PREACHING AND THE HOLY TRINITY:

DWELLING IN GOD

Jennifer L. Lord

Henri Nouwens book, Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons, beginswith these words, How can we live in the midst of a world marked by fear,hatred, and violence, and not be destroyed by it? He continues: To live inthe world without belonging to the world summarizes the essence of thespiritual life. The spiritual life keeps us aware that our true house is notthe house of fear, in which the powers of hatred and violence rule, but thehouse of love, where God resides. Nouwen wrote these words in the early1980s. He had made repeated lengthy visits to the lArche community inTrosly, France, where a hospitable staff member placed icons on the tableof the room where he stayed. First it was Andrei Rublevs icon of the Trinity(see this issues cover). On the following years visit, it was the icon of OurLady of Vladimir, then, on later visits, he brought two icons he had selected.The book is his meditation on these four icons.1

Describing the icon of the Holy Trinity, Nouwen explains that Rublev didnot paint it only to pass along spiritual insights, but as a gift to fellow monksat the monasterya way to keep their hearts centered in God while living inthe midst of political unrest.2 Nouwen describes the icon as a place to enter,a holy place to visit and stay. He invites us to see the icon, and therefore theHoly Trinity, as the house of love. Nouwens approach to the Holy Trinityorients us for exploring this question: What is preaching in relation to theHoly Trinity? What is preaching in relation to the mystery of God, Three inOne? To be inside the Holy Trinity is to be inside the house of God, the placewhere Gods wordwhere preachingagain and again invites us home.

John Baggley, reflecting on this same icon, writes about the intricacies ofthis house:

In this composition the most obvious geometrical forms that are used are thecircle, following the forms of the three angels (Ouspensky claims that tracesof a circle are visible); the triangle (formed from the head and torso of thecentral angel and extending down to the lower corners); and the Cross(formed by the central axis of the iconwhich includes the tree, the centralangel, the chalice, and the aperture in the front of the tableand the heads ofthe outer two angels). The circle may be associated with divinity and eternity;the triangle has obvious associations with the Trinity; and the Cross is at thecenter of the Christian revelation. At the lower level of the icon Rublev uses a

Liturgy, 30 (1): 1117, 2015 Copyright # The Liturgical Conference ISSN: 0458-063XDOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2014.952592

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system sometimes known as inverse perspective in the depiction of thefootstools and the seats; the lines which we would expect to converge as theyrecede in fact open out away from the front of the icon; this has the effect ofdrawing our attention up into the circle of the relationships between thethree angels, inviting a certain participation by the viewer. The lines of theseats and footstools at the lower corners are balanced by the shape ofthe building and the mountain at the top corners; thus the four corners ofthe icon have been used in ways that enable us to discern an octagonal shapeas well as a circle within the structure of the icon. The octagon, seven plusone sides, is seen as suggesting the eternal glory of the eighth day, theendless Sabbath of the heavenly kingdom.3

By addressing the stylistic conventions of this icon and how they conveytheological content, Baggley shows that an icon is not just an illustration.Through the faithfulness of the scribe, it is Holy Scripture in visual form, avision of the divine world in lines and color. We are truly invited in to thelife-giving presence of the Holy Trinity.

Baggleys observations about the icons detailed geometrical forms dee-pen an invitation to pay attention to what Nouwen and so many others havecome to know through its forms and symbolism. I want to explore preachingin relation to the Trinity not as an attempt to define, describe, and argue forthe Trinity but rather as participation in the life-giving work of the triuneGod. What does it mean to preach in a way that consistently invites us toknow we live in this house of love, this eternal glory of the eighth day? I offertwo ways that preachers can think about preaching in relation to the Trinity:Naming God and Keeping Perspective.

Naming God

To think about trinitarian preaching is to think about the meaning of thisname for God. Christians use a variety of names for God such as: Mother,Father, Holy One, Holy Three, Redeemer, Son, Spirit, Creator, Sustainer.The way we name God shapes our faith; our beliefs, in turn, influence thenames we choose. Orthodox Christians keep a trinitarian focus in theirprayers. Pentecostals emphasize the Holy Spirit. Evangelical Christians prior-itize Jesus. Persons across Protestant traditions hold on to the nameFather-God. Some Christians wish for a constant use of a variety of namesfor God according to the many names and images for God in scripture suchas God who is Abba, Son, and Spirit or God as gate, bread, and water of life,among others. Through the testament of our Jewish brothers and sisters, weknow that Gods name is sacred. Through the centuries Christians havedisagreed about names for God and how the persons of the Trinity are tobe seen in relationship to one another. The different names for God representtheological distinctions across Christian traditions and the variety of nameschosen to describe and address God shapes our beliefs.

