"Trinity Sunday" 2012

         06/10/12                  "Trinity Sunday" 2012               Grace UMC
Over the years, the worldwide church has suggested that local churches take certain times of the year and set them aside to talk about certain things.  For example, in December, we talk about Jesus being born and in the early Spring, we talk about the Resurrection of Christ from the dead.  There is nothing magical about these times; they could have just as well been different.  But the thing that is wonderful about this is that it gives us a pattern, a way to live our lives together as Christians that allows us to weave the key parts of the story of God's interaction with humanity into the very fabric of our lives so that it more deeply makes up part of who we are.
It is about this time of year that this pattern suggests that we should talk about the fact that the God we worship is not just a single isolated individual, marked simply by unchangingness and perfection.  After all, even the pagan Greek philosophers thought that God was like that.  Rather, the God we worship is a community of three Persons that are all bound together in the same Being.  That is to say, we worship a God who is Triune.
I would imagine that many of you have either not heard any sermons on the Trinity or, at least, not too many of them.  Why is that?  After all, we declare that we believe in the Trinity every time someone is baptized and we imply it every time we take communion.  In fact, the creeds that have historically bound the church together are deeply Trinitarian, both in form and content.  One could say that the Trinity forms the basic grammar of our Christian faith.  John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was profoundly Trinitarian, though not everyone has noticed it.  In his sermon on the Trinity, after he had made a point of stressing that Christians can disagree on a wide variety of issues, says this.  "But there are some truths more important than others. It seems there are some which are of deep importance...surely there are some which it nearly concerns us to know, as having a close connexion with vital religion. And doubtless we may rank among these that contained in [the words] 'There are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: And these three are one.'"  Wesley, who was so willing to be flexible on a number of significant issues, wouldn't budge on the Trinity.
Why is that we as Christians are so reluctant to talk about the Trinity in which, we say, we believe?  I don't think it is really all that much of a mystery.  After all, most people have never really heard the Trinity related to and connected up with their basic Christian faith and experience.  Now why not?  Why shouldn't a belief that lies so close to the heart of Christian faith be strongly related the very core of that faith in practical terms?  I think it is because we have had a tendency to start by saying, "Yep, I believe in the Trinity.  I'm not entirely sure why I believe in it, but they tell me that I should, so I'll go with it."  Once we do that, however, and it happens among scholars just as often as among laypeople, we have a doctrine that we hold because we were told to, not because it resonates with the depths of our Christian experience, and now we have to make sense of it.
But how do we make sense of it?  We sometimes use images like an egg, which is one egg but is made up of yolk, white, and shell, or water, which can be solid, liquid, or gas.  Now, whatever else those images might do, they certainly don't make us say, "Now I understand why the angels of heaven hide their faces before the glory of God and cry 'Holy, Holy, Holy!"  Even if we use more sophisticated images or ideas, we often set out to explain how three can be one and how one can be three in a way that doesn't really relate to what God has actually done in Christ.  I am not in any way blaming people for doing this, so don't feel bad if you have used those kinds of explanations.  After all, what better examples do we have?  In many ways, the history of the church has let us down because for the last 1,500 years, it is as if we have said, "We talked about the Trinity once upon a time but now we all agree, so let's stop thinking about it."  Then, it is only when someone comes along and says that the Trinity is nothing more than confused mathematical thinking, that we realize that we don't have a good answer.
Why is it that we should care about the Trinity?  The short answer is that it is bound up with the depths of our Christian faith.  Not a single other religion or philosophy has developed a doctrine of the Trinity like the church has.  In spite of all the times that it has been pointed out that the word "Trinity" does not appear in the New Testament, Christians have never yet been convinced, in general, to give it up.  There is something about the nature of Christian faith, that is unique, which drives us to consistently say that we have to think of God as one Being but three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  That something is the living reality of Jesus Christ.
Belief in the Trinity formed the major center of debate within the church for about a hundred years.  People wrote book after book on all sides of the issue, there were councils where the leaders of the church had heated discussion about it, bishops were exiled when they did not agree with the dominant opinion in their area at the time.  To us about 1,600 years later, it might seem hard to understand what the big deal was.  We might be tempted to think that the debates over the Trinity were like how our contemporary debates often are, either two sides who just like fighting and will fight over anything they can, or else a debate that has gotten out of control because both sides basically agree, but can't realize it.  However, neither of those things is the case.
The reason why the Trinity matters and why there were Christians who quite literally laid their lives down for it is because it goes to the very root of our Christian lives, whether we always realize it or not.  The very basic fabric of your faith is Trinitarian in nature and the fact that we worship a Triune God bears its mark on your most fundamental Christian experience.  John Wesley concluded his sermon on the Trinity with these remarks.  "But the thing, which I here particularly mean is this: The knowledge of the Three-One God is interwoven with all true Christian faith; with all vital religion...I know not how any one can be a Christian believer till he '[has],' as St. John speaks, 'the witness in himself;' till 'the Spirit of God witnesses with his spirit, that he is a child of God;' that is, in effect, till God the holy Ghost witnesses that God the Father has accepted him through the merits of God the Son: And, having this witness, he honours the Son, and the blessed Spirit, 'even as he honours the Father.'  Not that every Christian believer adverts to this [that is, not every Christian talks about their faith in distinctly Trinitarian terms]; perhaps, at first, not one in twenty: But if you ask any of them a few questions, you will easily find it is implied in what he believes."
