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Sermon: Trinity Sunday (A) - 19th June 2011
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping 7 & 8 am
Readings: Exodus 34:1-8 Song of the Three Young Men 2 Corinthians 13:11-13 Matthew 28:16-20
The doctrine of the Trinity is specifically not a matter of idle or mysterious speculation, but is rooted and grounded in Christian experience. Matthew concludes his Gospel with this story of the disciples encountering the Risen Jesus on a mountain in Galilee, when Jesus sends them out to “make disciples of all nations”. This commissioning has two components, baptism and obedience to “everything that I have commanded you”.
These components can be understood sequential order, with baptism being the rite that initiates disciples into the Christian life in the first place, and Christian life in the second place consisting in continual obedience to Jesus’ commands. This makes of baptism more than just a formal rite, but a kind of summary of the character of Christian life. It also specifies Jesus’ “commands” as more than a list of rules and regulations, but as the qualities shown in baptism that are to be lived out in the disciple’s life. In fact, in the gospels Jesus issues very few commands. He gives a great deal of moral teaching, and he offers expansive interpretations of the Ten Commandments, but he uses the words “command” and “commandment” very sparingly.
He commands the “summary of the law,” to love God with all the heart and mind and soul and strength, and to love the neighbour as yourself. The gospel of John is unique in adding a third, “new” commandment, to love one another as Jesus loves, that is, with the same quality of love Jesus himself exemplifies. The life of discipleship is to “obey” or to commit to these three loves. Committing to these three loves is the action undertaken in the sacrament of baptism and baptism is “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”. The Trinitarian formula, so rarely used in the New Testament though clearly attested in the early church, is here linked quite explicitly to the experience of the Christian life of love under the condition of baptism.
The threefold love of Christian experience is spelled out with greater specification in Paul’s closing blessing to the church in Corinth. “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you”, Paul writes, connecting a certain quality of love with each of the Trinitarian Persons.
With Jesus, Paul connects “grace”, denoting love that is a gift, free, unconditional and unearned. This is the quality to which John points in his “new” commandment that followers of Jesus should love as Jesus loves. Stories of Jesus in the gospels show him showing love in the way he freely accepts all who come to him, in all their difference, knowing their hearts, knowing them as they are and not merely as greed or fear or ambition might project upon them, offering them acceptance regardless of their “deserving” or “not deserving” social or moral station. When Jesus’ followers love one another as Jesus loves them, they experience this grace.
Attributed to God in Paul’s blessing is “love”, which carries important connotations of a love that is chosen and willed, an intentional inclination to seek the good of the other, and to be faithful in that inclination through any circumstances. The love is exemplified in God’s election of Israel, and now in God’s election of the redeemed among the Gentiles through the covenant in Christ. For those now accepted into God’s covenant love, the experience can be expressed formally as redemption from bondage to sin and inclusion in the inheritance of the saints. In emotional terms, the effect of this faithful redeeming love is described with great poignancy in Romans 7, “ There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death”. The liberating experience of love is distinct but not divided from the experience of the free gift of grace.
Third in Paul’s blessing is the association of the Holy Spirit with “communion”, which is fellowship, the love that is felt in common in the web of relationships in the Christian community, the love that makes of each member more than he or she would be alone. The Spirit can be thought of as the power of building relationships of diversity in unity and acceptance of distinctions, and this is in keeping with attributing to the Spirit the work of community building. It is worth noting that the Spirit is neither the object nor the subject of community, but is the enabling medium, in which such love is originated and sustained and fulfilled.
In the doctrine of the Trinity as it was more fully developed after the New Testament period, one way of speaking of the three Persons was as “the Lover, the Beloved and the Bond of Love between them”. It is that same quality of love that is indicated by community here, and the same recognition that the Spirit is not known in itself, but in the relationships it empowers. It is a mode of love distinct from, but still clearly related to, the grace and love that are also realities of the Christian life.
The baptismal formula in Matthew and the closing blessing in 2 Corinthians show us that the experience of divine love as threefold was a central element of Christian life from its earliest times. But, the theology of the Trinity developed specifically to say that the “three-ness” of the divine is not simply a thing of human perception, nor a divine accommodation to human limitation, but is in some sense a feature of God’s own being.
In classical Trinitarian thought, the issue was not only one of metaphysical speculation, but of salvation. Because it was believed that in Jesus we have the sacrament of the encounter with God. It was important that the experience of God received in following the Way of Jesus, is experienced as an encounter with the real God, and not just an appearance of God. If is not, then we have not encountered the real God and we are not really saved. If the experience of God given in the Way of Jesus is threefold, then that threefold-ness must therefore somehow be true of the real God. We can add to that that if God is revealed in the world in a threefold manner, then there must be at least some sense in which God is threefold. At the least we can say that the distinction without division of what Paul calls love and grace and community is a factor in the way God experiences what it’s like to be God of the world. Grace, love and communion must be thought of as patterns of feeling and activity that are ingredient in God’s makeup, because they are discernible in God’s revelation in the world.
In the first Creation story from Genesis, an alternative reading for today, we can see in it all three patterns of love in God’s creating activity. From the void, undifferentiated God creates by introducing difference. God differentiates light from dark, open space from chaotic world, dry land from salt sea, living things from inert soil, and so on. At each stage, God grants a distinctive way of being, to the creatures, that they should be as they are and have their particular place in Creation. This is similar to the grace of acceptance exemplified in Jesus.
Furthermore, the different creatures are not left in isolation, but are set in dynamic relationships: light and dark are not left as mere opposites, but are set in the dynamic alternation of day and night, providing the reliable, faithful frame in which all the rest of the story happens. Land and sea are related by coastlands and shorelines. Sun and moon and stars, differentiated from light in general, are set in patterns of relative movement that mark out times and seasons and years. Plants yield fruits which carry their seeds, animals have the fruits for food, and in turn carry the seeds to new growing places for new generations; and so on. This work of weaving diverse individuals into common patterns of life, building webs of life giving relationships, is the work of communion given to the Spirit, which broods over the Creation and gathers the whole under the shelter of its wings. Finally, the love of faithful inclination to seek the good of the other is reflected in the way that, at the end of each stage of creation, God pronounces it good, and in the later stages blesses the creatures and gives them instructions for how to live out their blessing. This not unlike the way God gives Torah to Israel and Jesus’ commands to his followers as instructions for living out their covenant blessing. The three patterns of love, which Paul, Matthew, and later Christian writers identify as Trinity, are thus evident in God’s creating activity in the first story of Creation.
The doctrine of the Trinity is not just an intellectual puzzle left over from the days when Christian theology was in debited to Hellenistic philosophy, but is instead an abstraction drawn from actual, concrete Christian experience. Christians who look for the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit are likely to see them in the world, because they are paying attention to signs that others might not be paying attention to. Christians who look for grace, love and communion because they are the traces of God being God, are likely to experience God as presently active in the world. They are bringing into prominence feelings of the divine that others might well be ignoring.
The theology of the Trinity, in itself certainly abstract, nevertheless can help constitute concrete Christian experience. It offers something to be gained for practical purposes. By accepting Paul’s blessing and committing to Matthew’s formula and looking for God’s threefold love at work in the genesis of the world, then the theology of the Trinity is a means for us to become a creature who can be a co-creator with God in the ongoing work of creation.
The theology of the Trinity, as a guide for Christian experience, invites us into grace, love and communion as concrete ways to participate in the adventure of life in the beautiful creation that God said was good.
This sermon constructed using material written by P S Nancarrow at http://www.processandfaith.org/resources/lectionary-commentary/yeara/2011-06-19/trinity-sunday