Preachers use different names for God, and the way God is named in ser-mons also shapes our beliefs. Sermons in some traditions prioritize the gifts ofthe Spirit, some stress conversion to Christ, others stress faith in the Creator.The ways we name God in the churchs preachingalong with our praying

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and reading, baptizing and meal-sharingis a theological act shapingour faith.

To think about trinitarian preaching frequently means preaching about theTrinity. We deal with theologies of the Trinity, and we rehearse our prepara-tions for Trinity Sunday (called by Protestants and Roman Catholics, theSunday after Pentecost; by Byzantine Christians, Pentecost Sunday). Thisusually means we remind ourselves of different theological emphases fortrinitarian speech. We might speak, for instance, of Gods interrelatedness(the immanent Trinity) or of Gods work and mission with humanity andthe whole world throughout history (the economic Trinity). We spend timewith the history of these theological developments, refreshing our memoriesabout certain ideas that were either condemned as heretical or nuanced asdisplacement (the Trinity comes into being in stages through history), subor-dinationism (the Son and Holy Spirit are subordinate to the Father), tritheism(the Trinity is really three gods), modalism (God has aspects like creating,redeeming, and sanctifying but is not three persons of one nature), andaccumulation (the revelation of persons of the Trinity are added at differenttimes in history). Current scholarly emphases move to Gods inner-community, relationship, and communication.

It is always a good thing for those of us who preach to immerse ourselvesin history and theology and refresh our thinking on doctrinal matters. Thisreview helps us know that theologies of the Holy Trinity are complex butindispensable because they underscore that it is not enough, in Christianpreaching, to speak of one person of the Trinity. There might be exceptionsbut they should never be the rule. If sermons only speak of God or Jesus orthe Spirit, a great imbalance is communicated. A quick cautionary listincludes sermons emphasizing God as creator in a way that describes agod who is distant and uninterested in our daily lives. Jesus can be preachedin such a way that we have no need of God who names him the beloved Son,or of the presence of the Spirit of the risen Christ, or any understanding thathis titles, like Messiah and Lord, take their meanings from the Old Testament.The Holy Spirit can devolve into one of many spirits, spirituality withoutrelation to creation, covenant, death, and resurrection. The ways we tell thenames and stories and actions of God in our sermons demonstrate the eternalinterrelatedness of God in three persons. Of course we cant preach every-thing in one sermon. But we can review our preaching with some helpfulquestions: Even if we prioritize one name for God, are we speaking thefullness of the Trinity? Do our sermons over time proclaim the nature, work,and purposes of God the Holy One, Holy Three?

I want preachers to think of trinitarian preaching more broadly thanpreaching that is about the Trinity. It is not enough to think we only preachthe Trinity once a year, on Trinity Sunday. Every Sunday, whether it is a feastday (holiday) or a standard (ordinary time) Sunday, is not just about thetheme of the day but about the theme in relation to the paschal mystery,the entire revelation of God in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.Who is this triune God? It is the God we know in the Crucified-Risen One. Itis the God who created the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land,and who gathered a covenant people. It is the Spirit of God who is a treasuryof blessings, ever life-giving for the healing of the nations. The one-day festal

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celebration reveals again, in our present day, the nature and purposes of ourGod. As I have written elsewhere:

[R]ecalling that Trinity Sunday is held in relation to Pentecost which in turnis itself the fiftieth day of the pasch, then there is something more to be said.There is a direction for these feast days . . . . They have a telos, a direction,which is the cosmos so that all creation shares in the fruits of redemption.The direction is the awakening to liberation. It is insistence of this accordingto the liberating power of the risen Christ at every level of life.4

Here are the sermonic cautions for Naming God in relation to trinitarianpreaching:

. preaching on the Trinity is not the same as trinitarian preaching;

. parsing the Trinity does not equal proclaiming the fullness of our life-giving God;

. trinitarian preaching is more than defining God and more than using theword trinitarian as an adjective for God while still only preaching a portionof the nature of God; and

. trinitarian preaching does not occur only once a year.

To preach in a trinitarian manner is to preach the fullness of Gods revelation.The church itself, as it stands before the creator of all in company with thewords and signs of this Jesus, believes it is enlivened by the very presence ofGod, called the Holy Spirit.5 We preach the fullness of Gods revelation inrelation to our lives. This is the second aspect for exploration.

