Trinitarian Physics

By Craig Hunter

1 John 4:7-12

For those of you who may not know, I spent the week before last at a Preaching conference in Nashville. I heard great sermons and lectures by some of the best preachers in the United States. It was a time to be inspired, a time to be renewed, and, to be quite honest, a time to get away from here and look back on Denton with a bit of separation. It is sometimes nice to be reminded that I have an identity that is older and different from the identity that I have had here in the last three months.

You see, I saw some acquaintances from seminary that I had not seen in six years. My first day there, I was coming out of registration when a young woman called out, "Craig!" At first, I didn't even recognize her, I had to dust off and pull out my old memories of who this person was. It is almost as though I knew them in a previous, nearly forgotten life.

I spent one evening with a couple that lived in Nashville, a couple I knew from seminary. I had not seen the wife, who I knew fairly well, in eight years. Now they had two children. It felt a bit weird. It wasn't just a journey to Nashville, you see, it was a journey into my past relationships, a journey into myself of a different time and place.

In my discussions with them, as we talked about our lives and our stories, I could not help but feel that I have changed, I could not help but feel a sense of separation between their lives and my own. They don’t have access to my experience in Japan, for example, it doesn’t connect with them, there isn’t any traction there, I lived a different life there, just as I live a different life here. I expect that to some extent the reverse is true for them as well. Sure, I can show them some pictures and share some stories, but so much of who I am here cannot be captured in pictures or stories. Of course, that has been true so many times before. I am especially aware of that because of all the time that I have spent living and traveling abroad, but one doesn’t even have to go abroad for that to happen. I suppose it happens anytime we change. It’s a part of life. Sitting on the flight between Nashville and Dallas, after the conference was over, thinking about my past and my future, I felt a bit out of place, leaving one world to return to another. This happens to me every time I come back from abroad, indeed, any time I travel at all. I feel that I am in some in-between space, I don’t quite belong, and I am aware of a kind of spiritual journey into myself even as the physical landscape passes by outside my window.

Have you ever felt like that? Do you feel like that now, from time to time?

I am reminded of one thing I said in the speech I gave at my high school graduation. I talked about how each of us is on a separate, yet parallel road. The trajectories of our lives are like parallel lines that extend off into infinity. I have my life to live and you have yours. There is a space, a gap, a separation between us. It is not that your life has no relevance for me, we can certainly learn something from each other, but rather that in the end, my life, my choices, my identity, are up to me. I must choose my own path. Each of us as individuals must choose our own individual paths. We come into this world alone. It often seems that we spend much of our lives alone. We pass each other at work, at church, in the grocery store, but how often do we really connect? Many of us feel alone even when we are together. Have you ever felt alone when surrounded by people, at a party for example – that is one of the deepest feelings of being alone there is. Some feel alone even in their marriages. And moments when we feel that we bond with someone else, how often do they really last? At the end of the day, we die, like we for the most part live, alone.

The human community, in this view, is a collection of individuals. Its purpose is to serve each of us in our individual journeys. Given that these journeys are something that we can only undertake alone, the best way to equip ourselves for the journeys is to know ourselves. Know thyself. What makes you tick? What are the passions that move you, what are the influences upon you? The more that you know yourself, the more empowered you will be, the more control you can take over your own life.

It’s almost as though life is a game of billiard balls, and each of us is a ball. We have our own separate identities, sometimes we collide with each other, sometimes we pass each other in the night. Sometimes it seems that if we just had more information, if we just knew a bit more about the forces acting upon us, if we just had a better understanding of brain chemistry and family relations or science in general, if we just had a big enough supercomputer to do our calculations for us, we could do a better job of predicting what would occur, and we wouldn’t have to be so anxious.

I use the billiard ball analogy because I think it highlights the connection between this understanding of the human condition and Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of physics. Sir Isaac Newton, one of the most famous physicists of all time, developed rules for how different objects interact with each other – rules of gravity and of motion. As with a game of billiard balls, if you know the velocity and mass of two billiard balls and the force of friction, you can calculate if they will collide with each other, and what will happen if they do. It requires no great leap to see us as these billiard balls. Just as the starting point of the view of the human condition that I have expressed is our existence as individuals, so is the starting place for Newtonian physics the stuff of existence upon which various forces act, in other words, matter. In other words, just as what makes us who we are is that we are each separate individuals, similarly, what makes the universe what it is is the existence of various bodies of matter. There is a parallel between our lives as individuals and the physics of the universe of matter, how we see ourselves

affects and is affected by, how we see the world, even the science that we do.

I would wager that most of you have heard of Isaac Newton, but I bet most of you don’t know that he was a Deist. That is to say, he believed that God is basically one, an unmoved mover who got the first billiard ball rolling and then stepped back to let everything unfold. This belief is consistent with his science. Just as the starting point for our lives is our own individual existence, just as the starting point for physics is the existence of matter, so is the starting point for God’s relationship with anyone or anything else the fact that God is one. God’s oneness defines God. Any relationship that God has is secondary to who God is, to what makes God God. God is defined not by relationship, but by Godself.

What I have been trying to do so far in this sermon is to draw a connection between how we see ourselves, how we see the universe in which we live, and how we see God. Because whether we realize it or not, that connection exists, indeed it is always there. This way of looking at life that I have described sees relationships as secondary – relationships between ourselves as individuals, between the matter of the universe, and between God and everything else. These relationships are secondary to who we are, what the universe is, and who God is. Unless I miss my guess, this, for the most part, is how we often see things.

