So here we are at the beginning of summer, a season in which many of us anticipate a somewhat less busy schedule (even at church we’ve suspended much of our education program as well as choir rehearsals and many of the meetings of committees and groups that are regularly scheduled the other ten or so months of the year). And yet today is also one of the “high” liturgical days of the year – Trinity Sunday. Today is the day we tackle annually that very difficult-to-explain theological concept of God as One yet God as three.
In planning for this service suddenly something dawned on me. Usually not all three clergy lead worship. It just kind of happened this Trinity Sunday for a variety of reasons. Perhaps partly it’s that we’re anticipating spending some time away from each other as mission trips, vacations, and guest preaching away from SPC occasionally send John, Lisa, and me in different directions. It’s becoming legendary how much we enjoy each other’s company, after all, so maybe our being together in one place this morning takes the sting off our anticipated summer separation. Or perhaps in another way our presence together in the chancel strikes a particularly apt way to image the Trinity. You know, sort of father, son, and spirit.
Sorry. I don’t mean to be inappropriate or certainly not blasphemous. But wait a few minutes, and I might be inviting you to line up with us in an image of the Trinity.
I was struck last week in the confirmands’ statements of faith how many of them dealt with Jesus’ identity by saying that he was 100% God and 100% human. Certainly such a point of view puts them in synch with the traditional Christian doctrine of the Trinity regarding the mystery of Jesus’ divinity and Jesus’ humanity. But for all their firmness in percentages, their statements are expressions of faith, not of verifiable scientific evidence. Nothing like a DNA test will ever reveal the nature of Jesus’ essence. When we speak of Jesus being human and yet divine we are making a bold declaration of faith. It has always been so in unpacking Trinitarian doctrine.
Mary W. Anderson has put it this way: “To speak of the Trinity, the one God who is made known to us as the Creator of all, the redeeming Christ, and the life-giving Spirit, is to use a shorthand way of expressing the depths of the faith. Without the Trinity holding us accountable, we might be tempted to worship a one-dimensional deity. This full view of God lifts up a God who is more than a Creator who made the world out of nothing, more than the God of the big-bang theory who began the universe and then left it to run on its own. We do not worship a process, but a provider who continues to create and move among us.”
We worship a provider, she says, not a process. I like that idea. It would be hard worshipping a process. It’s not so hard worshipping a provider, like a parent, who attends to our needs and who asks us to respond in like manner to others. But perhaps to better understand this idea we need to trace the doctrine of the Trinity back to the down-to-earth experience of Jesus of Nazareth.
Jesus happened upon us in the most understated, earthy kind of way. He was born to regular God-fearing “earth people” – not to renowned scholars or philosophers or theologians. Up until the coming of Jesus, a rigorous, undivided monotheism had been the bedrock of Hebrew belief. The word “God” was plenty sufficient for Jewish belief – and for the family of Jesus. Jesus grew up in a family and culture that confessed one “creed,” the Shema: “Here, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” That’s recorded in Deuteronomy, chapter 6.
Jesus was one of us. As a young man he learned the trade of carpentry and entered the world of adulthood as a believing Jew. Then, at around thirty years of age, after undergoing a rite of baptism or ritual cleansing of sin, the man Jesus clearly had some kind of spiritual transformation – and divine blessing – on the banks of the Jordan River. Out of this experience he initiates a ministry to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” As the story goes, he defeats the devil in the desert wilderness and returns to Galilee where, in the power of the Spirit, he exhibits a “new teaching” – one with “authority,” as the Gospel of Mark first records. In this “aura of God” Jesus does things that “normal” human beings do not do. He commands demons to flee with a word, and they obey. He heals a paralytic by forgiving his sins, an act traditionally reserved for God alone. Jesus, in other words, appears to be 100% human, but he acts as if he’s 100% God.
He raises a twelve-year-old girl from the dead. He feeds a multitude from a supply of food that can hardly fill a picnic basket. He calls contented, established fishermen from their nets to follow him in “catching people” – and they immediately walk away from their families, friends, and businesses to do so. He takes his closest friends to a mountaintop where he speaks to the ghosts of Moses and Elijah and is transfigured into a being of Light, a dazzling revelation of “otherness.” In other words, Jesus does things only God is supposed to be able to do. Amazing. Astounding.
Nevertheless, Jesus did not “fake” being human. He “acted like God” not in spite of his humanity, but through it. He was completely a part of the human condition. As our eighth graders pointed out in their faith statements, Jesus was completely human. He got tired, angry, and hungry. He felt grief, discouragement, and doubt. He had physical limitations. He was no phantom: he loved to eat, drink, and be merry – too much so, his critics charged. He was called “teacher” by his friends and even a “prophet” by his detractors. Yet at no time, it would be safe to say, was Jesus considered in his essence “very God of very God, begotten, not made,” as the Nicene Creed would later describe his relationship to the Creator God.
Jesus made a point to commune with the outcast and the irreligious and to assure them that they were closer to the Kingdom of God than were the righteous who felt no need of a physician to attend to their souls. He told a rich man – obviously righteous and blessed by God – that it would be harder for him to enter the Kingdom of God with all his stuff than it would be for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.
