Like a Big Pizza Pie
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LIKE A BIG PIZZA PIE
The Rev. J. Donald Waring
Grace Church in New York
Trinity Sunday + May 26, 2024
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty. (Isaiah 6:1)
The Scriptures assert that no one can see God and live. Yet here we have the prophet Isaiah declaring, “I saw the Lord,” and surviving to tell the tale. How about you? Have you ever known a time in your life when you could almost say, “I saw the Lord?” I have. I was in my second year of seminary, agonizing over a paper on the topic of why an all-powerful, all-loving God would allow suffering. For weeks I had thought and prayed and worked and wrestled with the relevant Biblical passages. When the time came to write I had many things to say, not a word of which was my own. I had many things to report on second-hand, but that was all. I didn’t want to admit it, but “second hand” would have described much of my Christian faith at the time. Like Isaiah before his vision, God had not yet granted me the grace of any divine revelation. To be sure, I knew some things about God and the church. But the case could have been made that I didn’t really know God.
That all changed for me on a November evening in 1987. As I sat at my desk working on the paper, following the clues, something completely unexpected happened. Suddenly, like a wave washing over me, it all came together. In a wonderful combination of both mind and emotion, Jesus made perfect sense to me. I came to know the cross and resurrection of Christ as God’s gift to me. I knew without a doubt that nothing in all of creation could separate me from the love of God. An intense, urgent joy welled up within me. I stood from my desk and paced back and forth in my tiny little room saying to myself, “Of course, of course.” I walked around for the next several days with my feet a few inches off the ground. The intensity of the experience faded, as mountain-top moments always do. But it was profound enough that I will always remember it. Since then I have been searching for words to describe the experience, but no words ever seem to capture it.
Today is Trinity Sunday. Ever since medieval times the church has set aside one Sunday every year to observe and celebrate something people honestly have a difficult time observing and celebrating: the doctrine of the Trinity. The Trinity is the church’s teaching about the nature of God’s personality – a subject that no human words can ever possibly capture. But let me try to explain, very roughly, how we arrived at where we are.
By the time of Jesus, people certainly had come to experience, or at least suspect the existence of Almighty God, the creator of heaven and earth, the universe around us, and all things visible and invisible. They looked at the star lit heaven, they stood upon the stable earth, they sailed across the deep salt sea, and they experienced God as much, much greater than they were. They knew God as the transcendent One who dwelled in light inaccessible from before time and forever. Then along came Jesus of Nazareth, and the impact of his life, death, and resurrection on people was such that they were certain God himself had visited them in this individual. They experienced Jesus as God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, of one Being with the Father. After Jesus came the Day of Pentecost, when God’s Holy Spirit descended upon the people, and filled them with such new life that they could only conclude this was yet a third unique visitation of divinity.
So the experience of God was as Father, Son, and Spirit. But which was God? Or were all three God? If all three were God, how could God be One, as Jesus, Moses, and the prophets had taught? To put the whole mystery in the mouth of a Youth Confirmation student I once knew: “If Jesus was God, then who was in charge of heaven when Jesus was on earth?” “Good question, young lady,” I replied. “And thank you for asking. Have yourself another slice of pizza, and maybe we’ll have time to deal with your question another day,” said I.
Trinity Sunday, I’m afraid, is that other day. The doctrine of the Trinity attempts to address the student’s questions – it attempts to summarize the human experience of God. The Trinity states that God the Father is God, that God the Son is God, and that God the Spirit is God. And yet they are not three Gods but One. The One God exists in Three Persons and One Substance. That’s where all the three-in-one and one-in-three talk originates. And it’s right about now – right at this moment on Trinity Sunday every year – when your eyes should glaze over, and your minds wander far, far away. The doctrine of the Trinity is incomprehensible.
Do you know what? Incomprehensibility is precisely the point. The Trinity is not meant to be comprehended. God is not meant to be understood. God is meant to be experienced. If the doctrine of the Trinity causes your mind to wander, it’s because you’re probably starting with the doctrine and then trying to get from there to the experience. You’re putting the cart before the horse. You’re putting the doctrine before the experience. Instead, we start with the experience of God, and then comes the doctrine. All Christian doctrine starts with an experience of the true and living God.
Let me try to explain. Imagine this hypothetical situation: You decide to go out to dinner one evening to enjoy your favorite food. Feel free to substitute whatever dish you want here, but for the common good let’s say that your favorite dish is pizza. In fact, the word pizza itself is somewhat sacred to you. You say it with reverence. The mere mention of the word causes you to pause, close your eyes, and anticipate your next trip to the pizzeria. Well, the time has come and the pizza set before you is an absolute masterpiece to be devoured. The experience of eating the pizza with friends fills you with delight.
