Genesis 1:1-2:3
http://bible.oremus.org/browser.cgi?passage=genesis+1%3A1-2%3A3
Psalm 8
http://bible.oremus.org/browser.cgi?passage=psalm+8
2 Corinthians 13:11-13
http://bible.oremus.org/browser.cgi?passage=2+cor+13%3A11-13
Matthew 28:16-20
http://bible.oremus.org/browser.cgi?passage=matthew+28%3A16-20
On Thursday I was with a bunch of other pastors and we were talking about this Sunday, and how this Sunday is Trinity Sunday. And every single one us admitted to having some anxiety about having to get up in the pulpit to talk about it. You see, today is the only Sunday in the church year that is dedicated to a doctrine instead of a Biblical text. Which means that in order to understand the doctrine, we can't rely on any specific Bible passage, instead we have to wade through more than 2000 years of theological history and church development. And that would be okay if we were talking about a doctrine like Creation, or Incarnation, or Redemption, but this particular doctrine - the doctrine of the Trinity - actually relies on all those other doctrines in order to make any sense. Which makes fitting all of this into a ten-minute sermon rather difficult.
Because most people don't think in theological terms like these. We're all too busy getting through the struggles and challenges of our days to spend a lot of time thinking about Creation and Incarnation and Redemption, let alone the Trinity. But the ideas behind the terms are still there. You might find yourself wondering, "how can God, who is supposed to be fair and just, and who is on the side of protecting the oppressed, have anything to do with forgiving those in my past who have betrayed and assaulted me? Mercy and compassion is all well and good, but what about the victims of those oppressors? "
Or, you might be having one of those days where your life seems completely out of your control and you wonder, "how can God, who is so powerful that the elements obey God, even remotely understand the powerlessness and frustration of what I'm going through? How can One who commands light into existence really get how demeaning it is to suffer and not be able to do anything about it?"
Or, you may find yourself bordering on burn-out, or maybe way beyond the border crossed all the way over, wondering if there isn't anything that can bring back the passion and spirit you used to feel? Yeah, we all heard the message of Jesus bringing new life on Easter Sunday, but really how is that going to make a real, concrete difference in my life?
These are all the kinds of questions with we struggle. And believe it or not, these are questions about the Trinity. Or rather, these are questions that seek to understand how God is active in our lives. It's the answers to these questions that are about the Trinity.
You see, before we ever had a doctrine of the Trinity, believers had different kinds of experiences with God. The Bible is their stories of those experiences, and in the Bible, we see a number of different, and sometimes seemingly contradictory things about God. One of the things we see is that one of our experiences of God is as being beyond, outside, of anything we might know. This experience is reflected in our Genesis story - the Almighty Creator God has power over the elements, creates life and takes it away. The Almighty God is before time, eternal, immortal, all-powerful. The Almighty God is immutable - meaning unchanging and never touched or moved by us. Part of this immutability means that the Almighty God is impartial, scrupulously fair, just and judging, punishing those who disobey and act unrighteously.
But this is not our only experience of God. If this was the only God we knew, our entires lives would be spent in fear, dreading the day of judgment, living each moment desperately trying to please this God and avoid punishment. But that's not the case.
At least, I hope not, because there are other experiences of God. And these experiences show us that God is Emmanuel - God-with us. These experiences reassure us that God is somehow with us in our suffering, that Emmanuel hears our prayers and changes in order to answer us. Emmanuel is compassionate and in love with us, with all the strengths and vulnerabilities that that brings. These experiences show us that God is merciful and unwilling to punish, that God seeks out those who are lost and walking down the wrong path. They show us that Emmanuel God even dies.
And then we have the often confusing experiences that show us that this Almighty God and this Emmanuel God are not, in fact, two different gods that we worship, like the Hindus or the Ancient Greeks and Romans, but that they are in fact one God. That the God who created the world is the same one who died for the world. That the God who demands justice and fairness is the same one who grants mercy and compassionate forgiveness. That the God who demands righteous living is the same God who seeks out the company of sinners. And the experience of that, that these seeming contradictory gods are one God, and most importantly that this God is working in our lives, is the experience of the Trinity. But how can we understand that Trinity?
One of the things that I learned in high school science class that has stuck with me ever since is that time is not an absolute. Sounds weird, I know, but it's not. You and I, and every person who has ever existed, experience time as flowing in a line from yesterday to today to tomorrow. For us, time is linear and flowing only in one direction. We can only ever see what is happening in the present and what has already happened in the past. We can never see what will happen in the future. We are like an ant walking backwards along a line suspended in mid-air. The ant can see where it's gone and it can look down and see its feet, but it can't turn around and look at what's coming up ahead. But what if we were a fly buzzing around the ant on the line? In other words, what if there was something that wasn't on this time-line? What I'm getting at it, is this: What if God was outside of our time-line? The buzzing fly can see not only where the ant has gone, but also what's coming up ahead. The fly can land on any point of the string in the ant's past or the ant's future. And it certainly fits with what we know of God to think of God outside of time, viewing every moment of our timeline, our past, our present, and our future. This is how the Almighty God can be said to exist before time, to have created the universe and everything in it, and to exist long after we are gone.
But the problem with God being outside of time is that God can never know what it's like to be living in time. The Almighty God can never know anxiety and hope over the unpredictable future, regrets over past actions, the miracle of birth as a person is born into this time-line and the fear of death that a person will one day ultimately have to leave this time-line - all the things that we have to go through. These are things that God outside of time can never know, which means that God can never know us.
And so we have God becoming incarnated in the man Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is a man, like us, walking the same string we do, knowing what has past, but never knowing what will come. Jesus knows the fragility of relationships over time, the anxieties over death that we have, the frustrations that we can't control, or even predict, the future. And Jesus, although he is the incarnated God, is also subject to the whims of time the same way we are - which means that Jesus, Emmanuel - God-with-us, can also die.
But how does God, who is outside time, relate to the incarnated God-in-time Jesus? And how does Jesus, who is in time, have access to the power over life and death that only the God outside of time has? Through God-the-Holy-Spirit, who communicates between God the Almighty and God the Son, and eventually between God and us.
The Holy Spirit is important because without it, the Jesus-in-time who died would have stayed dead. Only because Jesus-in-time was connected through the Holy Spirit to the Almighty- outside-time was there a resurrection. And only because the Almighty-outside-time is connected to the in-time event of Jesus' death and resurrection through the Holy Spirit can the power of that event, the saving effect of it, resonate through all of time, our past, our present, and our future. When we ask the question of how the death and resurrection of Jesus can possibly mean anything to our lives, here, 2000 years later, the answer is, through God the Holy Spirit.
But these three - Almighty, Emmanuel, and Holy Spirit - are all one God. When we want to know how God can preserve justice and still forgive the guilty, the answer is God, the Trinity - Almighty, Emmanuel, Living Spirit working to restore us. When we want to know how God who created the earth can identify with our daily struggles to get by, the answer is God, the Trinity - outside of time, living in our time, bringing the two together to be with us. And when we want to know how one weekend of death and new life 2000 years ago can still have meaning today, the answer is God, the Trinity, doing it for us.
Now, I don't expect this explanation, or any explanation of the Trinity, to satisfy you. The fact remains that God is a mystery, and how God does what God does is likewise. We will not, in this lifetime, ever know. But we do know that God - Almighty, Emmanuel, and Living Spirit - is oriented towards us - that, in a sense, Creation and Incarnation and Redemption were all for us, in order for God to bring us closer. And that is enough to allay any anxiety over what exactly the Trinity is and how it works. It is God, for us. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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