Trinity Sunday b May 27, 2018
Today is Trinity Sunday and therefore the topic of the sermon is obvious: Baseball. Why? because the Trinity is too mysterious and controversial. Just kidding. And so you won't think that my sermon is pointless, here are the points. The words of Jesus. The words of Paul and other New Testament writers. The baptismal formula. The Apostles Creed. The retroactive Trinity. The Nicene Creed. The Trinity for you and me.
Why are we Christians Trinitarian in our beliefs? Mainly because of the words of Jesus both from the oral tradition and from the oracle tradition of the words of Jesus. The oracle tradition are the words that Jesus channeled through the Holy Spirit because he gave the disciple authority to speak in his name and they like Paul could say, "We have the mind of Christ." The words of Jesus promote the relationship between Jesus as his Father. He taught his disciples to regard God as their intimate parent, even to be on a mommy/daddy intimate relationship with God. To teach such intimacy of God, Jesus was the uniquely intimate Son of God who invited us to be brothers and sisters and sons and daughters of God. The intimate relationship with God involved a conduit Person, the Holy Spirit. And Jesus promised that this Holy Spirit would continue to be his Conduit relationship with his followers after he was gone.
The words of St. Paul, many of which came to textual form before the words of Gospel, include the relationship of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, sometimes included in a formulaic benediction in his writings, invoking the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit equally upon the lives of those in his churches.
The Trinity was crucial to the Christian Rite of Initiation, Holy Baptism. The last words of Jesus found in the Gospel of Matthew was the evangelical command: Go into all the world and preach the Gospel, making disciples and baptizing them in the Name of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. If you have been baptized, you were baptized in the Name of the Trinity. These are the essential words of the Christian Rite of Holy Baptism.
Part of the early baptismal rites included questions regarding one's belief. Do you believe in God the Father? Do you believe in God the Son? Do you believe in God the Holy Spirit? Each baptismal candidate responded, "I believe in the God the Father.....I believe in God the Son....I believe in God the Holy Spirit." This question and answer format for the baptismal rite became what we know to be the Apostles Creed which is still used in question and answer form at baptism, but also at Morning and Evening Prayer as well as in the Rite of Christian Burial. At one's baptism one confesses a belief in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. One does not make a confession about how God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit are understood in their relationship. The relationship confession about the Trinity would come later in the history of the early churches when the Nicene Creed was generated.
Next, I would like to mention what I call the "Retroactive Trinity." By this I mean, that if the Trinity is how God always was, how can one find the Trinity in Hebrew Scriptures? The Jews do not confess a belief in the Holy Trinity; they confess a strict monotheism. How can Christians claim the Hebrew Scriptures of the Jews as being Trinitarian. Christian apologists found the Trinity, "retroactively" in the Hebrew Scriptures. I'll give one example: The Creation Story includes the Holy Trinity. God the Father Spoke the Words of Creation. Jesus Christ was the Word of Creation that God the Father spoke. And the Holy Spirit was the Breath and Wind of God which moved over the face of the abyss to cause creation to happen. There you have it: Retroactive Trinity. All three were involved in Creation.
Next, is the Trinity of the Council of Nicaea in 325. One can say that it wasn't until then that the public consciousness of the Trinity was so evident. The Trinity had moved from being hidden and implicit during the time of Jesus and the early church to becoming explicit doctrine and canon law in the aftermath of the Council of Nicaea in 325. In the Nicene Creed we have the Trinity as an administrative, political and legal truth of the Church. The Apostles Creed is about "that you believe in God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit." The Nicene Creed is about "how you believe in God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit." Why did this become important? Christianity was successful in the Roman Empire. The Emperor Constantine, like typical politicians, embraced this success of Christianity, but he also was aware of the fighting between Christians. Christians disagreed about God and about how they expressed the relationship between God the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. Constantine called the Bishops of all the churches in the Empire to gather in Nicaea to standardize Christian teaching so that disagreements would not divide his empire. The Council of Nicaea was a heated Church Convention. It ended with a Creed and statements of Canon Law. In the Creed, it is state that God is Three Persons who are equally God in their personal substance. The bishops used Greek philosophical notions to speak of God as three Persons who were equally One God. The majority vote of bishops won at Nicaea, but a majority of Christians were "excommunicated" because of the Council of Nicaea. The Canon Law stated, "If anyone believes to the contrary of what we have stated, let them be anathema." This is a polite way of saying, "let them go to hell." It took more than a century for the beliefs of Nicaea to become generally accepted, because many local rulers continued to protect bishops who did agree with the teachings of the Council.
Today, we in general accept the formula of the Nicene Creed, probably without thinking about what they mean. We probably do not appreciate the Greek philosophical distinctions used by the Church Fathers to state the relationship between God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. So, where do you and I stand with the Trinity today? When you pray, who do you pray to? Do you give Jesus more time than the Father or the Holy Spirit? When you pray to God, do you just assume all three? When you meditate how do you understand the involvement of the Trinity?
How can you and I appropriate a functional and relevant understanding of the Trinity for our lives today?
I begin with John's Gospel. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. All things came into being through Word. You and I are human because we are worded beings; we are language users and because we use word, we name everything including ourselves as language users. And we name human experience. We name the experience of God in human experience. We can easily name God as our Father or Creator, in the sense that we know we did not self create; we came from a Plenitude of Everything. Secondly, we accept our worded-human experience as a valid way to come to know about God. What gives us permission to regard our human experience as a valid way to know God? This is where God the Son is known. God became human and embraced and validated human experience as a way to know God. How could humanity know God if God did not permit the Divine Person to be Bi-lingual. Jesus as God's Son is proof to us that God is bi-lingual knowing both the divine and human experience completely. If we speak about God, the perfect bi-lingual Son is unavoidable. Next, in our human experience we are aware of not being alone. Space between us is not a vacuum. There is a conduit between everything that allows mutual experience to be conducted. How can you know me if you are not me and how can I know you without being you? The Holy Spirit is God's Omnipresence which means that mutual relationship is conducted between us and within us. I regard this to be the unavoidable mystery of God in human experience and this Mystery is the Holy Spirit.
Finally, why is it relevant to refer to God as Persons? As people we define God as the greatest. To speak about God is to use the superlative case of human attributes. One of the highest things we think about ourselves is that we have personality. A person is someone who is in relationship. Being relational persons is what defines human psychology and sociology. And if we want to speak about a great God, we believe that Ultimate relationship begins with God as a dynamic union of Personalities. In confessing God as Trinity, we believe that love expresses perfect relationship between persons. And we confess that Perfect Loving United Relationship begins in God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
And so I confess the Trinity as being unavoidable in my relationship with God today. I hope that the Trinity will be for you today, not just a confession or church doctrine, I hope it will be your intimate love relationship with God today. Amen.
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