Well, I’ve been back a week but life has been so frantic that posting anything has been impossible. But for starters here is my sermon for Trinity Sunday tomorrow.
Introduction
‘The doctrine of the Trinity isn’t in the New Testament. It’s a pagan idea.’
So said two Jehovah’s Witnesses who stood on my doorstep.
‘Pagans also wear trousers,’ I replied, ‘Do you want me to
take mine off?’
They declined my suggestion.
The Trinity is such a difficult doctrine. I think it’s fair
to say that Trinity Sunday is one of the two most dreaded Sundays in the year
for preachers (the other being Remembrance Sunday). And I suspect congregations
dread it, too. Yet at the same time, church members will say to ministers, ‘I
don’t understand the Trinity.’
Maybe we should expect the Trinity to be difficult to
comprehend. When Albert Einstein came up with his theories of relativity a
hundred years ago, someone commented that if the previously accepted theories
of Isaac Newton had been true, then God hadn’t stretched himself much in
deciding how the universe would work. We shouldn’t be surprised if it were much
more complicated. Moreover, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised if understanding
God is complex – even if the Gospel is simple.
So today, I’m going to use for my outline the themes of a
book entitled ‘Experiencing
The Trinity’ by Darrell
W Johnson. I used it to preach a series of five sermons on the
Trinity. I’m not going to give you five sermons today! However, I am going to
offer four of the five basic points Johnson makes in his book – the contents of
which were originally a sermon series on the Trinity. (The fifth is an extended
exposition of Ephesians 3:14-21.) And if you wish to read more on the subject, I
know of no better introductory book.
1. Finding The
Trinity
‘The Trinity isn’t in the New Testament,’ claimed the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Well,
the full doctrine isn’t – but the data that the Church Fathers used to
formulate the doctrine is. The New Testament is full of passages that reflect a
belief in the Jewish notion of one God, but that the Father, Son and Holy
Spirit are all divine. Our Bible readings from Romans 5:1-5 and John 16:12-15 are just two of
many. Indeed, you could go as far as to say that in the New Testament God has a
new name, and that name is ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’. For that is what
Jesus says in the Great Commission in Matthew 28: he says disciples are to be
baptised ‘in the name [singular!] of
the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.’ This is God’s name: Father, Son and Holy
Spirit.
Yet where did all this data come from? The answer, surely,
is that the New Testament documents faithfully and authoritatively recount the
early Church’s experience of God. The Trinity is a case of those first
Christians saying, this is our experience of God – it’s more than we’d been led
to believe – but how do we make sense of it? The Trinity is the only way to
make sense of the data.
Now if that is true, then the doctrine of the Trinity has a practical
use. It isn’t in the first case something that needs a ‘brain the size of a planet’,
like Marvin
the Paranoid Android in ‘The Hitch-Hiker’s
Guide To The Galaxy’. In the first instance, it is something against which
we check up our own Christian experience.
Some of us emphasise one member or another of the Trinity. Thomas
Jefferson said we should just get back to ‘the simple Jesus’ (cf. Johnson,
p13f), and others might stress the Holy Spirit, and still others say that our
most important duty is to revere the Father. However, if we are Trinity people,
then this is an encouragement and a challenge to see how broad and rich our
experience of God is. Do we honour the Father and know his tender, fatherly
love? Are we disciples of Jesus, living by the benefits and example of his
Cross? Do we live in the power of the Holy Spirit, serving God with his gifts
and letting him make us more Christ-like? Have we found the Trinity in our
Christian experience, or is there something missing to be filled in?
2. Understanding The
Trinity
Perhaps ‘understanding’ is too strong a word. ‘Too right,’ you may think, ‘the
Trinity is a mystery to me.’
But in a sense, that’s what we’re about: mystery. The Church
Fathers never thought they had God completely wrapped up when they formulated
the doctrine of the Trinity: they were preserving the mystery of a God whom we
mere creatures can never fully comprehend, and they were setting the boundaries for what is truly Trinitarian, and what isn’t.
I remember fire-fighters coming to my primary school to
teach us about the dangers of fire. They had three blocks of wood that made a
triangle: on one it said ‘air’, on the second it said ‘heat’ and on the third
it said ‘fuel’. In the middle, it said ‘fire’. If you took one of three sides
away, the triangle collapsed and there was no longer a fire.
Similarly, the Church Fathers held three truths together as
the basic boundaries of the Trinity: ‘one God’, ‘three Persons’ (although ‘persons’
isn’t the most helpful word in today’s language, but we’ve yet to think of a
better one) and ‘equality’. If someone left out one of these three blocks, you
didn’t have the Trinity. Some heretics got around the problem of the three
persons by saying that the one God revealed himself as Father in Old Testament
times, as Jesus in New Testament times, and later as the Spirit. However, the
Trinity is not God appearing in three successive different ‘modes’. Nor were
Jesus and the Spirit lacking in equality to the Father, ‘subordinate’ to him, as
someone called Arius claimed (and Arius is a hero to Jehovah’s Witnesses). But
nor do we believe in ‘tri-theism’ – three gods. There is a oneness, a unity at
the heart of God.