Now it so happens that you are a restaurant critic for a local food blog, and one reason why you went to this particular restaurant was to write a review. So when you go home you sit down with your laptop and search for words to describe the pizza. You do your best to find paragraphs and phrases and sentences to convey the reality of toppings and cheese and sauce. But ultimately you know that mere words won’t do it. A written or even verbal description of such a meal can hardly capture, let alone communicate, the experience of the actual substance hitting your taste buds.
The next day people open your post and read what you’ve written. Imagine that one person who has never before tasted pizza reads your review, studies it, analyses it, and without ever going to the restaurant or sampling a pizza, tries to become an authority on the pizzeria and the pizza. But how much will that person know? Not much, because the experience itself is lacking. It’s all second-hand. The doctrine of the Trinity in its fully developed form is a bit like your written review. It is a verbal description of something that cannot be contained in words. It is words and sentences and reflections based on the experience of the true and only God actually hitting your taste buds, or flying before your eyes, as in the case of Isaiah. Without the experience, the words make little sense.
Jesus seemed to think this lack of experience was the problem of one named Nicodemus. We have a conversation between the two recorded in today’s reading from the Gospel of John (3:1-17). Nicodemus was a good man who eventually became a follower of Jesus. John describes him as a Pharisee, which means he was a strict keeper of the Commandments. He was a ruler of the Jews, which means he was a member of the Sanhedrin, the top seventy Jewish officials in all of Judaism. He was a teacher of Israel – a rabbi who instructed other Jews in the ways of God. Nicodemus knew about God, He studied God. He taught the subject of God. He understood God as well as anyone assumed God could be understood. But in the conversation he had with Jesus, Nicodemus learned that what he knew of God was all second-hand. Nicodemus began the conversation by saying, we know. What Jesus basically had to say to Nicodemus was: no, you don’t know God because you haven’t experienced God for yourself. You haven’t been born anew, or born from above, or born again.
Nicodemus is like the person who tries to know all about pizza from your written review. He is like the drama critic who has never acted in a play. He is like the sports writer who has never played the game. Imagine if Nicodemus were to live today and have you over for dinner. You would sit around the dining room table reading cookbooks and discussing recipes and the nutritional value of food. You might recite some of the recipes together, responsively by whole verse. You might even set the recipes to plainsong or Anglican Chant and sing about the food, but you’d never get around to experiencing the food first hand. Of course, we are being unfair to Nicodemus, but only to highlight a point. Nicodemus had made a living out of studying and critiquing and analyzing God, but never actually experiencing and participating in God. It was all second-hand. He was so caught up in trying to understand, that he never got around to the experience itself. He was putting the cart before the horse. He was putting the explanation before the experience. Such was his problem, said Jesus.
It can be our problem too if we aren’t careful. Especially on Trinity Sunday, we can get so caught up in trying to understand God that we wind up missing or distrusting the experience of God. How many genuine moments of divine revelation have we dismissed as coincidence, or discounted due to the cynicism of our age? What Jesus had to say to Nicodemus is good news when you think about it. His message is that you don’t have to understand God in order to enjoy God. You don’t have to understand the wind in order to feel it. You don’t have to understand the Eucharist in order to receive it and be nourished by it. All we need to know is that we have a place at the table set for us. Have yourself another slice of pizza. God is to be experienced. O taste and see how gracious the Lord is, proclaimed the Psalmist (34:8).
A marvelous story is told of Karl Barth, one of the greatest Christian thinkers of the 20th century. From before World War One until his death in 1968 Karl Barth was a Protestant pastor and university professor of theology. He wrote and taught with passion and conviction, and had a profound influence in the Christian world. His massive work, Church Dogmatics, is a twenty-plus volume scholarly treatise dealing with all matters of belief and existence. One of my professors in seminary, when he was a young man, had listened to Karl Barth give a lecture, and he reported that merely the way Barth said the word “God” conveyed the richness and the depth of the life time of thought he had given to theology. Indeed, Barth had studied God. He knew all about God.
Toward the end of his life Karl Barth was being interviewed, and the question put to him was something on the order of, what have you learned in all these years? How would you summarize your life’s work? People braced themselves for a deeply profound, yet highly technical statement that would be inaccessible to anyone outside of an ivory tower. The great theologian thought for a moment, and then responded: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
If you don’t understand God, relax. Stay alert for moments of divine revelation when you might be able to declare, “I saw the Lord.” The love of God is an experience waiting for you – like a big pizza pie. Or in other words: when the Lord hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore!