Westwood Presbyterian Church

May 18th, 2008

197 Browning  Boulevard, Winnipeg, Manitoba  R3K 0L1

REV. PETER BUSH's SERMONS

John , Matthew 28: 16-20

 

Trinity Sunday 

    

     This morning I invite you to come along on a journey to deepen our appreciation of the Trinity. I invite us to fight against a tendency in us to let our eyes glaze over when talk turns to the Trinity. Yes, the Trinity is a mystery which is hard to get our minds around. In fact we will never understand the Trinity fully – it is one of the amazing truths about God – that there is always more to learn, more to discover, deeper depths to plumb.

 

     I want us to look at three traps that I think it is easy for us to fall into when we think about the Trinity – especially given the challenges of understanding the Trinity.

     One more thing needs to be said before we dive in – The Christian church refers to the persons of the Trinity as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And that language becomes problematic for people who had difficult relationships with their human fathers. To speak of God the Father is not to make a statement about God’s gender – it is rather to speak of a relationship that exists between Jesus, God the Son, and God the Father of Jesus Christ. I realize that that last sentence may seem illogical in a world where we have made gender one of the dominant categories that we use to evaluate things – but I invite us to work hard as hearing God the Father as a statement of perfect relationship. In a world where many are father-less – who have no human father regularly in their lives – speaking of God the Father brings hope and transformation.     

 

The first trap – “The Trinity is too hard to understand, it makes no sense to me – so I can choose to define God in ways that make more sense to me.”

     This approach is a problem because the Trinity is the way that God has chosen to be. God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – is the way Christians understand God to be. And even though that is hard to explain – and it would be so much simpler if we could just say there is a different way of talking about God – this is the way God has chosen to be present with us.

     A number of years ago I met a person who I am sure I had never met before, who said to me, “I know who you are, we met at such and such a place.” The place he named I had never been. I said, “I have never been there, I don’t think we have ever met before.” And he said, “No we have met, your name is Joe.” I responded, “No, my name is Peter.” The man with great confidence said, “No, we have met and your name is Joe.” I was a little frustrated at this point – maybe more than a little – I became very insistent, “My name is Peter, and I don’t think we have ever met before.” We went our separate ways, but I am pretty sure that he was convinced that I was Joe and that we had met.

     Sometimes we are like that man when it comes to our relationship with God who is Three-in-One and One-in-Three. We want to say – “I know you, we have met before – but I am going to focus on just the God the Father – the creator part of God; or we say I really love the Son of God part of God and I am going to focus on Jesus; or we say – the Holy Spirit is the part of the Trinity that is most important.” And when we do that we are failing to get the full picture of God – we are not meeting the whole of God – we are in fact forcing God into a box and a definition of our making.   

     That God is Three-in-One and One-in-Three is a central truth of what Christians believe about God – and every time Christians have emphasized one aspect of the Trinity over the other two as being the primary God is in the world – things have gone badly for the church – we have lost our centre. To paint in broad brush strokes –

If we emphasize God the Father over the other two – we end up with a distant, impersonal, abstract God who does not know anything about the way things really are.

If we emphasize Jesus, the Son of God, over the other two – we end up with a deeply personal connection with Jesus that has little impact outside of the holy huddle of Jesus and me.

If we emphasize God the Holy Spirit over the other two – we end up with powerfully dynamic movements, but with few controls on the direction of those movements.

All three parts of the Trinity matter.

     This is how God has chosen to reveal himself to us. We don’t go on a mission to find God – rather God reveals God’s self to us – to humanity. We do not define God – God shows – reveals who God is. To use a theological statement – We know who God the Father is because God the Son, Jesus, came to live among us and God the Holy Spirit shows us the truth about God the Son. God the Father is unknowable without Jesus Christ, God the Son, having become incarnate in our world, and we would not know about the love shown to us in Jesus Christ without God the Holy Spirit opening our hearts and lives to know this love.

     The Trinity is how God has chosen to reveal God’s self to humanity. It is the only way in which we can know God.

 

The second trap we can fall into is saying, “The Trinity is an interesting piece of theology, but it does not tell me anything about who God is.”

