Service for June 15 Holy Trinity Sunday

Those words of Jesus haunt me: I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” Reading the news, I have to wonder what it is that we still do not understand. What truth are we missing that allows the mess of violence and hatred and disregard for life to continue. If the Spirit of Truth has declared to us what Jesus knew that we needed to hear, why are things still in such a mess?

 I don’t have all the answers. But I’ll offer some thoughts that I hope are helpful. The Trinity is a uniquely Christian concept: God as Father, Son and Spirit; or another way of naming the persons of the Trinity is as Creator, Redeemer, and Advocate, or Lover - Beloved - and Love. That God is three in one tells us that God creates (along with the son and the Spirit.) The son, Jesus comes to humanity as one of us to show us what God wants us to know about God. And the Spirit – will be with us “always to the end of the age.” Because, when the Spirit is present, teaching, comforting, advocating so is Jesus and so is the Father. When Jesus is present so is the Creator and so is the Advocate. When God is creating the Son and Spirit are there creating right alongside God. All three are involved in everything. It is WE who experience them in different ways.

 It can get very confusing really quickly. And for many of us the question quickly becomes, “So what?” What difference does this make? Is this something that only scholars care about, people more concerned with ideas than the real world around them? It does matter so let’s look at two ways of trying to understand the Trinity.

The first is as mystery. There is a sense in which we will never understand God fully and so we must leave room for mystery, not just some loose ends we’ll figure out eventually, but the mystery of God who is completely different than anything we’re capable of knowing.

 I think N.T. Wright’s understanding of this mystery is helpful. Here’s what he has to say. “… the doctrine of the Trinity, properly understood, is as much a way of saying ‘we don’t know’ as of saying ‘we do know.’ …The Trinity is not something that the clever theologian comes up with as a result of hours spent in the theological laboratory, after which he or she can return to announce that they’ve got God worked out now, the analysis is complete, and here is God neatly laid out on a slab.  The only time they laid God out on a slab he rose again three days afterwards. 

 On the contrary: the doctrine of the Trinity is, if you like, a signpost pointing ahead into the dark, saying: ‘Trust me; follow me; my love will keep you safe.’ Or, perhaps better, the doctrine of the Trinity is a signpost pointing into a light which gets brighter and brighter until we are dazzled and blinded, but which says: ‘Come, and I will make you children of light.’  The doctrine of the Trinity affirms the rightness, the propriety, of speaking intelligently that the true God must always transcend our grasp of him, even our most intelligent grasp of him.”

 Another way to think about the doctrine of the Trinity is to look at why it is necessary; why this doctrine deserves our attention and why we continue to pray the creeds that attempt to describe what we mean by a Trinitarian God.

Believe it or not, in the first few centuries of the Christian faith, people died and wars were fought over what it meant that God was three and, at the same time, that God was one. The Nicene creed we’ll pray together in a few minutes was developed in the 400s as a way to put the arguments to rest and to set a solid, foundation for what we mean when we say we are Christians.

It is important because when we get it wrong, people get hurt and our faith is used in ways that were never intended.

 Robert Ratcliff says that in order to understand why the Trinity is so important and why it’s so important that we get it right, we have to look to the Old Testament. (And I must comment that I don’t think it’s possible for us to understand Jesus and the New Testament if we don’t read the Old Testament as well. It’s essential that we read the whole thing. It must all be read in light of its context: the place and time and the historical events happening when it was written. And remember, Jesus himself read and understood as inspired much of what we call the Old Testament: the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms.)

 Ratcliff asks, “What’s the one sin that comes up again and again in the Old Testament, that keeps getting the Israelites in trouble? It’s idolatry. As any Old Testament prophet can tell you, we always want a God who acts and thinks like, well, us. The temptation to remake God in our own image is as seductive as it is universal.”

 It's tempting to think of God as the one with absolute power: you know the One described by the three “omnis”: Omnipotence, Omniscience, and Omnipresence: All -powerful, All knowing, and Present everywhere. Humans like this idea of God. We’d like to think that God as creator is all we need to know about God: Mighty, powerful, able to create and destroy, to know absolutely what is right and what is wrong in every moment.

 The problem is that human nature inevitably twists every idea to what we see as our advantage. It’s a short leap from understanding God as all-powerful to thinking that we too should use our power to do what we’re certain God wants done. We think we’re justified in using power because whatever we’re doing, we’re doing it in faithfulness to God. At least that’s our reasoning.

 Do you know how many wars have been fought, how many indigenous peoples have been slaughtered around the world because Christians were certain that they knew what God wanted and were willing to use force to get it? The estimate is that over about 100 years 56 million indigenous people were killed just in South, Central and North America. This idea of God’s power rubber stamping humanity’s use of power is behind the dehumanization and murder of thousands of people who just happened to be in the Americas before Christians arrived here. And that same thing happened in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Everywhere Christians have gone, some of them have justified taking what we wanted, regardless of the cost to others by invoking God’s will and using the power they saw as God’s power given for them to use as they saw fit.

 Robert Ratcliffe again says, “To speak of God mostly in terms of God’s power is to imply that human power is a form of godliness, and that those with the most power are the most like God. Isn’t that what kings and despots throughout the centuries have said? “You have to listen to me because God wants order around here, and God has empowered me to make sure you stay in line.”1

 So, NO! understanding the Trinity properly is not just an abstract, mental exercise done by people with nothing better to do.

 Because God is Three and God is One, we cannot look only to God the creator to understand our relationship with God and with each other. We must also look at the role of Jesus and the role of the Spirit. Each one is necessary to understand who God is and what it means that humanity is created in the image of God.

 Because we can’t help but define the word “God” in terms of power, God comes in the flesh to show us what and who God really is. God shows us in Jesus what God has decided is essential that we know about God! In Jesus we see that for God, power means the power of self-sacrificial love. And because Jesus is God; the story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection is the final, truest definition of the word, “God.”

 But even that is not the whole picture of who God is! Jesus has always called those who follow him to go out and change the world: Go and make disciples of all nations! And how do we make disciples? By baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit AND teaching them to obey everything that Jesus commanded.

 We are to teach what Jesus has commanded us: that to be faithful is to center our lives on Love! We are to teach the Love of God and love of neighbor.

 We know how difficult that is since we tend to interpret everything through our own weaknesses and our tendency to idolatry! We know because the world around us gives us example after example of the ways we have gotten it wrong. There is evidence that the man who murdered a member of the Minnesota legislature and her husband yesterday was motivated by his Christian faith to do so.

 Nevertheless, Jesus entrusts us with this work that changes the world, that HEALS the world. Jesus can entrust this healing work to us because the Advocate, the Holy spirit is with us always, even to the end of the age! Jesus promised his continued presence so that we would not be orphaned; so that we would always have an advocate, a comforter, a guide leading us in the paths of the true God.

 Matthew Myers-Bolton says, “the doctrine [of the Trinity] is ultimately about a world saturated with divine presence, and a God “in whom we live, and move, and have our being.” This is not a pointless exercise for academics disconnected from our world. The doctrine of the Trinity is a guide for faithful people so that we are “in the world” in the way that God intended us to be in the world, humbly, loving for the sake of the other.

 May we live in such a way that the love of the Trinity shines forth from our lives. Amen.