“A
Few Words on the Trinity”
Matthew
28:16-20
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
June
19, 2011
Trinity
Sunday
In his preface to his truly wonderful
autobiography entitled Bound and Free,
eminent Reformed theologian Douglas John Hall says of the Christian message, “It
did not take me fifty-plus years to know that I never would understand it fully
– or even adequately. At best, I
could only stand under it, hoping for
glimpses and intimations of a Truth that I neither could possess nor skillfully
articulate.”
Well, that goes double for the doctrine
of the Trinity. It lends itself
neither to full comprehension nor satisfactory explanation.
The Bible nowhere uses the term
and yet the sense of it runs all through scripture, as in our reading this
morning from the end of Matthew’s gospel.
I have gotten to the place in my life where the Trinity has become for me
not a doctrine to be explained intellectually so much as a revelation of God to
be welcomed experientially.
There are some who prefer, for
inclusive language considerations, to name the Trinity as “Creator, Redeemer,
Sustainer” rather than the more traditional “Father, Son, Holy Spirit.”
There was a time when I was among their number but I have reconsidered.
The problem with the replacement terminology, as I see it, is that it is
functional language, not personal or relational.
Just as a human being cannot be reduced to something that he or she does
but is vastly more than that, so God cannot be reduced to functionality.
Similarly, because language does not always serve us well when we speak
of divinity, people talk about God as a “force” or as “energy.”
But all those descriptions leave me cold.
I do not want to be dealt with by an impersonal force or energy.
Just as in my life I do not want to know the “principle of love” but
rather someone who loves me and whom I can love, I want to experience the
communion of a “Divine Presence” who knows me and who, in some partial way
at least, I can know. The Trinity
allows for that.
Even on Father’s Day – and Happy
Father’s Day, by the way to our fathers who are present today – even on
Father’s Day we can say that all human fathers fall short of perfect
fatherhood. That does not, however,
disqualify us from using the term in relation to God.
Even those, perhaps especially those, who have had bad experiences with
their human fathers have an idea of what a good father would be like.
I also think it is fine to image God as Mother if one prefers for such
imagery also is extensive in scripture. But
Father and Son language is not meant to promote or elevate maleness over
femaleness, but rather to emphasize filialness, the family of God in which we
are, all of us and each of us, God’s beloved children.
The biblical witness of “God in three
persons” as our opening hymn today puts it admittedly is hard to get our heads
around. But the image is meant to
suggest to us something of the fullness of God.
Even more, it is intended to express the fullness of God’s love for us
that calls us into being as our Father, that shows us in the Son what it means
to live by grace into our true and full humanity, and that does not leave us to
fend for ourselves in life but, as Holy Spirit, fills us with God’s own
continuing presence and power.
I read a story recently that told of a
family in a particular pastor’s congregation who, when the family was eating
lunch one Sunday after worship, engaged in discussion about the sermon of the
day. In the midst of the
conversation, their second-grade daughter chimed in with this observation: “His sermons always are the same.
You know…blah, blah, blah…love.”
If you’re going to have a single sermon, as observers say that all
of us preachers do, a sermon on love is not a bad one to have.
Just so, the Trinity is a way of saying
that God is always love. You know
that I revel in the parable of the prodigal son but I do not know if I ever have
told you why. There are several
reasons, really, but the deepest one is because of the father’s love and mercy
and compassion. The father in the
parable, of course, is a stand in for God the Father and, as something of a
prodigal myself – as maybe we all are in our ways – I hardly can tell you
what it has meant to me across the years to know that God will not turn away
from me or turn me away. The Father
in the Trinity shows us that God is faithful.
Jesus as the human face of God, or, as
we say, the incarnation or embodiment of the Son of God, loves us enough to show
us what it means to live after God’s own heart even when, even though, it asks
a lot, or all, of us. He asks us to
live as the salt of the earth and the light of the world.
He asks us to live in a way that would not make sense were it not the way
of the God whom we trust and believe has the key to life in the world.
The reward of doing so, says Jesus and
The Holy Spirit is God’s way of being
with us now. It is the way that God
works in us, breathing into us God’s own life and power and understanding.
