Trinity Sunday 2010

05/30/10
Trinity Sunday 2010
Hudson UMC

Today is Trinity Sunday. What is interesting is that, in spite of the fact that the Trinity is both the form and the content of the great classic Christian creeds, we do not often think about it from day to day. The simple fact of the matter, whether we like it or not, is that the Trinity is one of the very few beliefs that makes Christianity unique in the world both today and throughout history.

Christianity is not set apart because of its particular views of ethics and morality. If you look around in our world today, you will find all kinds of organizations which exist simply in order to do good to other people. If the only thing about Christianity that is attractive to you is its take on how we should live, there are many other groups around that can offer you a good way to live.

When you get down to it, at the very end of the day, the one absolutely fundamental belief that sets Christians apart from all other groups, the one idea that lies at the very root of everything else we have to say as Christians, is the fact that the one God of the universe, who created everything that we can see and everything that we can’t see, became a man, a human being, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh; that He lived, died, was raised from the dead, and was ascended back to heaven. This fact, as born witness to in the New Testament, set up a tension between what people thought God was like, a single, isolated individual, and what God actually is, a community of Persons in absolute unity. Eventually, this revelation that we see in the Gospels and further laid out in the epistles, forced the church to come to a Trinitarian understanding of God.

So, even though the Trinity is a basic Christian belief, and though we all know that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, it does not always impact our Christian lives. When we think about how important we say it is, we figure that it should impact our lives but we do not always see how. It is made worse when we see the kinds of images we usually use to explain the Trinity to small children. Often we will say, “God is kind of like water, because water can be a solid, a liquid, or a gas.” Another image we sometimes use is, “God is kind of like an egg, because, though there is only one egg, it is made up of a yolk, a white and a shell.” We hear those images and we don’t say to ourselves, “Wow! Now I understand why the angels veil their faces and cry ‘Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty!’” Instead, we are more likely to say, “Boy, I know the Trinity is really important and that it should impact my life, but after hearing that, I don’t think I understand it at all.”

Now, we shouldn’t get mad at people when they use images like this. After all, they are doing their best to explain a very difficult concept. The fact of the matter is that there is absolutely nothing in our daily experience that can really show us what God’s triunity is like. It is one of a kind. And yet, in spite of the fact that this is a difficult idea, our Christian faith is rooted in the Trinity. After all, when we baptize a person, we baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. If I were to ask you, “Are you accepted in the eyes of God?” You would say to me, “Yes!” Then I would ask you, “How were you accepted by God?” Your answer would be something like, “Because God became a man in Jesus Christ and died for my sins.” Finally, I would ask you, “How did you come to know that you were accepted?” Your answer might not be quite like this, but it would be similar. “Because the Spirit of God bore witness in my heart that I am a child of God.” Our very most basic Christian experience is rooted in the fact that God is triune. So, if the Trinity is so very important, we should spend some time thinking about what it means.

I can remember when I first started paying attention to the Trinity and getting excited about it. What amazed me is when I realized that, when we say that God is a community of Persons in absolute unity, we are not just highlighting that, within the being of God there is a Father, a Son and a Holy Spirit, but that we are saying that the relationships between them are part of who God is. The relationship between the Son and the Father, for example, is every bit as real as the persons themselves. It is my prayer that, though we will never exhaust the depths of the majesty of God, we will come to just a little more clarity about the divine relationships within the Trinity and how it shapes our lives.

In order to help us do that, I want to point out what we can actually see about the relationship between Jesus and the Father and then Jesus and the Spirit in the texts that we read earlier. Jesus, when speaking to His disciples, tells them that He is going away but that they know where He is going. Thomas says to Him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus’ response is very famous. “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

What Jesus has just said here is often used to point out that other religions are not the same, that they are not just “different paths up the same mountain.” This is indeed true and Jesus could not have said what He said if that were not true. However, Jesus is not primarily concerned with inter-religious dialogue. He wasn’t primarily trying to help Christians maintain their distinction from Muslims among others, but trying to explain the incredible relationship that He shares with His Father.

Jesus has said that absolutely nobody comes to the Father except through Him. When He says this, He is saying that they are the same God, that though there is indeed a distinction between Him and His Father, they are not finally different gods, but are both within the very being of the One God of Israel. When we realize that are dealing with a man who is not just a prophet but also God in flesh, His statement makes a lot of sense. Jesus saying that nobody comes to the Father except through Him is not the same as if someone like the Muslim prophet, Mohammed, had said the same thing. We are not called to come to God through a particular prophet, but to come to God through God. No one can come to the Father except through Christ. If we were to try to come to the Father outside of Christ, by somehow bypassing the actual person of Jesus, we would be trying to come to God by avoiding God. It simply can’t be done. There is only one way to God and that is through God. In so many ways, Jesus is saying, “I am God. If you want to come to God, come to me. If you want to know the Father, get to know me. If you know me, you will know my Father also.” God has come among us. Thinking that we can come up with some other way to God other than the way that God has actually prepared and made known to us would be the height of arrogance.

