinity is mostly ignored these days, rarely mentioned from the pulpit because it is too weird, Trinitarian theology is too esoteric, or just plain irrelevant in our daily lives. This is especially true for Christians who embrace continuing testament, our commitment that we can continue to learn new things about God. It is also true for those of us who embrace science, for we have a hard enough time with basic Christian claims about Jesus, never mind this presence of God that makes people fall on the floor and babble in tongues.
Today’s superficial consumer Christianity is disinclined to do the hard work of thinking about the nature of God, and even religious professionals fall into the trap of telling the same old Bible stories with the same old comforting message, “you’re just swell, no need to grow and change,†avoiding anything that makes us go deep, anything that challenges. The illogical language of divine personhood raises uncomfortable questions about our own personhood.
The great Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner nailed it when he said “Despite their orthodox confessions of the Trinity, Christians are, in their practical life, almost mere ‘monotheists’.â€
As a constructive theologian, I am the first to admit that I can say exactly zero about the nature of God. While I might borrow language and images, God as love, as per scripture, as serendipitous creativity, as per the late Gordon Kaufman, the truth is that in order for God to be God, God must be beyond our understanding. The great heresy of Trinity Sunday is not found in our fumbling attempts to describe the source of all, but rather comes in our certainty, in the hubris that tries to fit God into a catechism.
Instead of asking does this formula for God work, does that formula work, economic Trinity or social Trinity or immanent trinity, none meaning exactly what the words would suggest they mean, we should be asking what this understanding of God offers us that is useful, providing needed comfort and challenge, that moves us from the twin evils of fear and narcissism.
I was thinking about all of this, about the nature of Trinity, the utility of Trinity, the paucity of Trinitarian preaching even in the most orthodox of settings, when I came across two stories in a recent issue of The Economist. The first had to do with Starlink, a project of Elon Musk’s SpaceX that plans to surround the planet with a constellation of 12,000 satellites. The first sixty went up on May 24th, “bright as Polaris,†attracting ire and concern from astronomers. Musk was initially cavalier about the complaints, but has since made concessions, especially around the impact of Starlink on radio astronomers, and the satellites weren’t quite as bright once they were in the operational configuration.
While an earth wrapped in satellites may feel very sci-fi, there are nearly five thousand in orbit already, possibly topping that mark by this morning, so it is way more sci and less fi. Starlink does aim at a common good, to increase internet access around the globe, including poor and isolated regions. Internet access is a good, despite the Russian troll farms and viral Trinitarian cat memes. It is the on-ramp not just to commerce, but also to research, humanitarian assistance. It is connectivity in an age of migration and the platform for the sort of cultural interchange that has made humans what we are, from Renaissance to jazz.
It may seem odd, and maybe more fitting for last week’s Pentecost, but the internet has done for information what Pentecost did for God, no longer localized, but ubiquitous, accessible from anywhere. God was no longer just in one place, the Holy of Holies in the Second Temple in Jerusalem, but was everywhere. You did not need credentials to access the wisdom, love, and power of God.
But I had skipped an article, knowing I wanted to give it a closer read, so I turned back. The given location was Phoenix, the title “Guts, brains, and autism.†The article begins by noting that the term paradigm shift is oft overused but sometimes appropriate. It then goes on to describe research into the relationship between the gut biome, the bacteria that inhabit our bodies and are essential to life, and autism-spectrum disorder. The researchers, at Arizona State University, sequenced the gut bacteria of 20 autistic children, discovering that these children were missing hundreds of species, especially Prevotella, which ferments carbohydrate polymers. As a follow-up, the team then tested microbiota transfer therapy, essentially the re-introduction of a healthy typical gut biome, on 18 autistic children, fifteen classified as severe. Positive results were seen by four and a half months in, and now, two years on, only three are still classified as severely autistic, and eight have fallen below the diagnostic cut-off entirely, meaning that they are now classified as neurotypical. This is seemingly a cure for many cases of autism spectrum disorder.
This is massive, really adds to the growing case against the overuse of antibiotics, and ties in with other research connecting our gut biome to all sort of conditions, including chronic depression.
Just a Trinitarian personhood raises uncomfortable questions about what it means to be a person, so too does this research that tells us that changing the bacteria in our guts can change who we are.
This whole gut biome thing is relatively new, about a decade, and is exactly the sort of paradigm shift The Economist article suggested. It should cause us to rethink our sense of self, though that can a bit scary and weird, for it turns out that I am not me, some static creature born on a half shell like Botticelli’s Venus. I’m not even just a being who has been shaped by a combination of nature and nurture, genetics and environment. What I am is an embodied set of relationships, from the mitochondria coopted into cells to pave the way for complex life forms to that gut bacteria that can change my mood. The royal “we†may well be appropriate, for I am Legion, as the demon famously said to Jesus. The great American poet Walt Whitman came close to the mark in the long and rambling “Song of Myself†that opens Leaves of Grass, his sense that he was more that just himself. “I am less the reminder of property or qualities,†he writes, “and more the reminder of life.â€
For the Muslim, any belief other than the singularity of God is a vice called “shirk,†an area of agreement between Islam and Judaism, and here we are with this three-in-one God, which even we can’t figure out.
And maybe we don’t need to.
The unabated overuse of antibiotics, especially in agriculture has coincided not only with a rise in drug-resistant bacteria, a dire health threat, but also with the rise in diagnosis rates for Autism Spectrum Disorder. These things may be completely unrelated, but it cannot be good thing when we take a flamethrower to our guts.
I am not myself. I am an ecosystem, a life cycle.
And here, maybe, is our harvest as we wrestle with Trinity. God is relationship. So are we.
Knowing that calls us to greater attentiveness and care, not just to other members of our own species, something already mandated in scripture, but also to our planet, to other species, not just for practical reasons, but for spiritual reasons. Not just because lobstermen will go broke as ocean waters warm and acidify, but because we are less ourselves if there are no lobsters, no lobstermen, for like Whitman, we are the lobsterman, we are that bottom feeder, we are feeding on the bottom feeder.
The late Terry Pratchett, English author of fantastical comedies, suggested that gods exist only as long as someone believes in them. I’m not sure I’d go that far, for there must have been something before there was something. But I think there is much to be said for the idea that God exists in relationship with the Creation, and that the God we know is found at the intersection of divine mystery and human experience. And we are found at the intersection of bacteria and of self, of civilization and of story, of divine mystery and of love. Amen.