All material copyright 2005.
Westminster Presbyterian Church
Durham, North Carolina
(919)489-4974
For staff e-mail call # above
or e-mail Gail
Comments, corrections and suggestions about this website are welcome.
E-mail Web
assistant
Three in One
Trinity Sunday, May 18, 2008
Betty Berghaus
By the Presbyterian calendar, today is Trinity Sunday. Trinity Sunday comes after the exciting birthday celebration of the church at Pentecost, and just before we slide into a long time of what is called “Ordinary Time.” In a hectic, fast-paced world, some “ordinary time” actually may sound a bit appealing!
But first we deal with the mystery of the Trinity. We spend a whole Sunday on it, even though the term, “Trinity,” is not even in the Bible at all! The concept is in the Bible, and theologians coined the term to explain the presence of three equal persons who are one God. The theologian, Tertullian, was the first to use the term Trinity, in the 2nd century. In secular terms, with a lower case “t,” trinity refers to a triad. But with a capital “T,” as Tertullian used it, it refers, of course, to the one God in three persons. That may seem a simple enough definition, but it has been the source of strong debate for many centuries. In the 4th century, in fact, the ruler Constantine was so tired of the arguing over the relationship of God and the Son that he formed a council, which met at Nicea, to come up with a statement to end the controversy. The council of over 300 bishops came up with the Nicene Creed, perhaps the most comprehensive statement of the three persons of the Godhead – but even this did not end the controversy!
There have been, and still are, perhaps, those who see the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as more like three Gods. This can be called tritheism. There are those who see God as the most dynamic, Jesus as the human created and given a measure of divinity by God, and the Holy Spirit as a divine influence. This can be called dynamic monarchianism. Modalism sees the three persons as ways, or modes, that God reveals God’s self at distinct and different times, as Father, as Son, as Holy Spirit. The Trinity is a hard concept to understand!
Augustine compared the Trinity to three parts of a human being – mind, spirit, and will. These three are distinct yet inseparable, and make up one human being. Our Westminster Confession of Faith says:
“There is one only and true God, but in the unity of the Godhead there are three coeternal and coequal Persons, the same in substance but distinct in subsistence.”
I still find the best explanation of the Trinity in that children’s book that I shared at the Children’s message! The Trinity is perhaps like the one apple, with God as the peel that protects, Jesus as the flesh that we taste personally, and the Holy Spirit is the core, and contains the seeds that enable God to grow in our hearts.
There are scriptures that can inform our understanding of the Trinity. In the first Creation story, in Genesis 1, there are several things to note that inform our doctrine of the Trinity. Just in the 2nd verse, a “wind from God swept over the face of the waters” right before God spoke to begin creation. The Hebrew word for wind, ruah, is used elsewhere for Spirit. So the Holy Spirit was there from the beginning, with God. And in verse 26, when God began to create humanity, the scripture says that God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness. God’s image is plural. And so are we – “male and female he created them.” And God told them to be fruitful and multiply.
Echoing the beginning of the Bible, John 1 says:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” So John tells us that the Word, logos in the Greek, or Jesus, according to John, was with God from the beginning. So we now have established that the Spirit and Jesus were one with God from before the very beginning of our creation.
There are many references to the Spirit of God in the Old Testament scriptures, and also many scriptures that we can now look back on as foreseeing Jesus Christ. Isaiah 9, for instance, tells us that “a child has been born for us; authority rests upon his shoulders, and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” (Isaiah 9:6) Here the Messiah, the Christ figure is called God the Father, the Prince Son, and the Counselor (another term used for the Holy Spirit), all three! And there are, of course, other OT scriptures that seem to predict the coming of God in Jesus.
Though the Trinity is not so named in the New Testament, we begin to see the Trinitarian formula used there. Most notably at the end of the Gospel of Matthew, the risen Lord called his disciples to a holy place, a mountain, and there he gave them the authority that had been given him, and he told them to go out to all nations, and to baptize them “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” The blessing at the end of most of the NT epistles uses a Trinitarian formula, much as we use in our benedictions at the end of each worship service. The end of II Corinthians, for instance, says “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” (II Cor. 13:13)
And we could go on and on. But we have established some evidence for the existence of this mysterious concept of the Trinity as biblically based. And we probably better leave the rest of the proof to faith! The truth of the Trinity for us today seems to me to establish one main point – that God is community, and that God creates us to be in community. We already saw in Genesis how God made us in “their” image! Paul wrote to the Galatians that “in Christ you are all children of God through faith,” …that there “is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). If we are created in the image of God, God must somehow be male and female, of dark or light or reddish or yellowish skin - for we are all made in God’s image. And in Christ Jesus we are all to be one people, just as God is three but one. The three persons of God appear to live together as equals and in harmony, sometimes hardly distinguishable one from the other. So the doctrine of the Trinity reminds us that God must intend for us to live together, treating one another as equals, striving for harmony among all peoples. And yet, somehow, it seems that we have gone far astray from what God intends for us to be!