Right after Jesus says that, because the disciples know Him, they know God, Philip speaks up and says, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Jesus’ response is, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father?’ Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?” The disciples have grasped that Jesus is not speaking of Himself when He speaks of the Father, so they ask to see Him. However, they don’t want God to be as rich and complex as He really is. They want a God who is simple and easy to understand. They want a God who is just a supreme individual, someone who is just like them only better. They want an idol; a god of their own making rather than the one that actually is. Jesus responds by saying that a request to see the Father from those who know Him is silly. If you know God, how can you ask to be shown God, as if you did not know Him? He is saying to them. “God is in your midst, living as one of you. God is right in front of you if you have eyes to see it.” The same God that the Father is has come among us as the man Jesus. When we look deeply into the face of Christ, we do not simply look into the face of a man, but into the very face of God. If we have seen Jesus, we have seen the Father, not because there is no distinction between them; after all, it is the Son and not the Father who died on the cross. However, there is a profound unity of being, a deep connection that lies within the very being of God that makes us realize that the Father and Son, while personally distinct, are the same God.

I want to shift at this point and emphasize the unity that we see between Jesus and the Spirit. In John, chapter sixteen, in what is quite possibly the most amazing Trinitarian passage in the entire Bible, Jesus says, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”

Jesus tells us here that that Spirit is not some totally separate being that does something totally different than He has been doing. In fact, He says here that the Spirit does not speak on His own, but takes the things of Christ and declares them to us. The ministry of the Spirit is bound up with the ministry of the Father and the Son and cannot be separated from it. As Paul says when he describes spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12, “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are varieties of ministries, and the same Lord. There are varieties of effects, but the same God who works all things in all people.” The gifts of the Spirit are not finally different than the ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ and the effects of God the Father.

When we look at the entirety of the Biblical message, we see that, when we are living lives that are filled with the Holy Spirit, it is the same thing as Jesus living His life in and through us in obedience to God the Father. Jesus says here that everything that He has was given to Him by the Father and those very same things are declared to us by the Holy Spirit. In everything that God does, it always involves all three persons. You never have the Father doing one thing, the Son doing another, and the Spirit doing some third thing that bears no relation to the others. God is always and everywhere triune and every activity of God is the activity of the Triune God.

If I were to stop this sermon on the Trinity without tying it to the daily life of the church and individual Christians, I would simply be contributing to the problem I spoke of at the very beginning of it, that we don’t take the Trinity seriously because it plays no role in our daily Christian lives. I want to share a few ways that this really does impact the way we live in a deep way.

The fact that God is a Trinity of Persons in union and communion impacts us because we have all been made in the image of God. There are some who would argue that being made in the image of God tells us that we are all creative individuals who choose to engage in relationship when it suits us. However, if the Trinity tells us anything, it is that God is not an isolated individual who only enters into relationship when He feels like it. Relationship is intrinsic to God. There is no God other than the God who is in eternal relationship between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The oneness of God is not any more basic to the identity of God than these relationships.

So, if we are made in the image of this Triune God, we would expect that we are made for relationship and that we cannot be who we were made to be if we do not allow those relationships to touch the core of who we are. The fact of the matter is that, whether we like it or not, we already are affected by our relationships. More and more it is becoming clear that our relationships make up part of who we are. If our relationships with other people are not centered in Christ, there is a part of us that is not centered in Christ. If we surround ourselves with people who do not love the Lord, who live in ways that are not compatible with the Gospel, it is only a matter of time before those relationships begin to drag us away from our God. However, there are other people whose lives are so characterized by faith that it is the easiest and most natural thing in the world to be a Christian when we are around them. When we surround ourselves with people like that, it is only a matter of time before we begin to become more faithful, joyful people. Both of these things happen because our relationships really do affect us.

When people turn to the Bible to find passages that tell us something about the church, they often turn to the place where Jesus says that “Where two or three have gathered together in my name, I am there in their midst.” While it is indeed true that Christ is present, even in small groups, Paul actually comes out and defines the church in trinitarian terms in the book of Ephesians. He says, “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.” The church is the one body of people who are united to God through Christ and in the Spirit.

If this is true, that the church is defined by communion with God, then we cannot invent distinctions and pretend that they have divine authority. We cannot say that those who use a different translation of the Bible are not part of the church. We cannot say that those who sing different songs or order their worship service differently than we would like them to are not part of the church. We cannot say that those who have different practices of preaching, baptism and the Lord’s Supper are not part of the church. We are bound by the fact that it is relationship with God that defines the church to allow that same God to be the standard that we measure ourselves by. Our likes and dislikes, our traditions, our opinions, our passions, are all trumped by God. Brothers and sisters, whether we have been in the church for decades or just a few days, we are not the ones who are in charge of the church. The church exists, not to serve our social interests or to provide a club by which we can separate ourselves from others, but because God has done the impossible, has entered into our midst and has given us everything when we had nothing to give.

We have been created in the image of a Triune God, a God who has shown us by His action that we are beloved in a way that we would not believe if we could not see the incredibly lengths He has gone to to save us. We are bound together by a common reality, that we are broken people who have received mercy. We are called as the church to preserve the unity in the bond of peace. We are called to have the kind of deep, personal relationships with one another that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, make us ever more like the Persons of the Holy Trinity, bound together in relationships that are so real that they are indeed part of who we are. Let us give thanks to God that He has come among us, not only two thousand years ago as Jesus Christ, but that He is present even right here and now by the power of the Holy Spirit; and may that knowledge fill us with joy and love for God and neighbor. Let us pray.

AMEN