"The Paradoxical Power of Three"
6-15-14 (Trinity Sunday, Year A)
Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Matthew 28:16-20
The Paradoxical Power of Three
The beginning of the Bible and the end of a Gospel. It seems like a strange pairing - even more so, perhaps, when we consider that in the calendar of the liturgical year, today is Trinity Sunday - a Sunday in which we specifically lift up the mystery of One God existing as Three persons, each distinct and each in relationship with the other, but also still One, Almighty God. And yet, the odd placement of these two texts together is perhaps only made sensible in the context of the Trinity.
We talk about the Trinity in our weekly worship as we recite the words of our confessions, our creeds, and even as we sing the hymns that make up so much of the backbone of how we express our faith. We’re no strangers to the ideas of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But at the same time, we don’t tend to spend all that much time thinking about them - they’re something that’s just a part of our faith and the language we use to talk about God. We know that God is one, and that God is also three persons expressed in that One. But we don’t always know just how to talk about that relationship. We know that the Trinity is an astounding mystery, despite the fact that it is central to our faith, and yet every attempt we’ve made throughout the years to explain it, to summarize it in 140 characters or less, so to speak… none of them are quite adequate. Images of three leaf clovers, water becoming ice, water, and steam, even comparisons of how a person can be both a Father, a Son, and a Husband and yet still be one person… they speak to one side of the Trinity, but don’t show the whole. And so we wring our hands… we hesitate and stammer… and then ultimately, we resort to the only sure statement that we can possibly make: “It’s a mystery!”
But as we look at these passages, as we reflect on the Triune relationship that they point us toward… perhaps the Trinity isn’t quite as mysterious as we’ve made it out to be. In the beginning… when God began to create the heavens and the earth… God the Three-in-One was present. The Spirit of God hovered over the waters, and God spoke God’s Word… the Word that John’s Gospel tells us was Jesus Christ… and creation came into being. And God saw that that creation was good - so good, in fact, that God placed something in that creation made explicitly in God’s own image: human beings. And then God entered into relationship with that creation and with the human beings God had created.
And yet, despite that relationship that God has offered to us, despite us knowing that we are made in God’s image, we get the relationship wrong - we try to shape God into our image, to make God into the kind of God that we want God to be instead of the God who is “I AM.” We want a God who thinks the same way that we do, who acts in the same ways that we do, who votes the same way as us, who has the same theology as us, who affirms us in our own convictions and ideas. We want a God who has the kind of power that we need but don’t have - so we make God into everything we want God to be. And in the process, all we really end up making for ourselves is just one more golden calf, one more idol, one more thing that we think is God, but really ends up being just one more shallow explanation of a greater mystery.
Fortunately, we also have a God that doesn’t give up on us. We have a God who constantly reminds us who God is throughout the entirety of Scripture. God reveals God’s self to Abraham, to Moses, to David and Solomon, leading God’s people and giving them guidelines by which to live their lives in a holy covenant relationship. God places God’s Spirit upon the prophets, speaking through them to remind God’s people throughout the years of what God desires. And God even goes so far as to become flesh, to walk amongst God’s own creation, and to show us specifically what God looks like, who God is, and what our relationship with God and with God’s creation is supposed to be like.
Through Jesus Christ, we finally and definitively know who and what God truly is - God takes our own illusions of power, our own illusions of what we want God to be, and shows us God’s own reality. Where we want a God who agrees with us and validates our own needs for power, we get instead a God who challenges us, who pushes us to view the world differently, and who shows the greatest power in the entire world by giving himself up even to death. And then, even after dying and rising from the dead, even after having given us a human understanding of exactly who God is, God is not content to simply leave it at that.
Instead, God sends us the Holy Spirit, the living presence of the Risen Christ always among us, always guiding us, always nudging us and pushing us forward, continuing to reveal God to us as we encounter God in Scripture and in worship anew over and over again. And as that Spirit pushes us, it continually pushes us back toward Christ, back toward that perfect expression of God among us, that example that we are encouraged to follow.
There’s something paradoxical about the whole thing - and that’s what makes it so mysterious to us. Yet, despite the mystery, God gives us every ability to understand it through the Holy Spirit. And it is through that very guidance of the Spirit that we are not only able to follow out Christ’s commission to each and every one of us that we go out and share that mystery with others, that we teach them to live in that same relationship with God through Christ in the power of the Spirit, but that we are compelled to go out and lead others to that same understanding. We are compelled because, in the relationship we have with God, we are better able to understand and experience God’s own love for all creation. And so we go out - we share that love to the world - and God sees that it is good.
