Trinity and Sexuality

Song of Songs 4:12 – 5:1

I want to talk about the sermon today, before I read the scripture. A number of months ago several people asked me if I could preach a set of sermons about what Christians believe – the purpose being to try and help people find ways to talk about their faith that made sense to them as they talk with friends.  They can be part of the solution in our world as we all come together in large conversation.  And so I’m going to do that in Lent and we’re also going to have a class; I’ll do a pastor’s class immediately following the 10:00 service during Lent . . . when we don’t have a congregational meeting or something, anyway.

But as I prepared those sermons I realized that I needed to do some foundation work.  We needed to talk about the three main doctrines or ideas of Christianity.  One of those is atonement and sacrifice. One of those is the nature of love, the interplay between agape and eros.  But the primary one for a Christian, the absolute bottom line, primary doctrine for a Christian, is the Trinity.

You know, 3 in one, verily, verily . . . Most people don’t pay much attention to the Trinity, but historically if you don’t focus on the Trinity than you should probably call yourself something other than a Christian – not that that’s the end of the world – but Trinity is foundational for who we are.  So today I’m going to talk about the Trinity and it may seem a little heady, but we’ll fill that out over the coming weeks, especially as we go through Lent.

In order to do that I want to introduce the idea of Trinity so we’re all talking about the same thing.  The followers of Jesus felt as though they were experiencing God in three distinct ways. They experienced God, the “I am,” and felt connected and one with God.  They experienced God in their relationship with Jesus.  And they experienced God as they lived within the matrix of the world of creation that God had created.  They experienced God in those three ways, and yet they believed that God was not separated into three parts, and so for a couple of centuries they just argued and argued and argued. To what degree were they three and to what degree were they one.  There was actually blood shed over this.  But where they came out was a paradoxical place: it’s three and it’s one.  That makes no sense, which is probably good, because if it did make sense it would mean we understood God and we can’t do that.  But the key to understanding Trinitarian theology is that anything I say about one member of the Trinity can also be said about the other two.  I know it’s a Trinitarian conversation when my head is spinning.  It’s the nature of the beast.

With that introduction, (and this may seem like a disconnect), I’m going to read what is probably the most erotic passage of Holy Scripture from the Song of Songs, beginning with chapter 4, verse 12.

^NRS Song of Solomon 4:12 A garden locked is my sister, my bride, a garden locked, a fountain sealed. ¹³ Your channel is an orchard of pomegranates with all choicest fruits, henna with nard, ¹⁴ nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense, myrrh and aloes, with all chief spices– ¹⁵ a garden fountain, a well of living water, and flowing streams from Lebanon. ¹⁶ Awake, O north wind, and come, O south wind! Blow upon my garden that its fragrance may be wafted abroad. Let my beloved come to his garden, and eat its choicest fruits.5:1 I come to my garden, my sister, my bride; I gather my myrrh with my spice, I eat my honeycomb with my honey, I drink my wine with my milk. Eat, friends, drink, and be drunk with love.

What do you think? An odd text to start with, to talk about the Trinity?  Maybe, maybe not.  Catherine LaCugna is a Roman Catholic Theologian.  She wrote a landmark book in Trinitarian studies in 1992 called God for Us, and in it she made the statement, “The sexual is iconic for the divine life.”  That is to say, the sexual is a window upon the divine life of God.  One has to wonder if the song isn’t in our scripture because there is some sense in which it sheds light, opens up a window, gives us a view of what the life of God is all about: the sexual.

Consider – the sexual starts, of course, with imagination.  You simply don’t get aroused without your imagination operating.  Imagination is the matrix in which it operates.  We obviously have a drive for union, and sex is generative; yes it makes babies but it also allows something to grow and build relationships between human beings as our sexuality is expressed.  It is an icon, a window on the divine life of God, as the first person, the second person, and the third person of the Trinity.

The first person of the Trinity is often called the father, the one who speaks and makes creation come into being, the power, the generative power of God.  Now remember, I could say the same thing about the other two.  But when we think of the father or this first person of the Trinity, we think of strength and power, the ability to bring something out of nothing, a window onto the divine. Remember King last week, “Tell them I am sent you, and if they don’t get that tell them my last name is the same as my first name, ‘I Am that I Am.”  You have to put a period after that.  Everyone else has to say I am because.  But this one has the power to bring the something out of the nothing, the first person of the Trinity.

