June 3, 2012
Holy Trinity Sunday
Isaiah 6, Romans 8, John 3
Grace, mercy, and peace be to you from God our father, our
lord and savior Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, the great Three-in-one,
One-in-three, amen.
Lots of time, and energy, and trees, have gone into an
attempt to explain what we celebrate today.
How does one speak about the Holy Trinity, a God who is simultaneously
one-in-three and three-in-one when there is very little in scripture that
actually speaks of the Trinity? When I
was in confirmation class, our teacher, Mrs. Ropes, explained the concept of
the Trinity to us using an apple and an orange.
With and apple or orange, or many other forms of fruit, you have three
parts: the fruit, the rind, and the seeds, all three are apple, but in
different forms…and all three forms make up one piece of fruit. Now Chris was taught about the Trinity using
water. Water exists in three forms, solid, liquid, and gas, and yet it is
always water.
It makes sense to explain something as abstract as the
Trinity in such concrete terms…especially with young teens, who think better in
concrete terms but are starting to think in the abstract. But even as good as these examples are, it
still doesn’t capture the entire mystery that is the Trinity. It’s probably because the Trinity is what it
is, a mystery…and sometimes a little mystery in the world of faith is ok.
The word Trinity never appears in the bible, and there are
only a few references to a three personed Deity actually mentioned, the most
clear reference being in the Great Commission in Matthew’s Gospel where Jesus
sends the disciples out to baptize in the name of the father, and the son, and
the holy spirit. So when you think about it, today we celebrate
both a teaching of the church and a great mystery.
What is the Trinity?
Scholars and church leaders have tried for centuries to
explain this, but in the end they have all thrown their hands up and allowed
the mystery to remain, recognizing that the more we think we have a handle on
who God is, the less we actually do. So
how do you preach a sermon on a topic that the more we realize we don’t
understand and cannot understand, the better off we are?
Instead of trying to find the darkest corner of scripture
and the churches history to figure this all out and come up with the answer
that solves the mystery once and for all, I think that it is better to take a
look less for proofs about the Trinity and more for information on what God is
like.
There is a lot of talk about what God is like. Just turn on the TV and evangelists will all
give you their take on God. Lately, it
seems, you don’t even have to look that hard to find preachers talking about what
God is like, just turn on the news and you will find it. God wants you to be rich, if you have enough
faith and give enough money to the church…God is angry at this group or that
group, that’s why natural disasters have happened around places where those
people live…God hates you and me and our children and our whole country…God
loves this country best, that’s why we are the richest country in the world,
even though one in five children in this country go to bed hungry at
night. Have you heard these messages?
There are lots of folks out there preaching them. And sure, there are troubling passages in
scripture that may lead some folks to think that these things are true. Plagues, folks getting struck down by
lighting for worshiping incorrectly, she-bears, the trials of Job, the list goes
on.
But it seems to me that there is a danger when we look only
to these troubling passages, when God starts to take on a form that only shows
one side of God’s story, is the story of God and what God is like being told by
folks made in the image of God? or folks who have made god in their image? Writer Anne Lamont once wrote that you can be
sure that you have made god in your image when god hates all the same people
that you do. It’s a pretty spot on
assessment of something that is really easy to do.
But there is another side of the story, one that comes from
our scripture passages this morning. One
that tells a story of God that counters stories of a god who is angry and
vengeful and hates you and me and the country we live in.
The first thing we hear is from the prophet Isaiah who is
reporting on a vision he had of the temple of the Lord and the greatness and
majesty of God…a grandeur for which the only response is worship and praise…and
we sing with the seraphs and cherubs around the throne of God each time we
celebrate communion and sing “Holy, Holy, Holy Lord, Lord God of power and
might, heaven and earth are full of your glory!”
And then we hear from Paul, in his letter to the Romans,
about the love of God which, through the work of the Spirit, has called us all
to be adopted to be God’s daughters and sons and invited us into and intimate
and loving relationship with our creator.
This is a relationship that allows us to be free from fear, for it is
not with a spirit of slavery that we have received, but rather that spirit of
adoption. And so, like an adopted child
cries out to his daddy or mommy, and they respond with all the love they can
muster, so we can cry out “Abba, Father,” knowing that God will hear us and
that God cares for us in our relationship with him.
But that’s not all.
Yes, it could be enough to just stop there and still have an image of
God, a caring creator who is great in majesty, but God kept going.
In the gospel reading from John we hear about the ultimate
love that God has for us. In his visit
to Jesus, Nicodemus got a glimpse of a God whose love is so great that God did
not even withhold his own son, but rather sent his son into the world so that
the world might be saved through his life giving death on the cross. Jesus told Nicodemus that he did not come
into the world to condemn the world, but rather to save it.
On Trinity Sunday, we have a God who defies definition. The doctrine of the Trinity, how God is
one-in-three and three-in-one, is something that we cannot explain…and that is
ok, not everything in this world needs to be explained away, that is where our
faith comes in…faith in a God whose love also defies definition, as well as
logic. When we confess our faith in God,
we confess our faith in a God of great grandeur, a God who has made us his own
and claimed us to be his children, a God who hasn’t withheld anything from us,
not even his own son, so that we could be given abundant life and be empowered
to call out to our heavenly parent and serve him without fear, knowing that we
are cared for and heard…even when the answer we get is not necessarily the one
we are looking for.
So let’s celebrate, let’s celebrate the Holy Trinity, the
father, the son, and the Holy Spirit, an indescribable God of love and grace.
Amen.
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