Recently, I have come into a greater awareness in my life of the
necessity of calling on the Spirit, of opening myself to the Spirit’s grit and
grace. Friends, the ministry of the
Holy Spirit is so crucial in our lives. Sometimes
we get bored with religion, tired of it, and relegate it behind all sorts of
other priorities and activities because we do not experience the power of it.
Maybe that is a trade off we make
willingly because we know that if we truly open ourselves to God’s power in
the Spirit that not only shall we be comforted but sometimes we shall be
confronted. And maybe we do not want
to risk our lives being changed or re-arranged in any substantial way or led in
new directions. We do not want to be
drawn past the shallow level of platitude and cliché into the deep seas of “ways
that are not our ways and thoughts that are not our thoughts.”
We do not want to be reconciled to those we feel have done us dirty
because we get emotional mileage out of our injury and self-righteousness.
The Spirit, Jesus promised, will lead
us into truth and that can be more than a little scary because it will cause us
to vacate the rationalizations and justifications we use to excuse our thoughts
and actions that are not, frankly, very Christian, very Christ-minded.
All I know – I know this – is that the Spirit never will lead us astray from
God’s heart. The Spirit will help
us, as the prodigal was helped, to come to
ourselves, and will put us together in a way that evokes – I have
experienced this – great gratitude in us because of the new depth at which we
live.
It doesn’t mean that all the
circumstances of our lives magically will be as we thought we wanted them or as
we wish them to be. Not that.
Jesus said that sometimes in the Spirit we shall be led into places we do
not wish to go. But we shall be
grateful because we shall see deeper, understand more, and feel more fully held
in God’s embrace, in God’s love. It
is something like the cry of the psalmist in the seventy-third psalm who grew
weary of the seeming unfairness of life and of trying to make sense of it all
until, he said, he entered the sanctuary of God.
“Then,” said he, “I
understood.” The inner
teaching and comprehension that come to us by way of the Holy Spirit yield peace
in us even in life’s most difficult and painful circumstances.
But you cannot just read about the
Spirit or hear about it. You have to
open yourself to the Spirit and trust God’s Spirit.
I have had in recent months a situation I thought at times would break my
heart, would undo me. The details
are not important this morning to say because we all experience those situations
in our lives. But occurring as mine
did in the midst of the bleakest and grayest of winters, the slough of despond
this time was especially severe. On
my morning prayer walks, I listened to some recordings of a preacher I knew
trusted the Holy Spirit and I began to learn to trust the Spirit more, too.
And I prayed each morning for the Spirit to come, for that Breath of God
to blow my way and to be breathed into me not knowing what would happen but
trusting that whatever it was it would be of God.
In the weeks that followed I learned a lot about myself and the heaviness
of life began to lift a bit and hints of hope began to appear as well as a way
forward where there seemed to be no way. The
situation did not change, has not changed, but I did and I have felt myself to
be held by the God of love. I am not
sure how to say this because I think we cannot know the truth of it until we
experience it. The abundant life of
which Jesus spoke is born in our spiritual poverty.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the
I cannot tell you the mechanics or
metaphysics of the three-in-one and one-in-three and how it all works.
People get tied into theological knots when they try to explain the
Trinity. They get a mental hernia.
Sometimes when people think of the Trinity they picture God the Father
coming first, then the Son, then the Spirit.
But that is not it, either. The
triune God is a tri-unity. All
together all of the time in a cooperative and communal and loving way but
experienced by us in the manner of our need in the particular circumstances and
situations of our lives – sometimes as the majesty or compassion of the
Father, sometimes as the teaching or example of the Son, sometimes as the power
and the help of the Holy Spirit. But
always as love.
There are some who think that talk of
the Trinity is antiquated or naïve or insufficient or unnecessarily confusing.
For me, the Trinity is poetry expressing in a way that linear language
never can the height and depth, the breadth and length of God’s great
encompassing love for us. In the
end, it does not matter much if you can explain or interpret the Trinity, only
that you trust the God it seeks to reveal, for it is that God who is the giver
of Life in the midst of our lives.
Amen.
Copyright
© 2011 by First Presbyterian Church