But having made these connections, we would do well to remember that today is Trinity Sunday. Trinity Sunday, the day on which we remember and celebrate the Trinity. The Trinity is the uniquely Christian way of speaking about God. It is not some obscure theological doctrine of real interest only to theologians, rather it speaks to the heart of who we understand God to be, what we understand the universe to be, who we understand ourselves to be. The doctrine of the Trinity is radically different, it challenges everything I have been saying up to this point. According to the doctrine of the Trinity, to say that God is one is false, or at least it does not tell enough of the truth. For as Trinitarians, what we believe is that God is one AND God is three, God is three AND God is one. Both are equally true. How God can be one and three at the same time doesn’t seem to make sense, it is a paradox, but we nevertheless affirm that it is true. We

are called to hold the threeness of God in tension with the oneness of God. All too often, however, I think we tend to over-emphasize God’s oneness at the expense of God’s threeness. For the most part, whether we know it or not, we tend to be Deists in the way that we think.

This leads me to the question, "Who cares? What difference does it make?"

It makes a difference because the doctrine of the Trinity reminds us that the three persons of the Godhead, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, or the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Sustainer, are in such complete relationship with each other that they become one. It is like a marriage, where the two become one, only taken to the infinite degree. There is a word for this relationship, and that word is love, or perhaps even better, agape, the Greek word for a self-giving, sacrificial love, not the saccharine feel-good type that we tend to associate with the English word "love. We read in First John this morning, that God is love, God is agape. In other words, what makes God God is not God’s oneness, to which relationships are secondary, rather in the Trinity we see that God’s agape relationships, God’s loving relationships between the persons of the Trinity and between God and creation, are the essence of who God is.

To repeat: what I am saying is that relationships are not secondary to who God is, God’s relationship with us, God’s love for us, is not just a bonus. Rather, God is God because of God’s relationships, because of God’s love, for Godself and for us. Being in relationship is at the very heart of existence. Indeed, the doctrine of the Trinity means that it is impossible to be at all without being in relationship. It is relationship, it is agape love, that makes God who God is.

This challenges all those connections that I made before. If self-giving relationship, if agape is at the heart of who God is, if it is at the heart of existence, then it is agape relationships that make us who we are. Above all, it is God’s relationship with us, God’s sacrificial love for us that gives us identity. This means that we are really ourselves only when we are in God, which is to say, only when we love, only when we are in relationship with others. If it seems that so much of our lives is characterized by aloneness, by separation, by alienation from others, and connections of love with others are the exception rather than the rule, then that is because of our sin as individuals and as a world, it is not who we really are, it is not the way the world really is. In other words, because of our sin, most of our lives we are not who we really are, we are not whose we we really are. Rather those moments when we are conscious of our relationships with others, when we do love each other and connect with each other, as rare as those moments may be, those are the true moments, the real moments in which we are who we really are.

Our lives may seem like they run on parallel tracks, not essentially related to each other, extending off into infinity, but what the doctrine of the Trinity tells us is that we live in a non-Euclidean world, a world in which the impossible is true, a world in which parallel lines meet at infinity, and we have a name for that infinity, we call it love. It makes the impossible happen, it takes us each from our separate, alienated lives and brings us together, it restores us to who we are. We see this from time to time in redemptive moments in our own lives.** It is a taste of who we are created to be, a foretaste of who we are becoming.

But not only do we see it in our own lives, we see it in the very structure of the universe, in the very fabric of existence. Science has moved on since Newton, physics has changed. 20th century advances in quantum theory and in the theory of relativity have challenged and changed much of what we thought we knew. Just as we are not individuals who happen to be in relationships, so is the universe not just matter that happens to interact with each other by laws of energy and motion. Rather, to be is to be in relationship, and as Einstein showed, matter is energy. Relationship is not secondary for us or for the universe. Quantum physics tells us that to observe something is to change what we observe, the interaction, the relationship with the object changes the object itself, relationship determines what is, relationship is not secondary. The theory of relativity tells us how, on a sufficient scale, gravity bends the space-time continuum, it can bring together even parallel lines. Love is like spiritual gravity, it brings us together in relationship with each other, making us who we really are. In a way, God is the ultimate black hole, sucking us all to Godself, changing us under the power of God’s love, bringing us together from all of our different trajectories, except that to be sucked into God is not to be destroyed, it is to be re-created, to become again who God intends us to be. Just as we don’t know what wormholes or different universes lie on the other side of black holes, so can we only begin to imagine what we will look like when we pass into the purifying, gravitational field of God’s love.

If pressed for details on how God can be three and one at the same time, I can give no theory explaining everything, just as neither I nor anyone else can give a theory explaining all of physics, just as none of us can explain in detail the mystery of what it is to be human. The doctrine of the Trinity, the physics of the universe, our understanding of ourselves – there will always be a mystery at the heart of each of these, a mystery that should keep us humble and in awe. It is the mystery of agape, the mystery of God's love.

This Sunday afternoon, as we prepare to celebrate my installation to this congregation, I am particularly aware of these agape relationships in my own life. The presence with me here of my parents, my grandmother, and friends from abroad is a visible sign of an invisible grace, it is a sacramental reminder that I am not alone. They, and so many others in my life, remind me of the truth of the Trinity, which is that in the deepest sense I am not my own, my identity is not based on me, rather that it is God's agape love through people such as these, through people such as us, that makes us who we really are.

This day and everyday, may we surrender ourselves to be sucked into the gravitational field of that love to be transformed more fully into the people God has created us to be.