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Trinity Sunday Sermon

The Trinity is an elusive theological idea that the greatest theologians of all time have been wrestling with since the beginning of the Christian Church. It is an abstract and complex idea and I am convinced that if you think about it too hard for too long in a single sitting it can make your head spin. We will not solve the mystery of the Trinity today What would like to do is to offer some reflections about the Trinity and different ways of picturing the relationship between God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. It is my hope that these reflections will stretch our thinking about the Trinity and remind us of God’s reach in our lives. Our scripture reading today out of Matthew is best know as the Great Commission and often used to charge people with discipleship. However, it is also one of two scriptures passages in the Bible that best support the Trinity (the other is the baptism of Jesus). The word Trinity does not actually appear in the Bible and the interconnectedness of the Trinity is only occasionally alluded to in some other passages. But, it a very important concept on which many of our other Christian beliefs rest. When the early church leaders were hammering out the basics of Christian doctrine, the trinity was the proverbial thorn in their side. There were no less than least 3 major councils

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between years 300 and 600 CE that tried to perfect the wording we have in the Nicene Creed about the nature of the Trinity. The break between the Eastern Christian Churches and the Western Christian Churches was in large part due to the equality of God and Jesus in the Trinity. But, because we are a part the Western Christian churches, The equality of all three persons is the view we will focus on today. “The Nicene Creed tells us: We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.” It is obvious from these words that God and Jesus are made of the same substance. There is no doubt that these two personas of the Trinity are interconnected. It goes on further to say that Jesus was conceived through the Holy Spirit and that “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,

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who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets.” This creed lays out nicely the connection of the three parts and shows that from the beginning all three were present. The creed also tells us the “roles” or “duties” each of the personas has: God is the creator, Of all things, seen and unseen. Jesus came for our salvation, fully divine and fully human, understanding our struggles, and the Holy Spirit, as in most of the Presbyterians Creeds is sort of a catch all category, but most importantly the Holy Spirit is present on earth and works to further the will of God and guide us in our actions. Easy enough right? Okay, so the problem lies in the fact that all three of the personas of the Trinity are fully aware and acting in all of the other parts. There is, in reality, no separation in the Trinity. There is no hierarchy or subordination in the Trinity. No nicely defined roles or duties for example: When Jesus was present on Earth so was God, Or we often say that we are followers of Jesus, But our creeds tell us that the Holy Spirit moves us in our life of faith. And other confusing things like that!

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As theologians have worked to explain these ideas in a way that makes sense, several other images have been used to describe the Trinity besides Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Augustine, an early, influential Catholic bishop presents us the most fully developed doctrine of the Trinity. All three members are fully and equally God, and while they are identical in their substance, they are distinguished by their relationship, not their “roles” as seen in the Nicene Creed. He uses the metaphor of a lover, an object loved and the bond between then or the love that holds them together. The Spirit is the love that unites God and Jesus creating the divine Trinity. Thus, as said in 1st John 4:8 – God is love. But, Augustine also says this, “Who understands the omnipotent Trinity? Yet who does not speak of it, if indeed they are speaking of it at all. Rare are the souls who know what they are talking about when they speak of the Trinity.” Augustine plainly lays out the mystery and difficulty of this idea. Karl Barth, a very important reformed theologian, gives a metaphor that he considers less abstract Although, I am not sure that is really the case. He uses Revealer, Revelation and Revealedness.

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According to Barth, it is our experience of God in God’s self-revelation of Jesus and the continuing revelation in our lives with the Holy Spirit that best describe the Trinity. The invisible God is the revealer and reveals God’s will in the human, visible form of Jesus. This revelation is further developed by Holy Spirit which leads to the revealedness of God’s work in the world. Is your head spinning yet? Mine was when I got to this point. Finally, in more contemporary times, there has been a push to integrate more inclusive or expansive language into the traditional trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. There is not a push to get rid of the traditional language, but simply to add more options in the way we imagine God. This is very important to remember because. One of the biggest issues with theology and faith in general is the limitation of human language to adequately describe what we can feel in our hearts and what we understand in our faith. Expanding our metaphors for God will allow us to expand our understanding of God. We will of course never reach a complete understanding, but there are benefits expanding our language. There are some who will connect with this last image of the Trinity, much more so than the ones above, and that is what ultimately we are striving for, ways to express God to all people. So, the last image of the Trinity