Put the boundaries another way: the Father is not the Son
and the Son is not the Father; the Father is not the Spirit and the Spirit is
not the Father; Jesus is not the Spirit and the Spirit is not Jesus; but the Father, Son and Spirit are all
God. Father, Son and Spirit are not distinctions of God’s being, but distinctions in God’s being. They do not ‘co-exist’ alongside each other, but ‘subsist’
in an eternal inter-relationship. There is something unique to each of the
three Persons. The Father is the source of all the distinctions. The Son is ‘eternally
begotten’ of (but not ‘created’ by) the Father, and the Spirit proceeds from
the Father through the Son. These are the mysteries we affirm in the Creed.
But what does all this brain-bending stuff mean for us
practically? Darrell Johnson makes three helpful suggestions: firstly, it means
relationships are at the heart of ‘life,
the universe and everything.’ When they are right, other things are right; when
they go sour, all of life is sour. Therefore, they need to be priorities.
Secondly, there is the balance I referred
to in the first point: we need all three members of the Trinity, otherwise our
spiritual triangle collapses, like the one used by the fire-fighters. Thirdly,
there is the matter of fullness: if
we are baptised into the Trinity, then God wants to immerse us in the life of
the Trinity. A sprinkling will not do! We long for all the life of God!
3. Joining The
Trinity
What’s the most basic statement about God in the whole of the Bible? Surely it
is, ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:8). How can love be God’s very nature, even before
creation, unless God can love ‘internally’? God may be one, but God cannot be
solo.
And the miracle of the Gospel is that God’s love reaches out
to us so that he may experience the love that is at the heart of his being. We become
what one thirteenth century Christian called ‘co-lovers with the Trinity’ (John
Duns Scotus, cited in Johnson, p62). What does this mean in practice?
We do not love God on our own: we love God with God! We witness
the amazing love that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit have for each
other. Our love for the Trinity is feeble, but God enables us to love God
better. That is one reason why our reading from Romans 5 spoke of the Holy Spirit
pouring God’s love into our hearts.
Further, if we see ourselves this way, then the only way we
can view others is to see them as held by the love of God, too. Therefore, with
God, we become lovers of others. It is hard to love other people sometimes –
you can add your own illustrations, I am sure! But the inner love of the Trinity
is made available to us – once more because that love is poured into our
hearts, we can with God love others in a way that we could not on our own.
Finally, we remember that ‘God so loved the world.’ The love
of the Trinity is for the world. If we are held within that same love, then, as
one person put it, ‘the closer you get to the heart of God, the closer you get
to what is on God’s heart’ (Robert Boyd Munger, quoted in Johnson, p68). And
the world is on God’s heart. An experience of Trinitarian love will give us a
heart for a lost and broken world, too.
4. Entering The
Trinity
God the Holy Trinity joins us in love to his inner life of love. We are
connected to the love that is at the heart of the universe, for ‘in him we live
and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28). What will we encounter as we enter
the inner life of God? Darrell Johnson suggests these qualities:
Intimacy – no longer
need we think of remaining distant from a remote God: the Spirit enables us to
cry out, ‘Abba, Father.’ There is tender love in the Trinity, and God shares it
with us.
Joy – The members
of the Trinity take great mutual delight in each other, and Jesus prayed in his
High Priestly Prayer, ‘may they have my joy made full in themselves’ (John
17:13). Yet the ruin of sin brings sorrow to the Trinity, and so salvation is
the restoration of godly joy to the world.
Servanthood –
Despite his equality with the Father, Jesus served him. And the Spirit’s work
is to glorify the Son. If we reflect the life of Trinitarian love, we shall
want to serve others, not ourselves, and glorify God, not ourselves.
Purity – Whatever the
twisted form of our world, purity is at the heart of the universe. That is why
salvation must lead to holiness. But such is God’s purity that when we, like
Simon Peter, encounter it and say, ‘Depart from me, I am a sinful man’, the
Trinity embraces us, heals and restores us.
Power – The God
who upholds the universe must be of immeasurable power. It is power not used
selfishly, but given away. So we have just marked Pentecost, and the gift of
the Holy Spirit and power. God’s power enables us to change; God’s power
enables us to glimpse the wonders of his love. God’s power is a model for our
use of power, too.
Creativity – From creation
itself, to the Virgin Birth, to using the wickedness of Christ’s crucifixion
for the salvation of the world, to the Resurrection and beyond, the Trinity has
always been creative and always will be. Spiritual gifts – often wrongly called
‘gifts of the Spirit’ when they are gifts of the Father, Son and Spirit – are given
so that we may use God’s creative and recreating power for the common good.
They are an expression of Trinitarian life.
Peace – Whatever evil
there is in the world, the Trinity is never threatened, and never panics. That peace
is a gift of salvation in restoring things to how God intended them to be.
Conclusion
My Jehovah’s Witnesses got it wrong. Not simply because they were not half as
biblical as they claimed to be, and not simply because they have to use a
deeply distorted translation of the Bible to buttress their teaching. The tragedy
is that in settling for a more easily explained understanding of God, they
reduce not only the complexity of God but also the beauty, mystery and truth of
God.
We shall never completely come to terms with the Trinity,
not even in the life to come. However, by keeping a hold all the time on the
Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, one God in three equal Persons, we shall
enter more deeply into the life of the God who sustains the universe, and whose
most profound characteristic is love.
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