The Holy Trinity
May 30, 2010
Sermon
by Rev. Dr. Marcus Pera
The Holy Gospel according to
[Jesus said,] “I still have many things to
say to you, but you cannot bear them now.
When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth,
for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will
declare to you the things that are to come.
He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to
you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what
is mine and declare it to you.”
The Gospel of our Lord.
In the name of our Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit, grace, mercy, and peace be unto you.
Amen.
Last Sunday, Pentecost Sunday, I began the sermon by
making reference to a book that was titled, “To the Unknown God,” a book about the Holy Spirit and a recognition
that probably the Holy Spirit is an under-appreciated person of the Trinity, at
least in most mainline churches. I also
said that the Holy Spirit was an elusive concept and that the Holy Spirit was
difficult to define and to describe.
Well, if we thought that was bad, here we are at Trinity
Sunday this Sunday, and the concept of Trinity certainly has its challenge to
it. One of the problems with the
Trinity, or the challenge, I should say, is that there is no narrative
connected to it directly. For example,
Jesus’ birth, there is the birth narrative.
And the resurrection, we have the resurrection narrative. With the Holy Spirit, we have the outpouring
of the Holy Spirit narrative. But the
Trinity, we have a doctrine. We don’t
worship the doctrine. So what we have to
do is try to communicate what is certainly a reference in scripture to the
three persons of the Trinity, but not a story about it.
Emily Dickinson, in one of her poems, said, “Tell the
truth, but tell it slant.” Now there are
a variety of ways you can understand that line from her poem. There are a lot of different kinds of truths
that we can’t take head-on, and we need to hear them slant. Then at the end of that poem, she says, “The
truth must dazzle us gradually, otherwise none of us can bear it.” And that certainly can be applied to
scripture and to the concept of the Trinity; for if we did understand the
fullness of the Triune God, we would not be able to bear it. It would dazzle us.
So what I’m going to try to do this morning is to give
an image for you, and we will work with that and ask that it blesses us, and
that we see the good news of God in that as well.
Before I do that, I want to talk about some other
attempts at the Trinity that I am not going to go there or I don’t think are
particularly helpful.
Leslie Newbigin, who was a missionary and also a Bishop
of the Church of Scotland, talks about how he visited the abbey at
The second thing that is a possibility, that again I don’t
think is particularly edifying, and that is an approach that tries to explain
the Trinity in a whole new kind of way.
And so people make reference to water, and they say that there is steam,
and that there is ice, and that there is liquid, but it’s all water. Or another one that people sometimes use is
to say an egg; and you have the yoke, and you have the white, and you have the
egg portion itself, the shell, and yet it’s all egg. Well, I don’t feel that any of these, again,
are particularly proclaiming the good news of God very clearly to us, so I’m
not going to go there as well.
Or the third option that could be there is to simply
have a history lesson, and what the history lesson would do is maybe take us to
Nicea and the Nicene Creed that did emerge from there. We might certainly talk about the Nicene
Creed then as having God the Father, and God the Son, and God the Holy
Spirit. Or we could talk about
Athanasius, some who favored him and some who fought against him. But there is the Athanasian Creed in which it
says, “The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, but there
is only one God.” But, once again, I don’t
think that particular history lesson—you can Google it and look at it, and if
you like history it is interesting—but that is not where we’re going this
morning as well.
Well, what I would rather talk about is how we’re going
to sing it in a hymn coming up in just a little bit, and that’s “the Trinity as
dance.” God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
is a God of relationship with God’s self.
It is a God in community with God’s self. It is a God as dance. The first stanza of that hymn goes:
“Come, join the dance of Trinity,
before all worlds begun,
the interweaving of the Three,
the Father, Spirit, Son.
The universe of space and time did not arise by chance,
but as the Three, in love and hope,
made room within their dance.”
Obviously, the dance of Trinity is one in which involved
the creation also of the world. And the
Book of Proverbs was talking about that with the role of wisdom within that
creative process. But it is certainly
present in the psalm for today, a beautiful psalm that talks about, “O Lord,
how majestic is your name in all of the world.”
It starts with that, it ends with that.
It is a psalm of praise to God for God’s creation. And it talks about the sun and moon and stars
and waters of the universe. If we simply
dwell on that just a little bit, I read, and I’m going to accept the person’s
scientific understanding and also the person’s math, to say that if we brought
that down to some manageable way of thinking about it, here is just one little aspect
of it. If you reduce the sun to a tennis‑ball
size, then the Earth, the Planet Earth, would be one grain of sand viewed from
27 feet away. And the nearest star would
1,400 miles away, et cetera, et cetera.
But then you go on to say, “What is the human being that
you, God, are mindful of him, and the Son of Man that you visit him?” You have made him a little bit lower than the
angels; you have crowned him with glory and honor. Yes, the creation of humans, of you, of me,
is one in which we are created in the image of God. We have some of the infinite within us; we
are capable of the infinite. Yes, not
only that, we are given responsibility; we are given a mind; we are given a
sense of right and wrong. And we have
been made caretakers over this vast creation of God.
What an incredible kind of opportunity and challenge
that is to us. And how low we hang our
heads these days when we see the reality of that, especially with the oil spill
that, once again, still cannot be plugged and cared for. We obviously are not to pillage. We obviously are not to exploit the
earth. That is not part of our
caretaking responsibility.
But before we go off on British Petroleum too far,
perhaps we ought to bring it closer to home and look at the many ways in which
we are simply oblivious to our role and our responsibility as caretakers of God’s
earth. People who, because of our greed,
like British Petroleum, because of its greed, and so much of our producing
world, because of its greed, continue to exploit the earth that God has blessed
us with. So the dance of God in our
recognition this morning is that God has blessed us with an absolutely
wonderful, marvelous creation, and has made us caretakers. And part of our praise of God is to also
offer our praise at the altar of God’s world and offer our praise in care for
God’s gifts to us.
The second part of the Trinity dance that I want to make
reference to is in the text that talks about God’s love. It is interesting where in First John it is
mentioned that if we don’t love then we are not of God because “God is love.” It doesn’t say, “God loves.” It doesn’t say that God offers love here and
there. It says, “God is love.” The substance of God, the stuff of God, is
love. And God so loved the world that God
gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but
have eternal life. The way in which God’s
creation has been broken and needs to be fixed, once again. The love of God expressed itself in God
incarnate; love coming to earth and living among us; living among us to the extent of taking on
and experiencing our broken condition, all the way to even death. And yet God raised him in love.
And that raising in love says that death is not the
final word, but that life and love, in fact, are further rich expressions of
God’s love. And we then are people, if
God is in us, to express our love to others.
That lesson in the Book of Romans says we cannot be disappointed with
hope, because the Holy Spirit pours God’s love into us. That love was poured into us as the Holy
Spirit descended upon us in our baptism.
And with God, who is love, inside of us, then we, in turn, are to live
in love to and for one another and all of God’s creation.
That is the wonderful dance that is the Trinity. The last stanza of that hymn goes this
way:
“Within the dance of the Trinity,
before all worlds begun,
we sing the praises of the Three,
the Father, Spirit, Son.
Let voices rise and interweave,
by love and hopes set free,
to shape in song this joy, this life:
the dance of Trinity.”
God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the dance that is
Trinity, dances within the Godhead itself.
But that dance also brings the world forth and calls us to dance within
it as well. And so our God, Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit, says to us this morning, “Shall we dance?”
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
(This is an unedited transcription of a
tape-recorded sermon given by Pastor Pera.)