O Lord, we pray, speak in this place, in the calming of our minds and in the longing of our hearts, by the words of my lips and in the thoughts that we form. Speak, O Lord, for your servants listen. Amen.
This Sunday is Trinity Sunday - the first Sunday after Pentecost a time of year that Popes and Bishops, Councils and Synods, Preachers, Pastors and Teachers have, for more years than this church has existed thought it good and wise to remind the millions of seekers - the millions of faithful - for whom they care - that God is a mystery which is best understood in three ways:
As creator - or Father
as redeemer - or Son
and as sustainer - or Spirit.
God is one. Yet God is three.
God is here. Yet God is everywhere.
God is mighty. Yet God is tender.
God is just. Yet God has mercy.
God is spirit. Yet God takes on flesh.
God is in Christ. Christ is in Us.
God is Spirit and the Spirit blows where it wills.
Yet the Spirit abides in our hearts.
God is one. Yet God is three.
The Apostle Paul writes this about God
"Since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made."
When you go outside after this worship time, take a little bit more time to worship - look at the bark of an old tree, at the greening fields, the scudding clouds, the running waters,
and give thanks - to the power - to the grace - to the beauty that made it all.
You know and understand what I saying - that's why you're here, because God is - and God is good, and you want to remind yourselves of that - and share and celebrate that truth with your brothers and sisters in God and before God.
But there are others, and they are many, who stop just there - with the clouds and the trees - with the land and the sea and the creatures that inhabit them, and while they get a spiritual message from them - they don't get the same message of goodness and of beauty that we do - we who know God is One, Yet God is three.
Paul writes that although they know God from what has been made:
"they neither glorify him as God nor give thanks to him, but their thinking becomes futile and their foolish hearts are darkened. Although they claim to be wise they become fools and exchange the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles."
My friends - the truth of creation is that there is more to it than meets our eye, that there is a design and purpose that is greater than the sum of the parts that we see around us.
God most surely is.
And God is good.
But there is more yet. More ways of experiencing the mystery that is God, more ways of understanding than that which regarding God as the creator can give to us.
God is One, Yet God is Three
Last week we celebrated the pouring out of the Spirit of God upon the followers of Jesus the Christ. We celebrated that presence - that force - that all of us here have experienced that power, that person, who gives shape to much that we see and hear, what we do and say.
Just as only a few weeks earlier we celebrated the resurrection of a man who is somehow more than a man, one who was a child of promise - one whom our minds and our hearts tell us was more than a good person - more than a saint - more even than an angel - and yet - was so much one of us.
Jesus our teacher and guide - our shepherd and our friend. Jesus our Lord, and our God.
God the creator, God the redeemer, God the sustainer.
God is One, Yet God is Three.
It is our experience is it not.
For me the Trinity is something like atomic theory. We all learned in school that everything in the universe is made up of atoms, which are themselves made up of tiny particles called protons, neutrons and electrons. That protons and neutrons together make up a nucleus, and that the electrons orbit around this nucleus sort of like the planets in our solar system orbit around the sun.
But there is no scientist who really believes that this simple model fully explains the substance of matter. Nuclear physics is much more complex - so much so quantum mechanics asserts that we can create things by simply observing them into existence. The most educated physicist will tell you we will probably never know everything about atoms and subatomic particles. The atomic theory is just a model that explains something about how atoms work. It doesn't tell everything about what they are.
So it is with the Trinity. The idea of the Trinity tells us something about how God is revealed to us, how God works in human events. But it doesn't fully tell us WHO or WHAT God is. And I guess that is the secret of this experience we have of God - this understanding we have of God as a trinity - it doesn't tell us fully - but it tells us some important stuff none-the-less. Life changing stuff.
How much better an understanding, than none - or worse, a misunderstanding, a view that leaves a person in a situation like which Paul describes when he writes:
"claiming to be wise, they became fools, and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles."
You know sometimes you just have to celebrate the faith we have. And yes - the doctrine we have. The understanding we have of the God that made it all. The understanding we have of how it all works.
The story is told about a young medical student who spent his summer vacation working as a butcher in a large supermarket during the daytime and worked as an orderly at the local community hospital at night.
Both jobs involved his wearing a white smock. One evening he was instructed to wheel a woman from her room down into surgery. He entered the patient's room and said, "Mrs. Johnson, I have come to take you to surgery." The woman, who was already frightened turned to her husband and said, "Harry, don't let him take me. It's the butcher!"
Mistaken identity can be a real problem.
That is why we as Christians ascribe to the doctrine of the Trinity. It helps us to identify God.
The doctrine of the Trinity is not a mathematical puzzle or an academic formula for theologians to debate - as they have done for so many centuries.
Instead, it is a belief born out of the experience of ordinary Christians as a real life answer to the question, "Where do we find God?"
It is an answer that we believe God has given us - God has made God's self know to us in three unique ways, that there is only one God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
One God who is Loving, Just, Holy, Intimate, Powerful, Wrathful, Forgiving, Life Itself, Light. And More.
Think of the words of Psalm 8 that we read this morning.
"When I look at the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established, what are human beings that youare mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?"
Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honour. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet.
It is incredible is it not. And don't our hearts echo the truth of these words even as we understand and applaud the story of creation itself: "O LORD, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
God is one, yet God is three.
God is a mystery my friends - a mystery so big, so awesome, so holy that our limited minds can never grasp the wholeness of it. Yet God has placed in us a capacity to appreciate and know the mystery that God. And more. God has taken on flesh in our midst.
In Christ, God reveals himself. In Christ God became Incarnate.
I tell you my friends, without this one, without this revelation of God whom we call the Jesus the Christ - you and I would not have the promises nor would we have the inheritance to come
Jesus is the one who reveals the way to us, the one who speaks the truth to us, the one who gives life by his touch and by his word. Jesus in the one who died and who rose again. Jesus shows us the way - and is the way. Jesus is the child of Mary. Jesus is the child of God. In him the fullness of deity dwells.
God is One, yet God is three.
We have - in God - the three in one - and one in three - something that is very precious. We have the gospel - the good news - of the salvation that is for all humankind.
We have the message concerning God's love and his desire to grant wholeness to all his children.
We have a light that shines into the darkness of human hearts and brings healing - a light that shines forth from thence into the life of all those around.
It has seemed good to hundreds of generations of our Spiritual Ancestors to remember this truth on this day of the year in a particular and special way.
And so we do today.
We remember Jesus' own words, the words he spoke shortly before his ascension into heaven, when he said to his followers
"All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And lo, I am with you always, to the very end of the age."
We remember - and we go forth - not simply because it has been commanded, but because as Paul wrote in the letter to the Romans - "In the Gospel a righteousness from God is revealed".
Blessed be the name of God. Day by Day. Day by Day. Amen
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