Sunday of the Holy Trinity
May 30, 2010
Ruskin Heights Lutheran Church
The great cry of Israel is also the great declaration of Christians:
Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.
Yet, almost in the same breath, we conclude our worship in the name of the Holy Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
All of this is very confusing to our sister religions—Jew and Moslem—both of whom worship the one God of Abraham.
It does little good to tell them—as we do in the various Jewish-Christian and Moslem-Christian dialogues—to relax. Average Christians don’t understand it very well, either.
Nobody much understands how it is we end up with one God who is in trinity, and a trinity who is one God.
It isn’t as if we haven’t tried to explain it.
Martin Luther, our Lutheran namesake, noted: “Many of course have written expositions on [the Holy Trinity] and great summaries about it, but they are mostly mud.”
And St. Augustine wrote three volumes just on the Holy Trinity.
But in the end, he said, it is still a mystery to embrace in faith.
The doctrine of the Trinity arose, however, not out of some sort of theoretical thinking, abstract and removed from real life.
It didn't begin as a proposition.
Like all Christian doctrine, it arose not from theory, but from experience—the experience of faith grounded in an encounter with God through Christ.
So it is, the Holy Trinity is never explained.
It is always experienced.
And out of that experience, our assertion that God is in Trinity is a final burst of doxology in thanks to the God of Abraham who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Experience I said. Yes. But we must explain the experience.
First experience:
The evidence of creation that, according to some schools of physics, seems to exist only that you may exist.
Change the values of a couple prime elements, and the universe wouldn’t be here.
Some physicists say this universe we are in is only the haphazard result of random chance. It was not an "unnatural" process that produced you, but natural one, and altogether by chance. Nothing special about it. We can all be glad for it, sure, but don't get your hopes up about being anything unusually special. You are just something that just happened, without exterior agency.
Creation, the universe, it may look like design, but self-organizing systems always look as if they were designed and, of course, since there is no Designer at all, it cannot be design.
Simple, see?
Yet there persists within the human spirit this notion, that some how we are here by purpose, by design, for a purpose, for a reason.
We ascribe that to a Creator.
We seek that which is always greater than ourselves, an implanted longing to seek God.
So I’ll go with a designed creation—and in this way the Creator of the universe arranges things so that his love and devotion comes to all by the very gift of life.
It works like this: the rain, Jesus noted, falls upon the good and the bad in equal measure, falls even on those who know God as well as upon those who do not. God cares for creation like we care for babies—we love them even before they know what love is, even before they are born.
That’s the first experience.
Here’s the second experience—Jesus on the cross.
God does not sit back like a watchmaker watching his watch.
His love is such that to counter the web of human failure he participates directly in creation by calling everyone to his love, the same love that made us in the first place. He enters creation—the cabinet maker become the cabinet, if you like—and subjects himself to all the limitations of humanity, birth and death included.
The Creator keeps a light in the window.
And the name of the light is Jesus Christ.
The third experience is our experience of the Holy Spirit.
A pastor from the last half of the first century said simply that the Holy Spirit is the soul of God.
He was amplifying St. Paul—the Spirit of God joins our spirit.
We are linked in divinity to the creator who made us in his image, the image of his mind that thinks and reasons, and knows passion and compassion.
"When we cry Abba Father!"—declared St. Paul—it is that very Spirit of God declaring that we are children of God.
That is the spark that makes us want to get up and go look for God in my life.
Only, thanks to Christ, I don’t have to go look—he has already come to me.
Our experience of God—as creator, redeemer, sanctifier — that let’s us conclude:
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Ruskin Heights Lutheran Church
The great cry of Israel is also the great declaration of Christians:
Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.
Yet, almost in the same breath, we conclude our worship in the name of the Holy Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
All of this is very confusing to our sister religions—Jew and Moslem—both of whom worship the one God of Abraham.
It does little good to tell them—as we do in the various Jewish-Christian and Moslem-Christian dialogues—to relax. Average Christians don’t understand it very well, either.
Nobody much understands how it is we end up with one God who is in trinity, and a trinity who is one God.
It isn’t as if we haven’t tried to explain it.
Martin Luther, our Lutheran namesake, noted: “Many of course have written expositions on [the Holy Trinity] and great summaries about it, but they are mostly mud.”
And St. Augustine wrote three volumes just on the Holy Trinity.
But in the end, he said, it is still a mystery to embrace in faith.
The doctrine of the Trinity arose, however, not out of some sort of theoretical thinking, abstract and removed from real life.
It didn't begin as a proposition.
Like all Christian doctrine, it arose not from theory, but from experience—the experience of faith grounded in an encounter with God through Christ.
So it is, the Holy Trinity is never explained.
It is always experienced.
And out of that experience, our assertion that God is in Trinity is a final burst of doxology in thanks to the God of Abraham who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Experience I said. Yes. But we must explain the experience.
First experience:
The evidence of creation that, according to some schools of physics, seems to exist only that you may exist.
Change the values of a couple prime elements, and the universe wouldn’t be here.
Some physicists say this universe we are in is only the haphazard result of random chance. It was not an "unnatural" process that produced you, but natural one, and altogether by chance. Nothing special about it. We can all be glad for it, sure, but don't get your hopes up about being anything unusually special. You are just something that just happened, without exterior agency.
Creation, the universe, it may look like design, but self-organizing systems always look as if they were designed and, of course, since there is no Designer at all, it cannot be design.
Simple, see?
Yet there persists within the human spirit this notion, that some how we are here by purpose, by design, for a purpose, for a reason.
We ascribe that to a Creator.
We seek that which is always greater than ourselves, an implanted longing to seek God.
So I’ll go with a designed creation—and in this way the Creator of the universe arranges things so that his love and devotion comes to all by the very gift of life.
It works like this: the rain, Jesus noted, falls upon the good and the bad in equal measure, falls even on those who know God as well as upon those who do not. God cares for creation like we care for babies—we love them even before they know what love is, even before they are born.
That’s the first experience.
Here’s the second experience—Jesus on the cross.
God does not sit back like a watchmaker watching his watch.
His love is such that to counter the web of human failure he participates directly in creation by calling everyone to his love, the same love that made us in the first place. He enters creation—the cabinet maker become the cabinet, if you like—and subjects himself to all the limitations of humanity, birth and death included.
The Creator keeps a light in the window.
And the name of the light is Jesus Christ.
The third experience is our experience of the Holy Spirit.
A pastor from the last half of the first century said simply that the Holy Spirit is the soul of God.
He was amplifying St. Paul—the Spirit of God joins our spirit.
We are linked in divinity to the creator who made us in his image, the image of his mind that thinks and reasons, and knows passion and compassion.
"When we cry Abba Father!"—declared St. Paul—it is that very Spirit of God declaring that we are children of God.
That is the spark that makes us want to get up and go look for God in my life.
Only, thanks to Christ, I don’t have to go look—he has already come to me.
Our experience of God—as creator, redeemer, sanctifier — that let’s us conclude:
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
posted by Pastor Russ | 10:28 AM
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