Sermon preached by the Very Rev. Dr. George Sumner, Principal of Wycliffe College, Toronto on May 30, 2008, at the Tyndale University College Conference on "The Holy Trinity and Scripture"
I heard recently that my teacher of New Testament in university, Krister Stendahl, died- though I came to disagree with him on several counts, I am grateful and appreciative of him. He was a scholar's scholar; after a serious auto accident, he was asked whether he wanted his back fused straight up or at a 45% angle, to which he responded: "give me the slanted one, I read a lot." He also had his 10 commandments for preachers, prominent among them being "don't preach on love," which I find easy to obey. Harder is the following mitzvah: you are responsible not for what you say, but for what they hear! Ouch. And here, my brothers and sisters, is what they hear in this pervasively, tolerant and pluralist and relativist age of ours: Christian words and symbols are powerful and evocative, and lead Christians toward the divine, and yet God is, at the end of the day bigger and greater, and so room remains, for other words and symbols. And there is a way in which of course our God is too small, and a way in which there is value in other orbits of symbol, and there are ways in which the Trinity itself is made to pull freight to make these points in our time. And more importantly for our work, there is a yet greater way in which the Trinity is the prime barricade against this escape route. Still, the tolerant and pluralist and relativist air we breathe makes it hard for ordinary ears in the pews or on the streets to hear. How do we know? Who's to say? Modern worries, our worries these. In other words, we can be confident that our talk about immanent and economic, about revelation and authority, however rarified it may seem, collides with a deep prejudice of our time. Maybe the 11th law of preaching is gratitude when we hear the sound of impact between stone of stumbling and furniture.
Consider with me, for example, Tertullian combating the modalists in his work called Against Praxeas. He reflects on the question of the visibility and the invisibility of God. We hear, he reminds us, both in the Scriptures. The Word that created all things can only be known under signs and enigmas. Moses is told by God that he is not to behold him, but only to see catch a glimpse behind him as he passes. It is his face Moses is not to see. And yet we hear Jacob in his chutzpah telling us that he has seen God "face to face" and has not died. We hear Paul tell us that in heaven, seeing in a glass darkly will end when we see face to face. The Father is the invisible, and the Son visible, Tertullian tells us. Or, more accurately, he explains this question of our seeing and not seeing by referring to our belief in the Father this way, using the image of the face: "Must he not be the face of the Son, by reason of that authority which he obtains as the begotten of the Father?...to be sure, it is an astonishing thing, that the Father should be the face of the Son…" And since the work of the Trinity is indivisible, and if the Son shows us the visible face of the Father by the power of the Spirit, then must it not be equally so that the Son leads us up to the invisibility of the Father?The Father is the unutterable mystery utterly beyond and before, yet in, with, and under, the world. He is the One whose utter holiness and power Jesus himself prays and teaches us to pray. He is the silent depth into which he prays with tears and faithful cries in Gethsemane, and on the cross itself. The doctrine of the Trinity is the Church's witness that in Christ we see nothing other or less than the Father himself. "The one who has seen me has seen the Father." "In our hearts has shone the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ." But equally, to live in Christ is to be lifted in praise and surrender to the throne of the Father, before whom there for us is only to fall on one's face in gratitude for not being slain. What humans in their doubt worry over as the unknowability of God, and moderns in particular in a sense of the shortened arm of our symbols, Scripture attests is the good news of the invisibility of the Father, his unutterable glory, at the very heart of the revelation of Jesus Christ.
In this morning's reading we are promised that on that last great day, we will stand before the throne. The questions and quandaries will be answerd, the believer confirmed, the scoffer's mouth stopped. Revelation tells us that we will behold something of indescribable beauty and majesty. It is the very vision of Yahweh first glimpsed in Exodus, though now surely the veil is in some sense lifted. But the face of the Father on the throne is still not beheld. We did not see it in Exodus or Isaiah or Daniel, and even here on the last day we do not see it. It is too bright to behold. Now this is God's kindness and not his stinginess. His eternal invisibility to us is good news. And the gracious unknowability, that can never be separated from his revelation, this too is protected in the doctrine of the Trinity.
