Trinity Sunday

Trinity Sunday 2010
The Spirit of truth will guide you into all the truth.

Today we celebrate the truth that the one God is three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
This is not a truth we can analyze, categorize and reduce to a simple formula. Many people have attempted to over define, over complicate or over simply the truth of the Trinity. The Trinity is a reality that we can experience. We experience the reality and the truth of the Trinity in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Many people in our modern world have the mistaken idea that the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century created the idea of the Trinity and then used the Council of Nicea to write the Nicene Creed and impose the Trinity on the Church. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The four biographies of Jesus that were written by eyewitnesses of his life all struggle to explain the unexplainable but inescapable truth that Jesus is both man and God. It is the truth that the One God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Moses and the prophets, had in fact united His divinity with our humanity in a single individual, Jesus Christ.

The revelation of the incarnation is the revelation of the Trinity. At the incarnation God the Father sends the Holy Spirit to the blessed Virgin Mary to accomplish the incarnation of God the Son. At the incarnation God confirms and clarifies the revelation he had given to Moses and the prophets. That revelation states that God is One. It clarifies that the One God is transcendent, immanent, and personally present. Why is this important?

When Jesus came into the world there were two basic misconceptions about God that produced two fundamental misconceptions about the human condition.

The first misconception about God is that God is so completely transcendent and holy that God is unknown and unknowable. This God can only relate to human beings through a series of intermediary spiritual beings, lesser deities or angels. These lesser beings bring to humanity the Law.

This misconception about God leads to the misconception about the human condition. The God of pure transcendence is the God of Law. The God of Law is the God who maintains the moral order in the universe through a system of rewards and punishments. The lesser gods, angels, prophets, priests and teachers who represent this God teach that if you obey God’s laws then God is obligated by God’s own Law to bless you. God is also obligated under the Law to punish you if you break the Law.

The assumption is that human beings are born morally neutral with the free will to choose obedience or disobedience, blessing or punishment, heaven or hell. Incidentally, this is not what the Bible teaches about God, the Law, or the human condition. It is a distortion of the truth that leads to a dualistic world view cast in terms of absolute good at war with absolute evil.

The second major misconception about God is that God is all and all is God. This is the distortion of immanence. This distortion produces religious forms characterized by mysticism. It teaches that not only is God everywhere but that God is everything, including you.

This form of religion teaches that the problem confronting human beings is not disobedience but rather ignorance. The solution to the problem is knowledge acquired through a process called enlightenment. The goal of this knowledge is to recognize that you are merely God playing hide and seek with God. You are already perfect. Good and evil are an illusion that we choose to create to hide from our true divine nature.

The God of Law is the God of rewards and punishments who demands submission and authorizes aggression against the unrighteous. The God of Enlightenment is the God of passive withdrawal, fantasy, and self indulgence.

The One God seeks to rescue humanity from these distortions by uniting the principles of transcendence and immanence with incarnation.

In Jesus Christ God reveals that He is real, He is personal, He is love. In Jesus Christ God reveals that the problem confronting humanity is not disobedience or ignorance, it is separation. Since separation is the problem the only solution is reunification. God himself accomplishes this reunification by uniting his divinity with our humanity in Jesus Christ. This reunification is what the Bible calls salvation.

As the apostles and their students pondered this truth they received two important insights from the Holy Spirit to help us understand how the reality of the incarnation and the Trinity impact our lives.

These insights are: What he did not assume he could not redeem. And, he became as we are so that we might become as he is. In Jesus Christ God recreates humanity and offers us all a new life and a new way of living. It is the fullness of God incarnate in Jesus Christ who reunites us to God.

Jesus is not a religious category. He does not just show us how to be good so we can earn God’s favor. Neither does he inspire us to acquire the knowledge we need to manifest our inner divinity. Jesus is God seeking us out, finding us, and calling us into a personal relationship with himself.

Jesus reveals to us that God eternally manifests His One Divine Nature in three persons: Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

God the Father is God transcendent. He is the one who eternally loves.
God the Son is God incarnate. He is the co-eternal Beloved.
God the Holy Spirit is God immanent, God everywhere, the co-eternal Love that manifests the One God as three persons and the three persons as One God.

The Trinity assures us that God is Love because the One God is a community of Love. The Trinity assures us that Love is available to all people everywhere. To be saved is to be reunited to God the Father, through God the Son, by the transforming Presence of God the Holy Spirit.
We cannot define or dissect God. We can only experience Him in His incarnate form: Jesus Christ.