Trinity Sunday – A

May 18, 2008 

Genesis 1:1-2:4a

Psalm 8

2 Corinthians 13:11-13

Matthew 28:16-20

Do y’all remember the TV sitcom Home Improvement? I always liked that show. Several of our friends told us that Tim and Jill reminded them of Kevin and me. I don’t think that was a compliment for Kevin and once in a while it wasn’t for me either. Despite his good intentions, Tim generally made a mess of things. Jill was always going to school, working toward some sort of degree and for many years, so was I. In one episode she was taking a psychology course and had made an A on a paper. Apparently that boosted her confidence in matters of relationships. Things went bad for the Taylor family when Jill started psychoanalyzing their friends. She gave out some bad advice. One of the couples she advised was the parents of their son’s girlfriend. They split up thanks to her advice. The son lamented all this to his father and asked why his mother had to mess up other people’s families. Tim said something like "I guess messing up ours got too easy for her."

I tell you that story because I don’t want to pull a Jill this morning. I want to say something about the human brain but it doesn’t come from a lot of years of study. I don’t pretend to speak as an authority on the human brain. Recently I ran across the theory of the triune brain. I am completely intrigued by this theory as it parallels the concept of the Holy Trinity. Researcher Paul MacLean says the human brain is three brains in one.

The lower brain is the reptilian brain. Its function is instinctual. It is where our survival instinct is located. It controls involuntary action like breathing, digestion and heartbeat. The fight or flight response to danger comes from the reptilian brain.

Then there is the middle brain called the mammalian brain. That’s where feelings are located, where relationships are nurtured. Playfulness, joy, and compassion come from that section of the brain. When we speak of love and other what we call ‘heartfelt’ feelings, we are referring to the mammalian brain and not actually our hearts.

The top brain is the cortex and neo-cortex. It is the place of reason and of the three it takes up the largest space in our heads. Its function is to tell our bodies to move as we need them to and to process sensory information. It is the part of my brain that is dominant in this sermon because it enables me to write and speak, even to turn pages. My mammalian brain has a supportive role in this sermon because it allows me to perceive how you might hear my words and to choose them carefully. My reptilian brain likes order and rhythm and repetition. It urges me to set the words on the page in exactly the same stair-step order, week after week and to stand in exactly the same place to say what I say and do what I do every single Sunday.

The three separate brains, MacLean says, are so interconnected and interdependent that not one of them can function effectively in the body without the support of the other two. None of the three is the dominant function all of the time. Dominance is shared between them and moves back and forth.

I know a lot more about the Holy Trinity than I know about the human brain. I worshipped a triune God long before I knew anything about a triune brain. The apostolic tradition that you and I have inherited has given us the doctrine of the Holy Trinity as a way to name the mystery of the fullness of God so we can direct our minds toward God by addressing God either as Father, Creator of all that is; as Jesus Christ, Son of God the Father; or as the Holy Spirit, also called the breath of God, the name we give to the transcendent reality of God that we can perceive but not see.

We must have a name to address God to have an intimate relationship with God. And one name alone does not capture the fullness of God in all the ways humanity has experienced God in the world. The three persons of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, are as interconnected and interdependent as the three parts of our brain. The unity of our Godhead is like the unity of the brains in each of our own heads.

I have played with this comparison between the triune brain and the triune God for weeks now and I hope you will play with it too.

I can see the person of the Father Creator as the Divine Cortex who thought to create and then spoke the words, "Let there be…" and there was. I can see the Son as the Divine Mammal, the Divine human named Jesus whose very presence on the earth was the manifestation of an intimate union. The perfect relationship between God and humankind. I can see the Holy Spirit as the Divine instinct, the giver and sustainer of life in God the way our reptilian brain sustains our physical life. It is the part that formed first in our mothers’ wombs. It told our hearts to beat and kept them beating while we grew skin and tissue and bone until we were viable humans who could live on our own outside our mothers’ wombs. To me the triune brain and triune God is a beautiful parallel.

In adult forum we have been dealing lately with healthy skepticism as a way to grow in faith. And the question a skeptic would ask regarding the human brain and God is, Did the triune God create humankind in God’s image thus the triune brain? Or did humankind with our triune brain create God in our image thus the triune God? That would make a hearty debate with an atheist!

As Christians we have abundant testimony (which I know is not the same as proof), but we have the testimony of the scriptures and the church fathers and countless others who experienced God as Father, Son, or Holy Spirit in their own lives and made their witness known in all the generations since our Lord ascended into heaven through their words and deeds. A huge body of testimony that before anything was God was; that the process of the crated order as know it originated in the mind of God.

Personally, I don’t have to know the answer to the question I posed just now. I am comfortable living with it, letting my whole brain explore it. To demand a reasoned answer is to hold the thinking part of the brain as the only valid function. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity says the three persons of God are coequal. If I apply that notion of equal value to the three parts of my brain, I wouldn’t discount the relational part because that’s where I am able to seek a relationship with the transcendent reality. I wouldn’t discount the instinctual part because that’s where I am able to perceive the presence of the Holy One by any name.

For Christians who try as best we can to love God with all our heart, all our mind, all our soul, and to grow into the likeness and image of our Divine Creator, the concept of a triune God gives us a way to approach the mystery of God with all that we are, all that it means to be human. It gives us a way to hope in a future that transcends death so we can enjoy the fullness of life promised by the One we believe has been the source of all life from the beginning.