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I want to leave you with is from a popular fiction novel called “The Shack” by William Paul Young. The premise of this book is about father named Mack who is going through what he calls the “great sadness” because his youngest child was kidnapped and killed several years before. This sadness is controlling his life, His relationships, and his faith in God. One day Mack is mysteriously invited to the shack the police declared to be the crime scene where is daughter was most likely killed by the kidnapper. He is so confused about his life that he decides that maybe he should go, what can it hurt? He also thinks he should go because he believes it is a possibility that the kidnapper sent this invitation, even though it is signed by God. After a lot of dialogue and reflection in the book, Mack decided to go to the shack. When he arrives the shack magically turns into a very nice cabin by a lake. Mack was indeed invited by God to come to the shack. Although this book covers many theological themes, the one I want to highlight is the portrayal of the Trinity. At the shack, all three personas of the Trinity are present. God first appears as a large African American woman named Papa. Jesus is a plain looking Middle Eastern carpenter. And the Holy Spirit is a “shimmery” woman from Asian descent. Theologically, this is a very interesting presentation. There is nothing inherently incorrect about this Trinity.

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God is described in many feminine ways in the Old Testament and in the very first chapter of Genesis, humans are declared to be created in the image of God. That includes men, women, white, black, Asian, Latino, or any other ethnicity. Although God is bigger than any of these things alone or combined, this personification really no different than personifying God as Father, with the exception of how new this image is in our thinking. In the book, God’s appearance is explained by the difficult relationship between Mack and his father. At one point, God even asked Mack if he would have been as receptive if God would have appeared as an older father figure with a long white beard. Therein lies the greatest need for an expansive vocabulary for the personhood of God. Fathers and mothers can be a very painful subject for many people, and if God is only described as on gender or the other, it can be very difficult for those people to connect to God when their own relationships with a mother or father was incredibly traumatic. God ultimately is both and neither, but limited to one or the other by our human language. Jesus is obviously modeled after the historical Jesus who lived in first century Palestine. A man brought up and trained in

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the same profession as Joseph, a common profession in those days. Simple and human is how Jesus comes across. The Holy Spirit is actually is a feminine noun, in both the Hebrew and the Greek often referred to as Woman Wisdom or simply wisdom or Sophia. The Holy Spirit in at Pentecost spoke to everyone in his or her own language, regardless of ethnicity or nationality, so this Asian portrayal is also a possibility. Of all three, this one is perhaps both the most likely and the most unlikely; likely because of the gender in the biblical languages, and unlikely because there is not a bodily description of the Holy Spirit in the Bible. The interaction between these three characters fits the other Trinity metaphors. There is a familial component in the way they interact as shown in the Bible and ancient creeds, there is an obviously genuine love between the three in this book as described by Augustine, and the revelation of God in the past, present and future is present in the way Barth describes. I think all of the writers of creeds and the theologians would applaud the effort at trying yet another way to explain the complexity of the Trinity to people, but this is a metaphor of our time, still hard to be pictured by some people who grew up with the traditional Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

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Regardless, the book makes the reader think in new ways, expanding the characteristics of God. Giving people a push to think further about the Trinity, in the same way that the historical writers tried to do. So, I invite you to ponder on how the Trinity works in your lives. What might the Trinity look like for you? Does your Trinity work to encompass the complexity of the three personas and their relationships? Or does your Trinity focus on the way God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit work in the world? Does your Trinity mostly describe roles or duties, or is it based on relationships? There are no right answers to these questions, it is simply a way to look further into a well-known, but often little understood theological idea. Some times as Christians, we just accept by faith what we have been told, which is occasionally a good thing, but I believe that to strengthen your faith you some times have to questions those “givens”, even if it makes you struggle a little bit or makes your head spin. In the long run, I believe it will serve you well if you have thought out the reasons you believe the things you do, whether it comes through reason and study or it comes simply through faith, the important thing is to know why you believe in certain ideas about God and certain theological doctrines.

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For me the Trinity falls into both of these categories. I am glad that I have thought out and studied different ideas about how the Trinity functions, but ultimately the mystery surrounding the Trinity makes this one issue I can not fully understand and accept through faith. As Augustine says,” Rare are the souls who know what they are talking about” when it comes to the Trinity,” And with Augustine I say, Great is the mystery of faith.