Trinity
I love the way these magical things just happen at our church that
are not planned in any way. Here we just happen to be installing our new
church council on Trinity Sunday. What is magical about that? What does one
have to do with the other?
They both have to do with group decision-making. Now I realize that
in our society, group decision-making is considered an oxymoron. Groups are
not known to make decisions very quickly or, it seems, very well. One of the
most ridiculed structures in our society is the committee, a group of people
charged with responsibility for making decisions and overseeing their
implementation.
We can see the respect our society has for committees in the many
quips that make the rounds:
A committee is a group of the unfit, appointed by the unwilling, to
do the unnecessary.
A camel is what a horse would look like if designed by a committee.
If you really want something done, do it yourself. If you don’t want
it done, assign it to a committee.
The concept of God that we refer to as The Trinity seems to be a case
of God by committee. In our gospel for today, Jesus talks about delegating
some tasks to the Holy Spirit: “I have much more to say to you, but when he,
the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.” He describes
the working of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in this way: “All that
belongs to the Father is mine. The Spirit will take from what is mine and
make it known to you.
Deep down, I think many of us are as skeptical of this
God-by-committee as we are of committees in general. We want to know, what
is the point of our acknowledging a divine bureaucracy, as we do every
Sunday in one of our creeds, in the benediction, and as we make a special
point of doing in our baptisms when we baptize in the name of the Father,
and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit ?
In our modern world, isn’t it hard enough to get people to buy into
the concept of God? Isn’t it much more simple and effective to just bear
witness to the story of Jesus?
Given the mysterious nature of God, trying to figure out exactly what
form God takes, and the exact interactions and relations between the parts
of God’s nature seems a fool’s task. We spin out of our comfort zone, when
we try to explain how God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit are inseparable and
of one substance, and yet are three separate persons.
Trying to comprehend this is like trying to understand tie-breakers
in the NFL playoff system. There’s no logic or coherence to it. Apparently
somebody in an ivory tower somewhere figured all this out and knows how it
works, but good luck trying to explain it to someone..
The theological arguments for this Trinitarian God by committee often
sound so convoluted and arcane that you have to wonder what is the point? It
reminds us of the old debates over how many angels could dance on the head
of a pin. My dad liked to say that while others were arguing over how many
angels could dance on the head of a pin, his church argued over whether they
ought to be dancing. Whenever churches get bogged down in deep arguments
over stuff like this, they confuse everyone. They get beat up by those
churches and religions that make their case more simply and understandably.
Besides that, the Trinity concept seems to be a step backward. Wasn’t
the great truth revealed to Abraham that the cosmos is not run by a motley
collection of gods each with their own superpowers, but by one eternal, just
and loving God? When we speak of the Trinity, we seem to be backsliding into
the old fascination with multiple Gods. In fact, Islam’s main issue with
Christianity is just that: to them it violates the most sacred of all
revelations: there is only one God.
To top it all off, the doctrine of the Trinity is never spelled out
in the Bible. It is the product of some nasty political infighting within
the early church. You can see this in the difference between the two main
creeds that we use: the Apostles and the Nicene. The Apostles is the
earliest known Christian creed, originally called the Old Roman Creed, and
probably dates back to the 2nd century. It lays out a belief in
God, in God’s son Jesus, and in the Holy Spirit, without making any specific
claims as to how all these parts are interconnected.
The Nicene Creed was written in the 4th century.
Ironically, it was composed by a committee. The Roman emperor Constantine
wanted the church to stop squabbling about different issues, and so he
assigned a committee the task of setting down, once and for all, what the
church believes. Look at the hairsplitting legalese that gets in there:
Jesus, eternally begotten of the Father. God from God, begotten not
made; of one being with the Father. The Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of
Life, who proceeds from Father and the Son.
To make matters worse, that last clause about the Holy Spirit
proceding from the Father and the Son, almost single-handedly split the
church into two camps. The original wording of the Creed was that the Holy
Spirit proceeds from the Father. Christians in
None of this casts the concept of the Trinity in the best light, so
we return to the question: is it worth it? Is it worth talking about God in
Three persons that are of one substance or being?
I’m going to argue that it is. But I’m not going to step into those
old 4th century debates and I’m not going to try any kind of
theological DNA fingerprinting to match up how exactly Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit are related.
Talking about the Trinity is like the explanation we got in atomic
physics for how atoms work. We were told that atoms are these tiny spheres
of matter, with a tiny core of a nucleus made of protons and neutrons,
around which revolve tinier spheres called electrons that form a kind of
shell. It wasn’t until I was long out of school that I discovered that
physicists don’t for one minute believe that this is what an atom actually
looks like. That model with the little sphere is simply an illustration that
allows us to understand some of the characteristics of atoms that we can
neither see nor fully comprehend.