The denomination of which I am a part talks all too much about the law of praying, and theology as doxology, and much that it means by these terms is an evasion of theology. But there is a truth to be found here as well. Before the throne of the Father, whom the elders joyfully cannot see, for he is all fire and lightning and thunder, everything dissolves into adoration. And there God is ever more and beyond, semper maior, and that is, it turns out, to know God rightly. And because that is true a seminary must lead to its chapel, and all our wordless wonder lead us to hear the voice that says "this is my Son, hear him." Seen and unseen are only understood from within the revelation of Trinity, and understood only so as to be adored.
I, as one who labors in such an institution, sometimes find it humbling and helpful to recall how little we remember from theological college. Thirty years later, the notes are all gone in midlife forgetfulness, though not the personal witness of some of my professors. But I do recall bits, one being the requirementto read Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Moses. It is a typological reading, a spiritual theology in the form of a meditation on heaven. Much of it is couched in Greek philosophical terms, for example we humans there having passed from the passible into the inpassible. Thereby we would seem to possess too much. But then Gregory turns to Paul in Philippians, and talks about the upward striving, of not having arrived, of journeying eternally up the mountain side, deeper and deeper in our desire for heavenly things, which itself enables us to see more and more of them, a stretching onward. There is one place for him that the Christian Gospel transforms Greek, or any, philosophy. Into the presence of God, and not just the eternal or the unknown, we are drawn. Into the Father, and only by the gracious hovering of Christ who is the rock with water, by the power of the Spirit.
My task is to preach God the Father, the good news of the eternally unseen face. It cannot be rightly understood without the revelation of Jesus Christ, the Son whose face is the face of the Father. But something, though broken and confused, is seen here. Our not knowing tells us is a vacuum whispering to us of what is not yet known. In a room with this many Barthians here I indeed quake. But the yearning of the world must be noted. The sense of absence is pervasive. The wistfulness for something he had never seen or known that C.S. Lewis considered a vestige of the hope of heaven, that is familiar to me. The dark unanswerability of the eternal is the negative witness of the religions, though in the next breath we admit that it is inseparable from imaginings that are in error. That which is least accessible to the unbeliever, the adorable facelessness of the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, even it, suggests an opening, whispers to the not yet believer that God is not in the things we would suppose. Idolaters though we be, we have been imprinted by the facelessness of the Father and in our lostness cannot altogether lose a sense of it.
And if on this warm June day we are treading on very thin ice, let me add a word of my own experience, problematic though our own memories of fathers be. As a very small boy Saturday was the day that my harried mother would surrender us over to the care of my father, and we would be taken on half-adventures, half-forced-marches through thickets, and on bicycles down yet unopened thruways, and into dark drainpipes. The youngest, I grasped his hand for dear life. I could see him, far taller than I, though it was only the side of his face I could see, looking ahead as he invariably was. I couldn't make out his face, yet as the years go by I see more and more the brightness of him in what he did show us.
The shining face seen in the Son lifting us up by the Spirit to adore the invisible and indescribable beauty of the Father. It is the source of a daunting challenge, for you are answering calls to convey the news of Father, Son, and Spirit to a generation that can so readily hear its converse, sheer plurality. It is the source of a great joy in the midst of such twilight discouragements that go with being a tradition-minded priest or scholar in this era of little things, when a desperately functional church is deaf to the word about the Trinity it most needs to hear. It is the source of modesty too, for our defense of the Trinitarian truth involves as yet no winning of a white robe. It is the wise reminder of what we all know, that theology can only be done with the end of doxology in view. It is the source of humility, for there are real magisters, but they are around the throne, and there is a true science of God, but it is taught by the creatures in that brilliant light. And it is finally the source of a sweet sense of fellowship, for in this gathering this May morning, in this chapel, for this one day, we are with are one with a far longer and wider line of pastors and scholars toiling in that bright, revealed and unknowable light from the throne toward which we travel.
