Isaiah 6:1-8, Psalm 29, Romans 8:12-17, John 3:1-17
Today is the Sunday of the Holy Trinity. That means we are now in what’s called Ordinary Time. Ordinary Time means time with no liturgical season in it. From now till Advent there are no big Christian holidays.
We have two liturgical seasons: the minor season is the six weeks of Christmas, from Advent to Epiphany, and the major season is the fourteen weeks of Easter, from Lent through Pentecost. The seasons are built around the holidays that mark the major events in the life of Christ. But there won’t be any such holidays for thirty-odd weeks now, and we call this Ordinary Time.
During those two seasons we watch God expose God’s self as Son and Father and Spirit: first as the infant in the manger, then at Jesus’ baptism, with the Father’s voice from heaven and the Spirit as a dove descending, and so on to the cross and the resurrection and the ascension and the Spirit as a fire descending on the disciples. Today we put God back together again as One God. In the words of our collect, one of my favorites: “O God, you have given to us your servants grace (in these two seasons) to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, in the power of your divine Majesty (in Ordinary Time) to worship the Unity.”
The doctrine of the Trinity is not an easy one. On Monday I told my wife Melody that I was burdened by having to preach on it, and she said, “The best minds have written about it for two thousand years, so just tell the people to look it up.” How can One God be three persons? That’s the usual question in modern times. But in the earliest centuries the onus was the other way around: How can these three divine persons be the One God?
Nowadays we assume the Unity and try to understand the Trinity. In the early days they assumed the Trinity and tried to understand the Unity. It took the first four centuries for the church to work it out, and that was mostly in terms of saying, “No, not that. Not that either. Only this. Words fall short, that’s enough, don’t say more.”
The best way to know the Trinity is not in theory but in worship. It was at worship that Isaiah had his profound experience. He was in the Temple. Suddenly the unseeable was seeable to him, he was seeing into heaven. It’s not that he left the earth for heaven, because the earthly altar was still there, but rather the heaven that is the vast unseeable reality enveloping the small arena of our physical sensation was suddenly opened to him. The room that he is standing in is vast, everything is immense, and the ceiling is out of sight. It’s not that heaven is far away, it’s that the scale of things on earth is so small compared to it.
He saw the Lord, high and lofty, and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Let’s imagine from Isaiah’s report what he experienced. Shock, bewildering displacement, maybe dizziness, he’s craning his neck up into this vast space—at the sight of the Lord God, whose figure he dares not describe to us. Neither does he describe the seraphim beyond their wings. Are their faces human, or are they dragons? The sight is too great, the light too strong, so he covers his eyes, as do the seraphim, taking only glances. He covers his ears from the thundering of their voices, so loud it shakes the structure of the temple. The temple fills with smoke, and it burns his eyes and it’s hard to breathe.
“Woe is me, I am undone.” He confesses his unclean lips, and his people’s unclean lips, the filth of their speech and the corruption of their praise. Then the seraph touches his lips with the burning coal, and the fire of judgment is the heat that purifies, and he can answer, “Hineini, here I am. Send me.” If I am forgiven, then let me serve you.
Was this a real experience, or was it only a vision? Did Isaiah actually look on God? Which Moses was not allowed to do? John Calvin raises the question why it should be deadly to look on God, considering that the worship of God is the chief end of humankind, and also considering that God is the source of life, so why should the source of life be a cause of death? His answer is that the problem is not our human nature itself but the corrupt condition of our human nature.
Take this metaphor: If we are pure, the light of God’s presence will enter into us and light us up from the inside like the seraphim, or like Jesus himself at his Transfiguration. But our sins fill us with impurities that resist the light and heat up and ignite, and that burning would destroy us. Depending on our condition, the light of God’s grace is simultaneously the fire of God’s judgment.
But with the burning coal upon the lips of Isaiah we notice that the judgment can also be the purification. Is the difference because of Isaiah’s confession? He confessed his condition and God gave him the smaller fire of a purification he could handle. This was God’s purpose, the purpose of this experience was for his commission, his mission to relay a message to the kingdom of Judah, the Kingdom of God on earth. That message is not included in our lection, but it was a daunting one, of condemnation and disaster, and to give that terrible message the prophet will need to be inspired.
So where is the Trinity in all of this? Some theologians argued that the Trinity is in the three-fold cry of Holy, Holy, Holy. To this John Calvin says, Not really. And I don’t think Isaiah ever saw God in three persons. But many years later, the Lord Jesus saw himself in this vision. From his youth he heard it read out in the synagogue, and he will have meditated upon it in those quiet years before his coming out. He saw himself as a prophet, a messenger, a servant. But also as a Son, the Son of God, so when the Father said, “Who will go for us?” the Son said, “Hineini, here I am, send me!”
Jesus is the messenger sent from heaven with a message of judgment, but with a difference: the Son of God takes the judgment on himself. His judgment was the grace and reconciliation. As he says to Nicodemus, “[I] came not to condemn the world but that through [me] the world might be rescued.”
The Son of Man was lifted up on the cross “like the serpent (seraph) that Moses lifted up on the pole, so that everyone who believes in him might be rescued.” His Spirit is the fiery burning coal who purifies our uncleanness, and we may present ourselves to God in confidence and joy, "Hineinu, here we are, send us."
St. Paul takes it further in Romans 8, almost that we are brought into the Trinity. He says that not only are we rescued to be God’s servants, even more we are adopted as God’s children. The Son of God goes as a servant so that the servants may be sons and daughters of God, and if sons and daughters, then heirs along with him. And then, through all our suffering, to keep us inspired till that great day when we come to our inheritance, we have the early inheritance of the Holy Spirit, that Spirit who is in the Son of God himself eternally among the Holy Trinity. And on that great day will be the great celestial banquet, “the feast of love of which we shall partake when his Kingdom has fully come, when with unveiled face we shall behold him, made like unto him in his glory,” and we see God face to face.
If you want a take-home, then this is why we do Holy Communion every week. Because the high point of the service is not the sermon, but the Sanctus, the Holy, Holy, Holy, that we sing with the angels every week. And then we eat the bread and raise the cup as a foretaste of that great celestial banquet of which God is the host, and also to celebrate our commission to feed the hungry and share the message and offer a vast and welcoming space of sanctuary and hospitality. You are adopted by God not only to receive God’s love but also to share that love with all your fellow sufferers within the world. Your worship is for your mission and your mission is for your worship.
One last thing. We do our worship as a human activity, but there is more going on in it than we can tell with our five senses. There is a reality unseen behind what we can see. We talk to each other about the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, but the liturgy moves us beyond ourselves to the unseeable depths of the universe and the mystery of the Unity: Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Sabaoth, Lord God of hosts.
That Unity is love, for God is love. That love goes out in mission and that love comes back in worship. God is love not as compact love but complex love, not static love but expanding love, generating love, begetting love, interpersonal love, mutually-sustaining love, taking-eternal-pleasure-in-each-other love. The Holy Trinity is the circle of love and the Unity of God is love.
Copyright © 2018 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
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