In researching for this sermon, I found out something about the Book of Genesis that I never realized before. Walter Brueggeman says that Genesis was probably written in the 6th century BCE, when the nation of Israel was in exile by the Babylonian conquerors. Our text took creation stories and myths of the area of Egypt and Mesopotamia and put a new twist on them. Whereas the Babylonians believed in many gods who were often battling one another, and in thus adversely at times affecting the earth and its inhabitants, Genesis proclaimed one God who brought order and beauty out of chaos. Written to a people living in the chaos of exile, taken by force out of their land and bound to live as slaves for a foreign people, this creation text declared with great majesty that God is present, that God can be trusted, that God is the Lord of all life.
Psalm 8 also testifies to God’s sovereignty, and declares that humans are important to God, in fact, just a little lower than the angels, it says. This text, like Genesis, says that God gives dominion to humans over the rest of God’s creation. In other words, God shares a bit of God’s power with us. Psalm 8 follows Psalms 3 through 7 that cry out for God’s help in the midst of suffering from assault by enemies, and from grave illness. And so the Psalms do not deny the suffering of humanity, but actually embrace it and declare all of life to be lived under God’s rule anyway!
The Matthew text calls for disciples to go out into the world and to reach out to all peoples, not with weapons of war, but with the peaceful teachings of Jesus and with the still waters of baptism. If we truly believe that God is the Lord of all the earth, that God, who is community, has created us for community, we will need to change our ways of living to embrace a lifestyle that cares for the creation that God has given us dominion over, and which strives for harmony with all of other people - who are one of us anyway because we are all God’s creation, and thus we are all one! This is a tall order in a world that is so diverse, that in fact endorses diversity; in a world that is violent and war-torn; in a world where individuality is exalted and where dependency sometimes declared as a weakness. Over and over again, we find that the biblical concepts call us to live counter to the ways of our society. So to live as a Trinitarian people calls us away from the practices of our society, and even of our country, into a life that lives in harmony with all of creation.
For some hints on how to accomplish that almost impossible seeming goal, we can return again to the Genesis text. In a beautiful text that could almost be read as a litany, we hear of God establishing our world, through speech (the Word) and with great order and great care. God worked hard for 6 days, says the text, and then on the seventh day, God rested. God even blessed that 7th day and called it holy. Our society no longer allows us to live Sunday as a Sabbath day. Sunday is not a day without work anymore. But God, in whose image we are made, rested on the 7th day, and regarded the work that God had done. I am willing to bet that most of us do not really take a Sabbath time. We are too busy with soccer or basketball games or gymnastic meets, or with work that we could just not get done during the week. We are too busy with the busy-ness and noise of the world that is ever-present around us. Perhaps the first little, but important, step to returning to life as God intends for us, is to observe the Sabbath. Rest without TV, glaring music, or computers, but perhaps with a Bible, and reflect on the God who made us in God’s holy image. Rest in that silence for a good while. Reflect, and pray. Use the wealth of spiritual materials and practices that are available, if needed. But observe the Sabbath. It might just change your life. As one who has just come back from a month of sabbatical, I know that time off can help refresh and renew.
And now at Westmisnter, as a congregation that is in transition, with the loss of two beloved pastors, and in the midst of searching for a new leader, we need to seek God’s guidance both individually and corporately. Sabbath time for us all might help in that process. But we will also need to follow the lead of our God who is the Word, and who makes things happen with and through the Word. We need to talk. We need to communicate our needs, our worries, our revelations. We need to talk about how we will work together. We can acknowledge that we are all part of one holy family in our life and work here together as Westminster Presbyterian Church. And we can strive for the oneness of all humanity created in the image of God as we do acts of justice and kindness, as we strive for peace for all the nations, and as we follow the lead of our Lord who promises to be with us in our endeavors, even to the end of the age. That is the promise of the Gospel. That is the promise of our Creator and Redeemer, and Comforter. Glory be to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit! Amen.
Our hymn is perhaps the most exciting and familiar Trinitarian hymn, “Holy, Holy, Holy,” #138!
CHARGE AND BENEDICTION:
God, who is community, has created us to be community. That takes work! So on this Trinity Sunday, let us pledge to work harder at being community, here at Westminster, in our workplaces and homes, and with the whole creation over which God has given us dominion.
(Close with II Corinthians 13:11-13 –
“Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell. Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace;
and the God of love and peace will be with you.
Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you.
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”)
And let all of God’s people say, AMEN!