To God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit be all glory, now and forever. Amen.
Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Matthew 28:16-20
The Paradoxical Power of Three
The beginning of the Bible and the end of a Gospel. It seems like a strange pairing - even more so, perhaps, when we consider that in the calendar of the liturgical year, today is Trinity Sunday - a Sunday in which we specifically lift up the mystery of One God existing as Three persons, each distinct and each in relationship with the other, but also still One, Almighty God. And yet, the odd placement of these two texts together is perhaps only made sensible in the context of the Trinity.
We talk about the Trinity in our weekly worship as we recite the words of our confessions, our creeds, and even as we sing the hymns that make up so much of the backbone of how we express our faith. We’re no strangers to the ideas of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But at the same time, we don’t tend to spend all that much time thinking about them - they’re something that’s just a part of our faith and the language we use to talk about God. We know that God is one, and that God is also three persons expressed in that One. But we don’t always know just how to talk about that relationship. We know that the Trinity is an astounding mystery, despite the fact that it is central to our faith, and yet every attempt we’ve made throughout the years to explain it, to summarize it in 140 characters or less, so to speak… none of them are quite adequate. Images of three leaf clovers, water becoming ice, water, and steam, even comparisons of how a person can be both a Father, a Son, and a Husband and yet still be one person… they speak to one side of the Trinity, but don’t show the whole. And so we wring our hands… we hesitate and stammer… and then ultimately, we resort to the only sure statement that we can possibly make: “It’s a mystery!”
But as we look at these passages, as we reflect on the Triune relationship that they point us toward… perhaps the Trinity isn’t quite as mysterious as we’ve made it out to be. In the beginning… when God began to create the heavens and the earth… God the Three-in-One was present. The Spirit of God hovered over the waters, and God spoke God’s Word… the Word that John’s Gospel tells us was Jesus Christ… and creation came into being. And God saw that that creation was good - so good, in fact, that God placed something in that creation made explicitly in God’s own image: human beings. And then God entered into relationship with that creation and with the human beings God had created.
And yet, despite that relationship that God has offered to us, despite us knowing that we are made in God’s image, we get the relationship wrong - we try to shape God into our image, to make God into the kind of God that we want God to be instead of the God who is “I AM.” We want a God who thinks the same way that we do, who acts in the same ways that we do, who votes the same way as us, who has the same theology as us, who affirms us in our own convictions and ideas. We want a God who has the kind of power that we need but don’t have - so we make God into everything we want God to be. And in the process, all we really end up making for ourselves is just one more golden calf, one more idol, one more thing that we think is God, but really ends up being just one more shallow explanation of a greater mystery.
Fortunately, we also have a God that doesn’t give up on us. We have a God who constantly reminds us who God is throughout the entirety of Scripture. God reveals God’s self to Abraham, to Moses, to David and Solomon, leading God’s people and giving them guidelines by which to live their lives in a holy covenant relationship. God places God’s Spirit upon the prophets, speaking through them to remind God’s people throughout the years of what God desires. And God even goes so far as to become flesh, to walk amongst God’s own creation, and to show us specifically what God looks like, who God is, and what our relationship with God and with God’s creation is supposed to be like.
Through Jesus Christ, we finally and definitively know who and what God truly is - God takes our own illusions of power, our own illusions of what we want God to be, and shows us God’s own reality. Where we want a God who agrees with us and validates our own needs for power, we get instead a God who challenges us, who pushes us to view the world differently, and who shows the greatest power in the entire world by giving himself up even to death. And then, even after dying and rising from the dead, even after having given us a human understanding of exactly who God is, God is not content to simply leave it at that.
Instead, God sends us the Holy Spirit, the living presence of the Risen Christ always among us, always guiding us, always nudging us and pushing us forward, continuing to reveal God to us as we encounter God in Scripture and in worship anew over and over again. And as that Spirit pushes us, it continually pushes us back toward Christ, back toward that perfect expression of God among us, that example that we are encouraged to follow.
There’s something paradoxical about the whole thing - and that’s what makes it so mysterious to us. Yet, despite the mystery, God gives us every ability to understand it through the Holy Spirit. And it is through that very guidance of the Spirit that we are not only able to follow out Christ’s commission to each and every one of us that we go out and share that mystery with others, that we teach them to live in that same relationship with God through Christ in the power of the Spirit, but that we are compelled to go out and lead others to that same understanding. We are compelled because, in the relationship we have with God, we are better able to understand and experience God’s own love for all creation. And so we go out - we share that love to the world - and God sees that it is good.
To God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit be all glory, now and forever. Amen.
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