The fact of the matter is that, if you are a Christian, if God has cleansed you with the blood of Christ and transformed you through the power of the Holy Spirit, you are already Trinitarian.  Wesley said that we could easily find that this is true if we just ask a few questions.  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.
I think it is one of the most profound tragedies of our contemporary Christian culture that we have neglected the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, which is truly the Christian understanding of God.  And why do we do it?  We do it because we can't see how it actually applies.  We are told, perhaps in confirmation, that as Christians, we are Trinitarian, and so we believe it.  It has been seen for so long as so crucial to what it means to be a Christian that we are afraid to deny it, but we could never defend it if someone were to press us on it.  For many Christians, we find ourselves between a rock and a hard place with the Trinity and we are afraid to ask for clarification and often times we don't have any examples of people who think that it matters enough to talk about or think through.
So, what are we really saying when we say that God is Triune?  What we are really saying, what lies at the root of our fundamental, Trinitarian conviction is that, in Jesus Christ, we have to do with God.  When we say that we believe in the Trinity, we are saying that, when we look at Jesus and all the things that he said and did, we are looking at God doing them.  His words are the very words of God, his actions are the very deeds of God.  In Christ, we are face-to-face with God and not just a messenger of God.  Jesus is not merely a prophet, not just one upon whom the Spirit of God rests, but one who is God in his very self, at the core of his being.  We believe that everything that Jesus says and everything Jesus does is truth, that he is the very definition of truth, that he is the truth, and that this truth applies no less when we see him praying to and communicating with his Father in heaven.
When we say that we believe in the Trinity, we are saying that this same God that we come to know in and through Jesus Christ has also taken up residence in the hearts and lives of the people who belong to the Father through the shedding of the blood of Christ.  We are saying that, not only did God so love the world that he sent his only son so that whoever believes in him might not perish but have eternal life, but that this salvation does not come like a kind of "get out of hell free" card, but by God coming and redeeming us from the inside out.  In Christ, we see that God loves us so much to limit himself, meet us on our own level, and ultimately take our broken and diseased condition upon himself and condemn our sin to death on the cross.  In the Holy Spirit, we see that God loves us so much as to enter into each of our fallen lives, to meet each of us where we are and to take our hearts and connect them to the heart of Christ, so that our words begin to sound like the words of Christ and our actions begin to look like the deeds of Christ.
This is why we heard that passage from John as our text for this morning.  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."  This is one of the most amazingly Trinitarian passages in the entire Bible.  Everything that belongs to the Father in heaven also belongs to Jesus, his Son.  There is nothing of God that is missing in Christ.  Everything we say about the Father, we say about the Son, except "Father."  But that is not all.  The Holy Spirit, to whom Jesus refers as the Spirit of truth, is the one who takes the things of Christ and declares them to us.  The Spirit is the means through which we have come to faith in Jesus Christ, the one who took the blood of Christ and made it real in our lives, who continues to take the things of Christ and make them known to us.  In a very real sense, through the power of the Holy Spirit, the very life of Christ, God in flesh, is made real in our lives so that the blood of Christ begins to pump through our veins and shapes us into people who begin to follow more closely in the footsteps of Christ in his life of love, devotion and obedience to the Father.
So, aside from the fact that the very fabric of our Christian life is Triune, what impact does the Trinity have on our daily lives?  It shapes the way we live because we have not just been made in the image of God, but in the image of the Triune God, the God in whom the relationships between the Persons is every bit as important as the Persons themselves.  This means that we are people for whom our relationships are just as important as who we think we are on our own.  It means that we cannot be the people we were made to be if we insist on doing things by ourselves and always doing things our own way.
​ 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, both in theology and in natural science, 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.
We are the church.  We are the people whom Paul describes as being the ones who live lives worthy of the calling with which we have been called, who live with all humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another in love.  We are the people who are to make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.  We are one body with one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.  If you notice, Paul even speaks of the church in Trinitarian terms.  We are the people who have been made right with God in Christ and through the Holy Spirit; we are the people who give our prayer and praise back in the Holy Spirit, through Christ to the Father.  And because of all that, we are bound to each other, to build one another up, to contribute in our own unique way to the work of God in our midst.
We are Trinitarians because we believe that when we look into the face of Christ lit up by the Holy Spirit, we see the very face of God.  We are Trinitarians because we believe that what God has done shows us who God truly is.  We are Trinitarians because we believe that God does not just sit up, far away from his people, telling us what to do and what not to do, but loves us so much as to meet us where we are, to transform us, and to lift our lives, even here and now, into his presence.  We are Trinitarians because we believe that we is just as basic as me and we live our lives for each other because we know that what happens to you impacts me and what happens to me impacts you.  And finally, we are Trinitarians because God has loved us so much to reveal himself to us as he actually is and not how we would like to imagine him.  And that is good news.  Let us pray.

AMEN