Sermons

Three in One

John Wilkinson                               Third Presbyterian Church  May 22, 2005                               Matthew 28:16-20

Please excuse me if I have told, and particularly if you remember me telling, this story. As a child in Zanesville, Ohio, the community of local churches held a week-long ecumenical series of worship services. Sunday to Saturday, a different preacher and a different church each night, what was called the week of prayer for Christian unity. My father drew the short straw, or so it seemed, and was the preacher at the final service, on a Saturday night.

The service was held in one of the two Roman Catholic churches in town. I do not remember which one, but it seemed like a very mysterious place. I also remember that I was part of a joint children’s choir, and we sang “Let There Be Peace on Earth, and Let It Begin with Me.” Not a dry eye in the house!

At any rate, my father got up to preach, and before so doing said something to the effect of “in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.” The language was not completely unfamiliar to me. But what I so clearly remember is that a vast majority of the people in the congregation made a ritual gesture, though I did not know enough to call it that. They crossed themselves at the saying of the names of the Trinity. I was amazed, and not a little bit impressed at my dad’s ability to make all those people do that.

That memory came back to me recently when I spoke with a group of young people from Temple B’rith Kodesh. My task was to explain all of Christianity to them in sixty minutes, which I did with several minutes to spare to answer other questions, including the inevitable “what happened to the First and Second Presbyterian Churches?”

What gave me pause, however, was a question, from one of the adult advisors, actually, who asked about the Trinity, and why the Catholic Church believed in it and we didn’t. It was a question based on the experience of observing that ritual gesture that I just described. I very carefully explained the gesture, and even said that crossing oneself was not the exclusive purview of our Catholic brothers and sisters. And that further, the doctrine of the Trinity was shared in common by the entire Christian community, and was, in fact, the central doctrine of our faith.

And so today is Trinity Sunday, a day in the liturgical calendar devoted to a theological concept rather than a biblical event like the birth of Jesus or the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. And further, it is a day devoted to a theological concept whose name, Trinity, appears nowhere in scripture. Perhaps that is part of the problem. Perhaps not.

The Trinity is like the air we breathe, the theological DNA encoded in everything we are and all that we say and do. That we do not spend much time considering it may be acceptable, though it may be useful every once in a while to remind ourselves about this core understanding.

Kathleen Norris writes that “’Trinity’ has always seemed a word more strange than scary, although it has generated some of the most abstruse, mind-boggling writing in all of Christian theology.” (Amazing Grace, page 287)

As Thomas Halbrooks reminded us last week, at the time of the earliest church, adults were brought to the river’s edge to be baptized, and then were asked a series of questions. “Do you believe in God the Father almighty? Credo – I believe. Do you believe in Jesus Christ? Credo – I believe. Do you believe in the Holy Ghost, or the Holy Spirit? Credo – I believe.”

Later, as the church transformed the creed from a purely liturgical use to a teaching one, words were added – a few about God, a few more about Jesus, nothing about the Spirit, and a whole lot about a whole lot of other things.

But the rhythm of our understanding about God was firmly established, and it was understood in three movements.

Nowhere, as I have said, does the word Trinity appear in the Bible, but a Trinitarian understanding certainly does, an articulation of a triune God, a God whom we know in three distinct ways.

· We know the God who called the world into being, who created the universe and all living creatures, the God who made covenant with the Israelite people.

· And we know God in Jesus, God incarnate, the human window to God, the fullest expression of God’s intentions for all of us, offered in such a way as we might understand.

· And we know God the Holy Spirit, conscience, interpreter, “empowerer,” if that is a word, and if it is not, the one who empowers.

Though the word does not appear, the Trinity does, the triune God made known to us in these three ways. In Matthew’s gospel, for example, Jesus tells the disciples to go and baptize in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Paul concludes the second letter to the Corinthian church with the greeting that “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all,” words that typically serve as the benediction for our service of worship.

That the word Trinity does not appear, and that a Trinitarian understanding of God is nonetheless present throughout scripture is important, but there is an even more fundamental affirmation. These are the three ways we experience God – one God, three manifestations.

· We experience God in creation, wind and thunder, every living thing, the lovely fragrance of the lilac bush.

· We experience God in Jesus – a mystery, yes, fully human, fully God, demonstrating in flesh and blood the lengths to which God’s love will go.

· And we experience the Spirit as the one who comforts us in moments of hardship and heartache, who compels us forward when strength and courage are needed, who speaks to the church at key moments.

