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Sermon: Trinity Sunday (A) - 19th June 2011
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping 10 am
Readings: Exodus 34:1-8 Song of the Three Young Men 2 Corinthians 13:11-13 Matthew 28:16-20
Today is Trinity Sunday. This is the only Sunday in the church year that celebrates a teaching of the church rather than a teaching of Jesus. But the Trinity is rooted in scripture, and even though we don’t find the word “Trinity” in the Bible it is clearly indicated in Matthew 28 where the instruction is to baptize in the name of the Father, the Son & the Holy Spirit.
But why is this odd doctrine so important to us? Why does the church set aside one Sunday a year to celebrate such a difficult teaching? This teaching has a history going back 1,700 years. Ecumenical councils worked for years to hammer out the language to capture the truth of the nature of the relationship between the Father and the Son. And this teaching is important because it reveals the very heart of God. We want to know God deeply and truly. And of course, there are different ways of knowing. There is knowing through observation. We can know something by taking it apart, and observing its finer details, until we have an understanding of its essential nature.
That’s what the ancient church did. That’s how we got this doctrine of the Trinity. But we can also know something by living with it, by relating our lives to it. In this way of knowing we experience it, we interact with it, we develop a relationship with it, and allow that knowledge to transform us. So there are times and places to seek both kinds of knowledge of God. We have a good strong foundation in the early creeds. The Nicene Creed is still a great confession, and one we will continue to stand on. But it’s one thing to speak truthful words about who God is. It is quite another thing to know God himself.
One big challenge we face in the church today is not about believing the confessions of our faith. The challenge is to move deeper, to know God more deeply, by experiencing the various ways that this living triune God encounters us in life, and draws us into relationship, and transforms us. If we know anything about God at all, it’s that God is relational. Everything sacred, everything that is of God, is relational. People have tried, and failed, to know God in the abstract, as a purely objective reality that we can study and observe in the same way we study Maths or science.
But true, deep, robust knowledge of God only becomes real, when it is a lived reality, when we allow the reality of God to impact upon our mundane lives. When we argue about God in the abstract, about God’s existence, or God’s nature, or God’s activity in the world, it’s like “pointing a searchlight towards the sky to see if the sun is shining.” Speaking about God can be like “staring into the sun.” It’s too dazzling to look at straight away. We need to look around and appreciate how the light of the sun illuminates life around us, how the stuff of life reflects, and relates to the light.
Nevertheless, we seekers of God don’t give up trying to catch a glimpse of the sun itself, trying to discover the truth about the nature of God. The doctrine of the Trinity came about because early Christians were seeing this beautiful light reflected in so many different ways all around them, and wanted to catch a glimpse of the sun. The early church, experienced the activity of God in complex ways. It was their experience of their faith that made it clear that God related to creation in different ways. They experienced God as majestic, powerful, and awe-inspiring. They experienced God as gentle, compassionate, and intimate. And they had experienced God in the flesh, in a man named Jesus of Nazareth.
So it was their experience of God, that was given to the theologians to work with, to help find language to talk about it. God is not merely a concept. God is known and experienced in relationship. It would be a mistake to give the impression that the Christian doctrine of God is just a matter of clever intellectual mind games. For Christians, it’s always a love game: God’s love for the world, calling for a responding love from us, enabling us to discover that God not only happens to love us...but that he is love itself...The heart of God’s own being, and this is the essence of it, is the love which passes continually between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.”
The Trinity keeps us focussed on the worship of a relational God; and it protects us from worshiping God as nothing more than a cosmic notion of goodness. In the Australian census over the years, one religion continues to grow, many people put down their religion - as “Jedi.” “May the force be with you.” But for us, God is much more than that. Once we glimpse the doctrine of the Trinity we are less likely to slide back into vague notions of God as just a force in the universe. Jesus exploded into the life of ancient Israel... not as a teacher of timeless truths, not as a great moral example, but as the one through whose life, and death, and resurrection God’s rescue operation was put into effect, and the world turned that great corner at last...It’s because of Jesus that Christians claim they know who the creator God really is.
It is because he, as a human being, is now with the Father in the dimension we call “heaven” that Christians came so quickly to speak of God as both Father and Son. It is because he is still in heaven while we are on earth that Christians came to speak of the Spirit, too, as a distinct member of the divine Trinity. It is all because of Jesus that we speak of God the way we do. And it is all because of Jesus that we find ourselves called to live the way we do. It is through Jesus that we are summoned to become more truly human, to reflect the image of God in the world. The Trinity is not a dry, intellectual exercise in the study of the nature of God. The Trinity is putting into words what it means to worship a God who is with us - really with us, in a way that puts a claim on our ordinary lives, in a way that compels us to respond to God, to relate to God, in one way or another.
It is the evidence in scripture of our relational God that has given rise to this doctrine of the Trinity. It is that real, concrete, present, and multi-angled relationship with the triune God, that makes a joyful and hopeful life possible, in a world of suffering. And as Jesus sends out his disciples in Matthew 28 to begin their mission to the world, they are to teach about God - but this is God now revealed as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Trinity is the essence of their teaching.
The disciples were coming to believe that Jesus was from God, that Jesus was the Anointed One, the Son of God. They were just beginning to get accustomed to that thought. Jesus was the real and distinct revelation of God the Father to the community of believers. He was the incarnation of God. God in real flesh. God present. God with us - Immanuel. But how was God going to continue to be present in the community when Jesus left? The spirit of God would be with them, and the spirit would be in their teaching.
But the Trinity is not something for us just to dissect and examine until it makes perfect rational sense. Rather the Trinity speaks beautiful truths about how we relate to God, and how God relates to us. For us to grasp the Trinity, we don’t need a neat and tidy point-by-point outline. Rather we need to look at it as God’s precious jewel - from different angles, and soak in the beauty it reveals. It’s like a multi-faceted gemstone that reflects the light in different colours and intensities, depending on the angle from which we’re viewing it. The Trinity helps us see God from three angles. God the majestic sovereign, creator of the universe, all-knowing, all-powerful. And, God who understands my human frailty, God - who has been in my shoes, God who knows suffering, and continues to suffer. And, God who is near to comfort, to guide and empower in the present, to speak the words of God to us today. This multi-faceted, three personed God,who by his very nature, brings together heaven and earth.
It is our life-calling to know this God, not by looking on from a distance, but to know by participating with, by living with, by letting the truth of God make a difference in the day to day, of our ordinary lives, by engaging in the kinds of practices that nurture this deeper knowledge and participation in God.
In your daily life, how do you relate to God? As almighty - as creator of heaven and earth? How does Jesus, sitting at the right hand of the Father make a difference in the way you face suffering, or in the way you pray, knowing how intensely he has experienced suffering in his own flesh? What does it mean for you to believe in “the forgiveness of sins” and the liberation that truth brings? What does it mean that the Spirit of God is with you, that no matter where you are – he is there! That no matter what we endure – he stands with us and beside us – into eternity. In fact, it means everything to us, doesn’t it?