Then, instead of ushering in the Kingdom of God in a Passover showdown with the authorities in Jerusalem, Jesus threw the corrupt moneychangers out of the temple. He became an increasingly clearer target for the Roman occupiers who would silence such an insurrectionist – and for the “orthodox” religious establishment who would convict such a heretic. He was sentenced to death Roman style – nailed to a cross, where he died a horrifying, ignominious death, abandoned by even his closest disciples.
The essential kernel of the belief in Jesus as God emerges, however, from this sacrificial – this Paschal – event. Jesus passes through his grisly, apparently God-forsaken, death to his glorious Resurrection without which, as Paul says, “faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” After a period of time with the community, this Risen Jesus ascends to heaven as the exalted Lord of all.
And that’s when what will lead to the concept of the Trinity begins. Mark’s Gospel opens with the words: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” The Gospel of John a half century or so later calls Jesus “the Word made Flesh.” The Letter to the Ephesians asserts that Jesus was raised from the dead and is seated at God’s right hand in heavenly places, “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.” No longer is Jesus simply a teacher or prophet: Jesus comes to be known to all his followers as “Lord and Savior.”
Years later – and I mean four and five centuries later – the community of faith, gathered around this person of Jesus, postulated the creedal formulation of the Trinity that is as foundational as it is distinctive for orthodox Christianity. Was the process easy? Far from it. People anguished over how to state what had become experientially true. The math doesn’t compute. How can three be one, yet also three?
Various images have sprung up to “explain” the Trinity, many more than the example of three clergy in one chancel. Some have said the Trinity might be seen as a molecule of water which holds the identical essence whether it manifests itself as ice, water, or steam. St. Patrick merely picked a shamrock from the Irish meadows to explain the Trinity in converting pagans to Christianity. Others have said that the Trinity is like an apple: the creative force is the seeds in the middle; the flesh is the part we eat; and the protective spirit is the skin that covers the whole. God the Creator, God the Redeemer, God the Sustainer.
So the creeds came to say something we can never quite understand, only experience. But isn’t that the really important thing – the experiencing? Listen to the writer Madeleine L’Engle: “In the Night Prayers in the New Zealand Prayer Book,” she observed, “the three persons of the Trinity are referred to as Earth Maker, Pain Bearer, Life Giver, and that is illuminating for me.”
Throughout the Gospels the disciple Peter seems to represent us in the story. He’s so human, just like us. Full of promise, prone to failure. But after all is said and done, Jesus builds his church on the one he nevertheless calls the Rock.
Look at Peter’s story to get another glimpse of the birth of the Trinity. Peter knows God as Father from his childhood. Through the worship of the synagogue, through the study of the law of Moses, through the experiences of his life Peter has known God as Father, as Creator of life. But then one day Peter meets a man who seems more than a man. This man confronts Peter after a long, fruitless night of fishing as he sits mending his nets. Peter puts down his nets and follows Jesus, watching, listening, taking in all that this man says and does. Then one day, Jesus asks Peter, “Who do you say that I am?” And Peter hears himself confess, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” When Jesus confronts Peter, Peter cannot escape the conclusion that God is confronting him. This man is a man – but he is also God.
The time comes, however, when Jesus is no longer physically present with Peter and the other disciples. But after their initial shock they do not feel that God in Jesus has left them, for Jesus’ promise has come true for them in their experience. They feel the Holy Spirit as a constant abiding presence and the source of their power. God is not a God of the past tense, but a God of the present, active and at work right now in the present, with the promise never to be absent in the future.
And isn’t that how it is with us? Though we cannot explain the Trinity, we come to know its inexplicable nature through God’s presence in these commanding and nurturing ways, inviting – that is, compelling – us to take our place in the ongoing work that God has set before us. Some of us perhaps are better in the creating mode, making new things out of old, or creating a pattern where none before existed; others of us take things that may appear of little worth, even people on the margins, and bring them to life again, redeeming God’s purposes in the world; and some of us, let’s face it, are just very good at keeping each other going, uplifting, encouraging, nurturing, sustaining. That’s what I meant before about all of us finding ourselves somewhere in the complexity of God’s simplicity, following by believing and doing.
Which, by the way, was the case with Nicodemus, the person whose story is told on this Trinity Sunday. Let’s not forget him. The man Nicodemus, a religious leader of the traditional sort, who becomes a secret follower of Jesus, who must come at first in the dark of night so as not to be discovered by those who would do him harm if they knew, but who then discovers the One who will save him, who offers him a spiritual rebirth that will change his life. And Nicodemus doesn’t fall off the pages of Scripture. He stays in the story. Later in John’s Gospel it’s Nicodemus who has the courage to stand up to his colleagues in public, defending Jesus against malicious and unfounded slanderous attacks. And after Jesus has been killed Nicodemus appears yet again with Joseph of Arimathea to prepare Jesus’ body for burial in the tomb. From closeted disciple to open defender to convinced believer and active follower, Nicodemus gives us the example of the faithful one as a “work in progress,” the ideal image for each of us in our respective journeys of faith.
After all is said and done, those beloved words still stand, don’t they? For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
God loves the world and all of us so much that God will stop at nothing to reach out to us in more ways than we can count or fathom. But on this Sunday we are reminded that we are safe at least to start with three.