     We love to quote the passage from I John – “God is love.” Now if God were singular – one – a monolith – to say that God is love would not be saying much. On the whole we don’t usually have a lot of trouble loving ourselves. As the saying goes, “I love everyone, it is people I can’t stand.” The tough part of love is not the concept – it is living in relationships that are loving.

     God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – is a God who is by definition relationship. The three persons of the Godhead must be in relationship with one another or else the whole thing would fall apart. We catch glimpses of that relationship in the way that Jesus speaks. The Father from heaven speaks – “This is my Son with whom I am well pleased.” As the Spirit as a dove comes and rests on the Son. Jesus obeys the will of “my Father who is in heaven.” Jesus says that He will ask the Father to send a Comforter – the Holy Spirit – who will teach the disciples all things and will remind them of what Jesus had said and in the Spirit they will do greater things than Jesus did. Here we have a relationship – Father, Son, and Spirit in mutual submission to one another, helping each other, each bringing honour to the others within the Trinity.

     So when the Bible says God is love – it is speaking about a God who knows the challenge of being in relationship. And when Jesus says that we are to love one another – He is speaking as one who knew only too well the challenge of living in relationship with others.

     Now let us take this one more step – this is a Trinity – a triangle of relationship – in a triangle of relationship there is room in the middle – there is a space there – in a way that does not exist in a one-on-one relationship. In the passage that we read from John, Jesus talks about I am in the Father and the Father is in me, and you can be in me, and… The whole thing gets very confusing to follow who is in what. The bottom line is this – because there is room in the middle of the Trinity – in the middle of the Godhead – a Trinity who is in perfect relationship – perfectly loving – we are invited into the middle of that relationship – into the middle of the Godhead – to enjoy the love that overflows from the connection between Father-Son-Spirit.

     In entering into the center of God we discover who we really are as people made in the image of God – made to be in relationship with God – and with one another. Part of the image of God in us is that we are built to be in relationship. And in the relationship in which the Trinity shares we find the model of that love. We imitate the example of a God who knows what it means to be relationship.    

 

The third trap we can fall into is saying: “The Trinity does not matter in my everyday life.”

     The fact of the matter is that every time we pray we are resting on the truth of the Trinity. The people of Israel needed to go to the priest to bring their prayers to God. The priest acted as the intermediary. With Jesus’ death on the cross – the curtain in temple – a thick curtain – probably 2 inches thick – which separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the temple – into which only the High Priest could go because that was where God was supposed to reside. With Jesus’ death – that curtain was mysterious – miraculously torn from top to bottom – torn by the hand of God – and from that moment on everyone has access directly to God the Father in our prayers – no human intermediary needed – but that access is possible only because of the death of God the Son on the cross. That is why we end our prayers by saying, “in the name of Jesus. Amen.” Jesus is the one who opened the path. But often in our prayers we have no idea what to pray – the  situations are too heart breaking, too complicated, just too much and all we can do is groan with groans too deep for words – and God the Holy Spirit takes those groans those wordless prayers and gives them substance and takes them to God the Father.

     So we obey Jesus command to pray to God the Father, but we are only able to pray through God the Son, Jesus, who has opened the way and we pray in the power of the Holy Spirit who takes our words and groans and brings them to God the Father. Every time we pray we are doing so because of the action and reality of the Trinity.

 

     This sermon started by contending that God is by definition Three-in-One and One-in-Three – Trinity. It is in the Trinity then that we are saved – adopted by God the Father through the death and resurrection of God the Son – and empowered daily by God the Holy Spirit. Thus our salvation – our path to glory – is made possible in and through the Trinity. That is how our salvation comes to us. There is no other way.

      We hear that clearly in baptism – Christians are baptized in the name of the Triune God – “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” In baptism – be that when we are infants or as adults – we are marked – sealed – in the name of the Triune God. And this then becomes our new identity – people who have been made by God the Father, redeemed in Jesus Christ, and empowered by the Holy Spirit. This is who we are if we are among the baptized – the reality of the Trinity drips off of us. We can not avoid it – it is who we are.

 

     Does the Trinity matter? – Yes, it does. It defines who God is, it tells us what God does, it explains our relationship with God, and it gives us our identity. Yes, the Trinity matters.

     Blessed be God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.