Keeping Perspective

On many Sundays I am standing with my spouse in his assembly, hearingthese words at the very end of the liturgy, The Holy Trinity keep and protectyou. I like those words a great deal. Somehow they sound different than thetrinitarian blessings Im familiar with: The Lord bless you and keep you, theLord be kind and gracious to you, the Lord look upon you with favor andgive you peace (Numbers 6:2426) or the Presbyterian use of 2 Corinthians13:13 at the sending rather than at the gathering, The grace of our LordJesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be withyou all. In these and other familiar benedictions, the Trinity is worded bynaming each of the three persons of the Trinity or by naming God in three-foldaction (e.g., bless, be kind, look with favor). But the priest at the AntiochianOrthodox church, after all other standard dismissals have been said, adds thatsimple sentence: The Holy Trinity keep and protect you. One Orthodoxfriend, who is a priest in the Slavic practice of the tradition, has never heardthis particular wording, making it all the more interesting to me.

This trinitarian blessing describes God who stays near and envelops us.By these words, I envision us in the midst of the Three in One, the One inThree. I imagine that the spatial relationship between God and humanity isnot only vertical, from heaven to earth, or only horizontal, side-by-sideaccompaniment, but is God with and around all. I envision the Trinity as a

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good and pleasant fence that borders us, keeps us, and protects us. But thewords mean more than that, for the Trinity is not simply a static object fixedin place to keep and protect us. Rather, this wording for the Trinity evokes asense of God keeping watch. We are accompanied and surrounded by theliving, active, loving triune God who is paying attention to us all. And thesewords seem big enough to mean that the triune God is paying attention to thewhole cosmos. The fence encircling is very large.

This large circle raises a second exploration regarding preaching and theTrinity: the scope of our words. Do our sermons name both the everydaynews of our lives in the world and the expansive presence and promises ofGod who is in and beyond our time? Can we speak of both the quotidianand the mystery, the immanent and the transcendent, the now and thenot-yet? Trinitarian preaching means that we must.

Sermons are Gospel proclamation that honestly names the commonplaceof our lives, even the commonplace that Nouwen refers to as our false houseof fear, hatred, and violence. Yet sermons also repeatedly awaken us to thelove and work of the life-creating TrinityGods presence and promise:Gods very word over and against what seeks to mutilate the life God gives.A sermon is proclamatory speech, witnessing to the biblical God, addressingthe reality of our lives through the language of the texts, but also announcingthrough those same texts the purposes and ways of God-for-us. Preachingdoes not circumvent what is going on in the world and in our daily lives;it speaks to those realities, naming Gods life-giving self alongside those rea-lities. The scope of our speech means that our human efforts and joys, ourfears and griefs, are held in the breadth of majestic power, making the inti-macy of divine attentiveness even more profound because we also knowthe vastness of God.

But that does not seem to be the direction for many preachers. Too muchpreaching participates in popular rhetoric with short and easy answers,shaped to compete with the glut of words in our information-saturated world.Preachers grasp for what will catch our attention, giving us a bylineoftenabout happiness or prosperitythat turns preaching into one more resourcefor an easier life. Or we hear how we need to do more, be better, and workthings out by our own labors. The Gospel becomes imbalanced because weightis placed on our efforts. These are examples of reduced speech: deep unrestand sorrows go unnamed, Christianity is packaged as nice or prosperous,and the new life of Gods reign is entirely up to us. Walter Brueggemannblatantly refers to this as reduced speech and mourns the fact that it con-tinues as a prominent preaching trend.6 We forget how to think deeply,how to admit our questions and laments, and what it is to walk in mystery.

Filmmaker Terrence Malicks movie The Tree of Life prompts reflection onthe current state of preaching.7 The film holds together common humanexperience and the cosmic reach of God. The visual frames for the scenesestablish and evoke a sense of spatial and chronological perspective. In thisfilm (as with his others), Malick works with themes of water, grasses, leaves,and sunlight.8 The camera angle has us crouch in tall grasses, float amidst treetops and waving branches, squint through water fights and sprinkler spray,and view nebular space. The viewer is set both in chronological time andspace and moved beyond it.

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Malick situates human events through this same spatial and chronologicalframing, introducing us to a family and a sorrow that will permeate the life ofthat family.We are placed alongside them and beyond them: the audiencemem-ber is inches away from the fathers andmothers tears and yet also positioned asif hovering above them, above ground, and even into outer space in order, itseems, to experience the God to whom we pray as familiar yet beyond, intimateyet surpassing, synchronistic with human joy and grief yet mighty and majestic.The viewer is transported between particular events in the lives of these familymembers and simultaneously presented with scenes evoking timelessness.

