Rev. Debbie Cato
Fairfield Community Church
John 16:12-15
June 12, 2022
Soften us, God, so that we may approach your word
without pride or rigidity. Show us, Jesus, what it means to belong to each
other and to you. Stir us up, Spirit, that these words may be made incarnate in
our lives. Amen.
What is
this “Trinity”?
Today is Trinity
Sunday. When we recite the Apostle’s Creed, we say we believe in a Triune God –God
the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
One God but Three Persons. It’s hard
to explain. In fact, there were
religious wars fought over the understanding of the Trinity. The Orthodox Church split over the doctrine
of the Trinity in 1054! The Western
Orthodox Church, which became known as the Roman Catholic Church, believed one thing
and the Eastern Orthodox church another.
This is an example of what happens when men get a hold of Scripture and
try to make it complicated!
When we recite the Apostle’s Creed, we say that we believe in God, the Father Almighty, the creator of heaven and earth. We believe that God existed before anything else existed. He spoke everything into being. He parted the water and created land. He created every bird and beast. He created humans and breathed his own breath into them. We believe that God is sovereign over all the world. We have given God many names – Counselor, Redeemer, All-Loving, All-Powerful. I could go on, and on.
We say that we believe in Jesus Christ, God's only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate. We proclaim that He was crucified, died, and was buried. That he descended to the dead.* We believe that on the third day he rose from the dead, he ascended into heaven,
Jesus is our example of how we are to live and be. At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus stood in the temple and read from the scroll of Isaiah:
because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
Throughout his ministry, Jesus fed people, he healed the sick, exorcised demons from the possessed, he ate with the despised, and taught anyone who would listen. Perhaps most importantly he loved. He loved the unlove-able of society. He is our example. When we follow Jesus. This is what we follow. This is our call.
John T. Robinson, a New Testament Scholar says, “There Jesus was, forgiving people of their sins, healing the outcasts, raising the dead, passing divine judgment upon the obstinate, and revealing the Kingdom of Heaven as if he knew it personally. As those around Jesus soaked up these experiences, they began to find themselves thinking, “Wow, so that is what God is like.” It wasn’t enough to be grateful to this man for his compassion or admonitions. The way in which Jesus gave himself for others graciously led his disciples to marvel, “Here was more than just a man: here was a window into God at work””. The disciples came to believe that watching Jesus at work wasn’t like watching God at work — it was watching God at work! [1]
As Robinson writes elsewhere, “We see not simply a man living close to God; we see God exposed, God in action as sheer grace, accepting the unacceptable, reconciling the world to himself.”[2]
We all know what it’s like not to be able to understand or not to be able to bear the truth. Parents have things to tell younger children that they can’t yet understand. Adolescents have things to say that adults, especially parents, can’t bear to hear. There are things to be said about suffering, or terminal illness, or grief, or natural disasters, or mass shootings of children, that we cannot bear to hear or bear to understand. There are things we cannot understand unless we have experienced them. So too with every Christian community since the disciples; Jesus has said more than we can bear, more than we can understand – the full meaning of his words, his ministry, his life, death, and resurrection, we are still far from grasping the full “truth”.[3]
Last Sunday we celebrated Pentecost Sunday, the giving of the Holy Spirit to the disciples and the birth of what we call the church and in the Apostle’s Creed, we say that we believe in the Holy Spirit. Pentecost began the activity of the Spirit in advancing the teaching ministry of Jesus, specifically in facilitating within the Christian community a mature appreciation of the revelation brought by Jesus. It is within the community that the Spirit works. It is within the community that the Spirit’s activity leads to the truth; the ”Truth” which is Jesus. The Spirit provides greater clarity about all that Jesus said and deeper conviction regarding who Jesus was. Jesus was all about the works of the Father. Jesus represented the Father and the Spirit functions as
The New Testament goes still further. The “Spirit” of this same God is
discovered living in the community of Christ, both in us as a
community
and within each of us as individuals. Just as the first
disciples looked at
Jesus and found God at work, so we can look at each other and
find God at
work. Not, of course, that we are God, but
simply to say, “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2.20). All of Christ lives within us; all of
God was in Jesus the Christ; and all of God lies beyond this world
ushering it forth.
To put it succinctly, God is without
us, with us, and within us. the presence of Jesus for the community after his
death and resurrection. Everything we
understand is because the Spirit brings us that understanding. We can even go further and say that we have
faith because the Spirit gives us that faith.
John A. T. Robinson writes, “One can say that for the Christian the deepest awareness of ultimate reality, of what for them is most truly and finally real, can only be described at one and the same time in terms of the love of God and of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and of the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.”[4]
Although God is one, this one God is fully met
in three distinct ways. We Christians have called this “Threeness” the Trinity.
It’s not some abstract
doctrine with no bearing on daily life; it expresses a very simple Christian idea, which the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer captures neatly: “Wherever God is, God is wholly there.” If God is in Christ, then God is wholly there. If Christ is in us, then Christ is wholly there. There are no half-measures for God! God is not multi-tasking, trying to juggle being in you and in me; if Christ’s Spirit lives within us, Christ is wholly there in each of us.[5]
The Spirit provides an openness to fresh encounters with the revelation of Jesus. It is not that there will be new “truths” beyond that of “the Word made flesh”. But the message of Jesus and the meaning of Jesus requires ongoing interpretation. There are changing circumstances in our world and the emergence of new questions that require the Christian community to think in new ways. New things that need interpretation based on conformity with the life and teaching of Christ. The Spirit provides that openness and knowledge. We can rely on the Holy Spirit to lead us where we need to go.
God desires to be known. And he manifests himself into three-persons yet one to make that possible. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit. Do we have to totally understand to believe? I don’t think so. But praise be to God for giving us His Son and His Spirit to be with us forever and always. Let us pray an old Irish blessing:
St. Patrick's Breastplate
Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind
me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above
me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down,
Christ in the heart of every person who thinks
of me,
Christ in the mouth of every person who speaks
of me,
Christ in the eye that sees me,
Christ in the ear that hears me.
I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the
Trinity,
Through a belief in the Threeness,
Through a confession of the Oneness
Of the Creator of creation. Amen.
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