Our understanding of God would be incomplete without any of these articulations because our experience of God is incomplete without each person.

Let us now take a brief detour about language that may turn out to be not so brief. Theological language is neither fully art nor fully science, and language about God is a clear example of that. It will always be a mere approximation of who God is. Explaining the unexplainable, seeking to wrap words around a mystery may be the height of folly. And yet it is words that we use, and they always will be imprecise, inadequate, human.

Moses wanted a name and got an indecipherable verb: “I am who I am, or I will be who I will be, or I am becoming who I am becoming.” When we sing “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah,” the word “Jehovah” is actually an attempt to put vowels to the ancient Hebrew “Yahweh,” that mystical verb form that was originally all consonants, and never uttered for fear of blasphemy. Some more traditional Jewish bodies even today will not spell the word “God” and will use the euphemism hashem, “the name,” in naming the divine.

And yet language is important as it seeks to describe experience and provide a helpful roadmap to the understanding of our faith. Every human language, including American English in 2005, is bound and shaped by its own limits. It is also shaped by our own imaginations.

Theologian Charles Wiley writes that a part of our challenge in understanding the Trinity is “because we are unsure of how to speak of the Triune God.” (Presbyterians Today, May 2005) He is right, I believe. We are rightly sensitive, or seek to be sensitive, to gender issues when it comes to language, for example, language about humankind and language about God. We also realize that whatever images of God we hold over from our childhood, or that have become ingrained culturally, that God is not a nice old man with a white beard and a voice approximating that of Charlton Heston’s.

And yet, as Wiley writes, the formula “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” has been “etched in Scripture and creed…[that is] especially true regarding baptism in the name of the Triune God, one of the few things that connects Christian believers around the world.” So we seek creative and alternative language, along with faithful ways to use language from the tradition, not simply to be P.C., but to be descriptive of the rich understanding of this Triune God in scripture and in the world.

A rhythm that has proven helpful is God the Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer. But even then, those are images that describe functions of God’s three persons, rather than names. At times our language will be personal. At times it will be functional. Sometimes a child will speak of a person as “the one who makes everything OK.” At other times that person will simply be named “Mom.”

Notice that the Brief Statement of Faith, the most recent Presbyterian creed, will speak of God, the first person of the Trinity, as the one whom Jesus calls Abba, the Aramaic term of familiarity for Father, or Dad. That is a name, a name connected to Jesus’ use. But the Brief Statement also describes God with more diverse language, diverse in activity and also diverse in imagery. “Like a father who welcomes the prodigal home,” but also “like a mother who will not forsake her nursing child.”

What started as a discussion of a key theological notion and detoured into a consideration of language, will now consider how we use that language to share with the world what we believe, and how we shall live in the world.

Duke Divinity School Dean Gregory Jones reports on an e-mail he received from a young adult. The person was concerned about the “large number of people my age who cannot seem to connect with God. I think part of the reason,” this person wrote, “is because the church has a very traditional, peculiar vocabulary.” (Christian Century, May 3, 2005, page 37)

Jones remembered Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote in 1944 that “in the traditional words and acts we suspect that there may be something quite new and revolutionary, though we cannot as yet grasp or express it.” Jones concludes: “We have either too quickly given up on the power of ‘traditional’ Christian language and convictions in our attempts to reach people who are disconnected from God or from the church, or we have emphasized ‘in-house’ language in ways that alienate people from the church.”

That becomes the invitation for this Trinity Sunday. To hold a faithful, rigorous conversation about the things we believe, including our core convictions, and never with the exclusive jargon of the theologians. But rather to have the conversation, a creative, imaginative conversation that leads to faithful, radical and even revolutionary service that will transform the church, intrigue the culture and redeem the world.

Our big concepts and our big words – reconciliation, redemption, salvation, Trinity – still matter. In articulating a new language, our challenge is not to throw out the concepts because they carry the whiff of tradition, but to allow the gifts of our tradition to be transformed for a new day, a new conversation, a new church.

That we may not simply make a statement about the Trinity, but sing a song, a song of faith and faithfulness about the God we experience as root, branch and bloom, (Tertullian, via Norris, page 292), as mighty fortress, loving shepherd, gentle dove, as past, present, future, as mystery, and mystery beyond mystery.

Let us pray. What language shall we borrow, O Triune God, to praise you and thank you for the mysteries of faith and the gift of salvation. Place such a song in our church and in our hearts, that our discipleship may be revolutionary, from the rising of the sun to its setting. Amen.