Trinitarian preaching keeps this same temporal and eternal perspective. Itis theHoly Trinity keeping and protecting us. And it is the Holy Trinity keepingand protecting us. The personal is always placed in the larger view of Godsloving expanse. How are we to do that in our sermons? One way is to reflecton our sermon focusespecially whether it is concerned with the individualor the community. In the United States weve tended to individualize faithand belief; sermon language shapes and reflects this. Preachers easily use textsthat speak of nation, community, and corporeality to speak, instead, to the indi-vidual believer or the aggregate of individuals on a Sunday morning. In thisway preachers avoid the cosmic, international, national, and corporate per-spectives and how those biblical claims interpret us as members of the bodyof Christ in the world today. In addition, preachers commonly privatize texts,and therefore faith, rather than showing us that the corporate, international,and cosmic language witnesses to God and Gods people at work in all spheresof life. Trinitarian preaching keeps perspective: individually we are membersof one body, we are in the household of faith, we are participants in the workof God, which is for the sake of the world, indeed of the cosmos. Any speechdirected toward us individually is also placed in this larger perspective.

Another way to keep perspective is to be certain that our preachingnames our worrisome houses along with Gods house of love, our true house.Malicks movie does not make light of that familys anguish. It depicts a con-tinuous flow between individual family members reactions and thoughtsand the pervasiveness of Gods presence and fencing. So, too, in terms ofthe texts, our sermons name all of our losses, laments, injustices. These areour deaths, including those that come to us uncontrollably and those we sys-temically perpetuate. Naming the life of God with and for us now, closer thanour own breath and as mercy beyond measure, we are held in the telos ofGod who has trampled down death.9

Preachers pay attention to what names we use for God and what we saytheologically by the choice of names. Preachers work to keep perspective, hold-ing together present angst, confusion, and grief with the merciful presence andpromise of God for the whole world. Preachers honestly name both houses butpreach the truth that keeps and protects us all. Preaching, alongside reading andpraying, washing and eating, continually invites us to life in the Holy Trinity. Itinvites us again and again to see that we are kept and protected byGod the Threein One. Just as the icon, through its lines, color, and other stylistic conventions,invites us into the presence of God, so preaching, as a verbal icon, does the same:

If one were to search for a single word to describe this icon, it is the wordlove. The Holy Trinity itself is a community of love so perfect that Father,

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Son, and Holy Spirit are one. All creation is a manifestation of Gods love.The Incarnation of Christ is an act of love as is every word and action thatfollows, even if at times it is what Dostoevsky calls a harsh and dreadfullove. Christs acceptance of condemnation and execution witnesses to theself-giving nature of love. His Resurrection is a sign of the power of loveto defeat death. Christ invites us each to participate in the love and mercyof God.10

Jennifer L. Lord is the Dorothy B. Vickery Professor of Homileticsand Liturgical Studies at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary

and a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA).

Notes

1. Henri J. M. Nouwen, Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons (Notre Dame, IN: Ave MariaPress, 1987).2. Rublev was a monk of the Holy Trinity Monastery founded by St. Sergius of Radonezh and wasinfluenced by St. Sergius spirituality and theology. St. Sergius (c. 131492) lived during the time ofcontroversies about the doctrine of the Trinity and of the Tartar oppression of the Russian people. . . [when] the Russian people were struggling under external attacks and internal disintegration asthe various principalities vied with each other for prestige. Many believe Rublev intended the iconto be placed over the tomb of St. Sergius. John Baggley, Festival Icons for the Christian Year (Crestwood,NJ: St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 2000), 15052.3. Ibid., 15354.4. Jennifer L. Lord, Preaching and Trinity Sunday: Preaching and Teaching New Creation, inInterpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 66 (January 2012), 37.5. Gordon Lathrop, The Pastor (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2006), 99.6. Walter Brueggemann, Finally Comes the Poet (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989).7. Terrence Malick, Tree of Life, Fox Searchlight, film, 2011.8. See for instance Terrence Malick, The Thin Red Line, Fox, film, 1998.9. For authors who speak to preachings naming of our deaths and Gods mercy, see Gordon Lathrop(see n. 5); Melinda Quivik, Serving the Word: Preaching in Worship (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press,2009); and Paul Scott Wilson, The Four Pages of the Sermon (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1999).10. Jim Forest, Praying with Icons (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001), 99100.

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