The second person of the Trinity. It’s as though the life of God cannot help but reach out and connect to other people.  It’s as though it’s in the nature of God to be in communion, and that’s part of what the Trinity is about – these three persons doing such a dance that it’s difficult to say when one is one and one is another.  But also it’s an outpouring into creation.  That’s what Jesus is about.  It’s a recognition that God pours out God’s love into creation; God is not interested in being up there in the lofty blue where you can’t touch God.  Instead it’s in God’s nature to reach out and unite with human beings.  Paul said in Philippians that “God emptied God’s self and took on human form.”  “The word became flesh,” is what it says in the Gospel of John.  The second person – it’s in the nature of God to reach us.

Third person – this third face, the Spirit – in Acts it says it is “that in which we live and move and have our being.”  It’s the matrix, it’s the idea, and it’s what we are that derives all of our evolution and all of our growth.  We need to have that idea, that strength, that framework in order to move forward.  We live within this creation that God has reached out and joined us to.  And it’s our imagination that touches us.  It allows us to be absorbed into and have a sense of our place within all that is being created.

First person: first face of God; Second person: second face of God; third person: third face of God, and the sexual is iconic on that divine life, that divine dance, until what happens is that God, that God that is understood with that dance, reflects back into our lives and shows us what it means to be fully erotically living humans.  Fully erotic – to have a full imagination, a full desire for union, not separation, a generative power that brings something new about in the midst of creation. This is the divine life so sexuality is not only an icon on the divine life, but instead it becomes a model for what it is like for us to live a complete, full, and erotic life.  I’ve redefined the word erotic there, haven’t I?

I have a friend, Marc Gafni, the Rabbi and he’s actually going to preach here on the 14^th of February, and he did a little exercise, and I’m going to tell him not to do this with you.  He was at a seminar, and he had people do a guided meditation. So he had people sit down and take two deep breaths like Jan did, and sort of imagine a white light, and eventually, after 20 minutes of so, they get to the point where they are all imagining world peace.  And he stopped the meditation and he said, “Ok who had an experience, really had your imagination taken up by world peace?”

They all raised their hands and he said, “I don’t believe you. I know you think you’re supposed to have an experience, but did you really? Did world peace really hold your imagination for all that time?”  And there was a tittering around so then he said, “ok close your eyes again,” and he lead them into another meditation where they were to envision a sexually erotic scene.  He didn’t give them the details you understand, but that’s what he did, and so after they did that for the same length of time he said, “Ok who could hold that image in their mind?”  Mmmm . . . There’s something about that which suggests the erotic life of imagination, union, and power has become exiled into sex. But when we see sexuality through the window into the divine life, into the presence of God, then it becomes a model for the fully erotic life.

Now we can get some sense of what the full human life needs to be and it’s none too soon, because as I’ve said here before – I feel like one of the prophets in the Old Testament- things aren’t going too well. We’re reaching crisis moments in our world that are going to require real changes in humankind, real changes in our hearts, real changes in how we look at one another – not just here, but across the globe.  We’re going to need to have some deep wisdom and imagination to understand how it is that the world works, because otherwise we cannot possibly find ways to solve the problems, without creating new ones.

Wasn’t that the problem with welfare?  Talk about a great idea, meaning the heart’s in the right place.  We want to do something to help the poor but somehow welfare, years ago, it managed to make the problem worse.  It didn’t quite have the vision, the wisdom to pull it off.  We’re in crisis moments environmentally, you know all that. We’ll need imagination, generative power and union with the Divine to move our species forward.

But never mind the Cosmos and the whole species for the moment, let’s talk about you instead.  Let’s not talk about the whole globe. You know a lot of people think those crisis are reflected in our own hearts and lives.  And one reason we would want to lead a full and erotic life is so there would be a sustentative joy that grows within each of us.

The Trinity – not out there – if King were here maybe he’d say, “we take that idea of Trinity, we’d take it right out of the lofty blue and stick it right out of the corner of 5^th and E, or maybe right into the center of your hearts.”  Generative, driving towards union, deeply7 imaginative  – this Trinity is inviting you, wanting you to participate in the fully creative, erotic life.

It doesn’t sound like that “three in one verily, verily” stuff any more, does it?