The Trinity works the same way. It is not a definition that pins down
the exact composition of God. Rather, it is an illustration to help us
understand something of God’s nature that we can neither see nor fully
comprehend.
The Trinity helps us to understand that there are three important
parts to God’s nature. God the
Father is an image that helps us know God as the Creator of the world,
the creator of life. In the person of
Jesus, God presents us with an
image that helps us know God as the Redeemer and Savior of all humankind.
The Holy Spirit is the image
that helps us to know God as the sustainer of life, the being who interacts
with our world and keeps things going.
If we don’t know all those parts of God’s nature, we do not know God.
Worse yet, if we focus on only one of those parts of God and ignore the
others, we get a warped sense of who God is.
God is the Creator. The
creative force that brought into being the entire universe, the phenomenon
of human consciousness, the unifying being that holds all of existence
together.
If we ignore the Creator part of God, we lose our place in the world.
We view ourselves as the only thing that matters, the only force worth
reckoning with, and so we mismanage the world.
If we focus only on the Creator part of God, then we view God as a
terrible, impersonal, inscrutable, often wrathful, all-powerful tyrant. This
is the path taken by hellfire and brimstone sects, holy warriors, rigid
Bible-thumping Puritans, and modern day Pharisees who worship the law and
condemn and exclude others.
God is the Redeemer. The
one who came into our world in human form to rescue us from ourselves, to
break through the walls of ignorance and indifference, to show us that love
and not raw power is the force at the center of God’s being.
If we ignore the Redeemer part of God, God reverts to the terrible
tyrant of hellfire I described earlier, or else is written off as the
indifferent, impersonal force that goes by the name of fate.
If we focus only on the Redeemer part of God, then God becomes merely
a historical figure, a role model, an object lesson. We end up in the camp
of humanists.
God is the Sustainer. The
life force that keeps creation in motion, that knocks on the doors of our
hearts and calls us to life in the kingdom.
If we ignore the Sustainer part of God, then God is mere theology or
philosophy or natural history--worth knowing about, in the way that all
knowledge of the world is worth knowing, but nothing more.
If we focus only on the Sustainer part of God, then God is merely an
emotional force, an urge, a synapse in the nervous system that stimulates us
to respond in a predestined way. We view God as a kind of drug, a way to get
spiritually high.
The doctrine of the Trinity captures the essence of God as revealed
in the Bible. Only when we unite the awesome God of creation with the God
who willingly suffers for humanity, and with the God who actively calls,
gathers, instructs, inspires, and motivates, do we get an accurate
understanding of God. We see that God is not an autocratic tyrant or a
beautiful role model, or a shot of endorphin. God is a loving, sharing
complex being who seeks relationship.
Without God the creator,
we would have no roots, no place in the world. We would have no life.
Without God the son, we would
have no future, no forgiveness. Without
God the spirit, we would have no
access to God. We cannot take God into our hearts—God is far too big and
powerful. We cannot take Jesus into our hearts—Jesus was a person who
accomplished his mission and left this earth. The only way we can take the
love of God into our hearts is through God the spirit. As Paul wrote in
Romans, “God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.”
There’s a lot of heavy lifting in this sermon. Let me try an
illustration and if you don’t remember any of the rest of the sermon, maybe
this will work:
Have you ever recommended to you a book or a movie or a play to
someone? All three parts of the Trinity have to be there for that to take
place:
1) There exists a concept, a truth, an experience of beauty and
wonder.
2) There exists a book or play or movie that captures that truth,
that beauty and wonder in a form that we can appreciate.
3) There exists a person who calls that book or movie or play to our
attention and motivates us to experience it.
God the Father is the
source of beauty, wonder, and truth.
Jesus Christ captures
that beauty, wonder, and truth in a form that we can appreciate.
The Holy Spirit calls and
inspires us to experience the person of Jesus, in which we find beauty,
wonder, and truth.
Alone, God the Father is inaccessible beauty, wonder and truth.
Alone, God the Son is life-changing book that no one reads
Alone, God the Spirit is persuader with nothing to recommend.
Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer. Somehow God works through all of these
facets of being. The parts of the Trinity work cooperatively to accomplish
God’s purpose of being known and sharing relationship with creation.
And if God chooses to work through a committee, maybe we should have
a little more respect for the art of cooperative government. For it is this
model of divine cooperation that shows us how to accomplish things that are
worthwhile and lasting