Trinity Sunday 2017

John 3:16-18

Today the Christian world celebrates a doctrine, not a particular saint or event in Christ's life. The doctrine of the Trinity sets Christianity apart from all other religions. But it's very hard to talk about, because our minds are limited. I cannot help but think of the three persons as – yes – three persons. In my case an old man with a white beard, a middle eastern Jew with blond hair and blue eyes, kind of like Robert Redford with a beard, and a bird. I know that those images have nothing to do with the reality, but they come. And then the obvious question is how are these three one? The Trinity is a maddening doctrine, because I literally can't understand it, and neither can you, and neither could Thoams Aquinas or Pope Francis. So why have it? What good is it that we know by faith that there are three persons in one God, that each peson is not the other, and yet each person is God, and that God is one? Historically the Church defined the doctrne of the Trinity because of heresies that popped up about the relationship of Jesus to God. The doctrine is the answer to many false ideas that circulated in the early church, that the Fathers of the Church recognized were wrong. So it must be important. But understanding how the Trinity can be is not the point. The point of the doctrine is to remind us of many things.

First, God is not a thing, or as one theologian said, God is nothing. God is not a being like you and I are beings. We cannot say here God is and there God is not. And because of this the arguments of atheists fall flat. You cannot debate whether God exists or doesn't exist; that debate implies that God is a being. God told Moses, “I am who am” – I am existence itself, I am that which everything that exists owes it's existence to – or as Saint Paul said, “in him we live and move and have our being”.

The second thing about the Trinity is that it tells us that God is fundamentally about relationship. The God of Islam is aloof, and while there are many words in the Koran that describe him, one that is not used is love. Were the God of Islam capable of love, according to their theolgians, then in some way he would share something with humanity, and not be totally other. For Muslims, the goal of life is to completely submit to Allah's will, and a certain mindlessness is needed. That's why its easy to be a suicide bomber; after all, everything that happens is his will, even you blowing yourself up. But Chrstianity, and indeed Judaism, insist that God is open, God is love, and love reaches out, love seeks to grow, to spread itself, to create new lovers, and lovers have to be capable of free will, and to make such beings is to risk being rejected. But the whole story in our scriptures is that when we go astray, God always moves to bring us back – of our own free will, not by compelling us. Because we are made to love, we are already entering into this relationship.

A third thing about the Trinity is that it tells us something about how we are to live. God is creator, and if we look with loving eyes at the world around us, at the people we know, we can see traces of God in everything, because he leaves his signature in everything. Only recently in human history have we come to understand that the fundamental nature of a proton or a neutron is three quarks bound together for all time. But we see God's signature in beauty – and beauty is touches us because we see something of ourselves there – that's oneness; beauty appeals because it is real – that's truth;; and beauty is almost by definition, a good thing; that's goodness. Beauty is the essence of God, and we are given minds and senses to appreciate this.

God is also Redeemer. We think about Jesus dying on the cross for our sins, and rising from the dead so that we can also rise. That's ok, we can think that. But redemption is much larger than that. Redemption is a pattern, God the Redeemer shows us how to live, shows us how we are to act in this world. Jesus said many things but not much that was particularly new. The thing that sets Jesus apart from other founders of religions is how he lived. And so it makes sense for us to know Jesus through the scriptures that were written by those who knew him when he walked the earth.

And finally, God is Sanctifier. That's a fancy latinized word, and like many things we talk about, we probably don't stop to realize that we don't quite understand what it means. But at the bottom, it means that God is faithful. Not only does God love the world, and us, into being, not only does he give us a pattern to follow, but he gets into his own creation to direct it toward it's ultimate purpose – to become one with him. Saint Paul tells us that the Holy Spirit prays in us for what we don't even know we need.

If I truly love someone, I want the best for them. I want them to have joy on this earth. I want them to live forever in heaven. If I truly love someone, I will do everytthing in my power to make that happen. And yet my love is weak and partial, and my power to bring about what I want for the ones I love is very limited.

Not so God. The protestant theologian John Calvin held that because God is all powerful and all knowing, he selects souls to be saved from the beginning of time, and the rest of humankind will be damned. His logic is that all deserve damnation because of sin, and God excepts some from this fate for reasons known only to him. But the Trinity, the logical consequence of the God who is love itself, says just the opposite. God does everything he can do to enfold us all in his heart and enjoy his presence forever; and only we can choose not to allow this to happen. God loves us so much that he will never take away our freedom.

So don't think about how the Trinity can be, one plus one plus one can be one. You can't figure that out. Think instead about what the Trinity tells us about the nature of God and how God acts in our own lives, and how we are to live. And then it becomes clear that how this teaching is the heart of Christianity.