Proverbs 8:1-4, Psalm 8, Romans 5:1-5, John 16:12-15
One God in three persons. Yet not three gods, but One God. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity, a difficult doctrine. And the doctrine is not taught as such in the Bible, and the word “Trinity” never appears in the Bible. But the doctrine is how the church has accounted for the evident behavior of God in the Bible.
Especially right after Easter. On that first Easter, when the Lord Jesus rose from the dead, the disciples still had God in heaven and Jesus as only an exalted man. But the next Sunday, when the Lord Jesus showed himself, it was Thomas who first recognized Jesus as “his Lord and his God.” He called Jesus the names reserved for the One God, the God that Jesus prayed to as his Father. And yet Thomas knew him by the marks in his hands where the nails had been as a person distinct from the Father. So here we have two persons as One God!
Then on Pentecost God opened up further as the Holy Spirit, coming down upon God’s people, and not just an energy, but a person, but also not Jesus. So now we have three persons in One God. So today, the first Sunday after the end of the Easter Season, we pause to “acknowledge the glory of the Trinity and to worship the Unity.”
The doctrine of the Trinity is not just tacked on to a general belief in God that we share with other religions. It’s the heart of our belief, and the source of many other features of the Christian faith. The Trinity is the source of the high importance of love in Christianity compared to other religions. The Trinity is also the source of joy in our faith, and the reason for the high importance of community and fellowship. Let me lay these out today—love, joy, faithfulness, and community—with an intermezzo on whether the whole idea is believable, and I will close with how the Trinity allows us to deal with our suffering.
The Holy Trinity is why we say that God is love. God’s love is not some impersonal force, but a personal practice of God within God’s self: the love of the Father for the Son, the love of the Son for the Father, the love of both of them for the Holy Spirit, and the love of the Holy Spirit for all of them—with a love that circles both ways round and rises up and overflows into the world and onto us. God loves us with the love that the three persons love each other with. That’s why we say that “God is love.”
The Holy Trinity is the source of joy. These three persons eternally enjoy each other. This inner joy of God was described by ancient theologians as the dance of God, perichoresis is the word. These three persons dance with each other eternally and joyfully, moving elegantly between each other in-and-out, and then they share their mutual joy with their creation, with the stars and whirling galaxies and waving trees and singing birds and sporting whales that God created to rejoice in and the infants and children that God loves to listen to.
But how can this be? The contradiction is obvious. How can you claim three persons and still have One God? How could Jesus talk as he did in our gospel lesson, of three different persons, and still claim to worship the One God of Israel? We call it a mystery. Is that a dodge? Or can a mystery be a reality, like the mysteries of quantum physics, which we recognize as real, but which defy the rules of logic with apparent contradictions?
So let me say that the apparent contradiction of the doctrine of the Trinity is not totally illogical. It is not nonsensical. Here is how: the God of Israel is not confined to time and space. God is free from the laws of time and space, and God can be anywhere God wants to be at any time and in many places at once. God is free within the laws of time and space because God is the author of time and space and has authority over them.
The same is true of logic and mathematics. God is the author of logic and mathematics. Our first lesson claims this when it says that God created wisdom. “Wisdom” here means what ancient civilizations called all human knowledge, including reason and logic and even mathematics and natural science. If God created all of this, if God is the author of logic and mathematics, then God has authority over them, and so God has freedom in logic and mathematics.
That means that the mathematical number “one” is not more powerful than God—as if while being true of God it can control God and confine God. But God is free to be One and yet also seem not like One according to the rules that we creatures have to follow. God can be One and yet seem plural to us at the same time. God has given logic to us as a gift for our understanding, but logic cannot limit God, or it would be God’s prison. The one-ness of God is not controlled by the one-ness of other things in mathematics or logic.
Now this is not a proof of the Trinity, for it cannot be proven, but it is to say that it is not nonsensical or even completely illogical. My point is that God is always free to be what only God can be. But here’s the next thing: that while God is free, yet God is also always faithful to what God has been. God is the One, and God is the One you can count on. God is free and God is faithful. The Lord our God, the Lord is One!
This faithfulness of the One God is God’s very nature as the Trinity, it is built in to God’s own self as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who are always faithful to each other. This faithfulness is an expression of God’s love within relationships, because relationship is in God’s nature too, the eternal loving and joyful relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Yes, God is One, but not compact like a pebble, or a diamond or a perfect stone, but dense like a heart, a beating heart, with room inside, and inner movement, and tender enough for suffering. A movement, a dance, an inner relationship, an eternal fellowship, a divine community. Shall we not say that this God is the original community?
And if God is by nature loving and relational and faithful, then God will want community with you. With you as a distinct person, distinctly you, with your own name, and eternally you. Some religions teach that we all get absorbed back into a primal unity, but this Trinitarian God loves otherness and enjoys variety and lets you have it too, but in fellowship and communion and mutual rejoicing.
So, of course God wants you in communion with each other. Not a compact community like a clump or a hive or even a tribe, but a fellowship with room and freedom for each other right along with your faithfulness. Our values as a Christian community come from the very nature of the God who is the original source community: our values of room and welcome, of faithfulness, of joy, and of love. If our values are now considered humanistic, that’s fine, but we recognize them first as Trinitarian. Whenever our values are lived out in the world, you can tell that the Holy Spirit is out and active in the world.
In our second lesson St. Paul takes it the other way, from the world back into God—that we enter into the grace of God and we share in God’s glory. We are welcomed into God’s inner circle when we come in the name of the Lord Jesus as his adopted brothers and sisters. So the movement is reciprocal. The love and joy of the Holy Trinity pours out into the world and into us, and we ride that love and joy back into its source inside the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the in-and-out of Romans 5, and St. Paul is daring magnificent thoughts here, thoughts never thought before.
When the Lord Jesus ascended into heaven, bodily, with the hole in his side and the marks in his hands where the nails had been, he must have brought new moves into that inner dance of the Holy Trinity, some new steps to include his resurrected body, with its marks and wounds of suffering. And when God adopts us in as well, God adopts our suffering too. God suffers us as we are, we who are the cause of suffering.
So when St. Paul writes of the cycle of suffering-to-endurance-to-character-to-hope, that cycle is turned by the movement of God, because God suffers us in love, and God endures us in faithfulness, and God’s character is to rejoice in us anyway, and God’s hope is God’s plan and God’s will, which because of God’s love will not be disappointed.
I know that in your experience the cycle can go the other way round, from suffering-to-misery-to-hatred-to-despair. The choice is yours, you have the freedom. I invite you to choose again to turn the suffering of the world to hope for the world, and when you energize your turning by the love of God that rises and the Holy Spirit pours into your hearts, you will not be disappointed in your love.
Copyright © 2019, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
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