Angry, grieving people around our country, and around the world, continue to march in protest against systemic racism which constantly causes injustice and violence against people of color. So as we approach the next Sunday in the church calendar, Trinity, what has that seemingly abstract doctrine got to do with what is going on? Does the fact that Christians believe that God is three-persons-yet-one-God offer any hope to our current crisis around race? The answer is yes.
I humbly, and with great hesitance in speaking for others, suggest that when people shout from the depths of their souls that “Black lives matter!” they want those of us who are white to grasp that race itself matters. We might wish to say something like, “It doesn’t matter what color a person is, we’re all the same.” But such a statement trivializes the life experience of a person who has continually found that color really does matter, both in the way one is treated by other individuals and by social systems. The upshot is that the differences do matter in profound ways.
That is why the significant differences within God Himself matter so much. Western Christianity has tended to focus more on the unity of God, but all Christian theology grasps that there are, at the core of God’s own being, fundamental differences between the persons, between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One classic way of representing that fact is the “Shield of the Trinity,” which appears to go back to at least the 13th century. I’ll follow this lovely image in Latin with a simpler version in English to help us all see what the Shield is meant to illustrate.
As you can see, on the perimeter of the triangle, the Shield clearly states (in a different order from the Latin image, but that is irrelevant) that the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is not the Father. There is difference in God. At the same time, the in-reaching lines toward the center state the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. There is unity in God. Difference in unity is one aspect of the eternal life of God’s own self.
When we remember that human beings are created in the image of God (as the Old Testament lesson for this Sunday from Genesis 1 teaches us), we begin to see how these abstract concepts about the Trinity offer hope. We are meant to reflect in human life that unity in difference which is God’s own nature. Race matters because our racial differences are one way in which God created us to reflect His Trinitarian encompassing of difference (our sexual difference is another way, but that’s another story).
Hope comes to us when we realize that the whole story of the Gospel is God crossing the infinite difference between God and us in order to invite us into the kind of life which God has always enjoyed, a life of unity in difference. In our Gospel lesson for this Sunday, Matthew 28:16-20, when we hear Jesus commanding the disciples to go forth and baptize people of “all nations” into the Trinitarian name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Jesus is giving them a mission to preach the possibility that people of every race on earth can come together in that name, different but in unity. That is what the church is meant to be, a great community of people who embody the image of God, the image of difference in unity, unity in difference.
The difficult part of this story is that we may not simply leap to unity over the differences, downplaying or ignoring them. As those images of the Trinity suggest, the differences are just as important as the unity. The differences between black and brown and white are as significant and important as whatever might make us the same. Any genuine community and any genuine justice is going to have to embrace and celebrate and work within those differences if it is going to be able to achieve any genuine unity.
Unity in difference is hard work, just as hard as the apostolic work of spreading the Gospel of Jesus to all the nations, a work that has taken centuries and still has further to go. It is actually the same work, for the Gospel which baptizes into the name of the Holy Trinity is only really the Gospel when it produces the kind of community which that Name names. As the last week has shown us so clearly, there is a huge amount of work yet to be done before the human community of the church is a true reflection of that Name. But there is hope because that Name names the fact that the kind of human life we are seeking already exists in the divine life. And the Ambassador and Author of that life has come to us and will, as He promised, always be with us. Let’s get on with the work, living in the hope.