Trinity

Trinity Sunday 2011 (Matthew 28:16-20)
Remember, I am with you always.

The Trinity reveals the pattern, plan and purpose for human life.

The reality that the one God is three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit can only come through divine revelation. The key to that revelation is Jesus Christ.

Certainly, Moses and the Prophets experienced the reality of God the Holy Spirit as that personal Presence of God the Father who called them into ministry and empowered them for ministry. They also looked forward to the coming of the Messiah.

The word “Trinity” is not used in the Bible. It is a word the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church chose to describe the reality of God as set forth in the Bible and as experienced in the lives of the apostles.

The teaching that the one God is three persons is grounded in the Incarnation. In Luke we read how our Heavenly Father sent the Holy Spirit to effect the incarnation of the co-eternal Logos, the Beloved Son of the Father. In John we read how the Word was always with God and always is God. That Word became incarnate in Jesus Christ.
At Jesus’ baptism in the river Jordan, God the Father speaks audibly and declares: this is my Son, The Beloved. God the Holy Spirit appears visibly in a form the witnesses could only describe as similar to a dove. The Holy Spirit anointed Jesus to be the Christ, the anointed one.

In the Transfiguration the Holy Spirit appears visibly to the senses of the apostles as a luminescent cloud. Once again, God the Father speaks audibly and declares Jesus to be His Son, The Beloved.

At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit appears visibly as fire and audibly as the sound of a mighty rushing wind.

Jesus himself refers to God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. In the gospel reading this morning, Jesus gives us the baptismal formula as the simple, direct and explicit statement of the reality of the Trinity.

Most people who are not Christians tend to describe the Christian belief in the Trinity as tri-theism. They cannot understand how the one God can be three persons so they tell us we really believe in three gods. No less a person than Sir Isaac Newtown was so troubled by his inability to comprehend the Trinity intellectually, that he rejected the teaching in his effort to make God fit into the mathematical precision of the world of matter, energy, time and space.

God is not limited by that world. God is infinite and eternal. God is greater than the universe. Those of us who live in the universe are limited in our understanding. All of us participate in our first parents’ choice to separate from God. As a consequence of that original choice, we are lost in separation and do not wish to be found.

The record of scripture through Moses and the Prophets is that people do not seek God. People flee from God. Religious people flee from God by creating God in their own image according to their own desires. Secular people flee from God by rejecting the very concept of God.

The first ecumenical councils met to formulate the Nicene Creed in response to a serious challenge to the teaching of the Incarnation and the Trinity. A priest by the name of Arius decided the doctrine of the Trinity was incomprehensible and confusing. He came to believe this doctrine was the cause for anti-Christian persecution.

Arius asserted that there was only one eternally self existent God. That God created the Son in a moment of time, thus removing the complexity of the co-eternal Son. Having rejected the Son as co-eternal with the Father, Arius redefined the Holy Spirit as an impersonal force emanating from God.

Arius accomplished what Sir Isaac Newtown would later assert: he fit God into the limited categories of human understand. He redefined God in human terms. God will not be defined by any one. God is God. God is the great “I am”. The Bible is very clear that the One God is three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The Ecumenical Councils struggled to find the words to express this Divine Mystery revealed in the Bible and made real for us in Jesus Christ. They found the words in the subtly of Greek Philosophical thought. After much prayer, Bible study and debate, the First Ecumenical Council in the year 325 AD wrote the Nicene Creed. The second Ecumenical Council met in the year 381 AD to respond to further challenges to the creed and gave us the creed in its present form.

Modern critics of the Council assert that the Church invented the Trinity to appease the pagan Roman mind. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even Arius recognized that it was the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation that confused the Romans and led them to persecute the Christians under the treason laws.

Other critics say that the Nicene Creed became the official teaching of the church by the narrowest majority of one vote. This is also not true. The overwhelming majority of the bishops who attended the Council understood what was at stake. The debates were not so much about whether the incarnation and the Trinity were Biblical. The debate was over how to express these divinely revealed truths in the most precise language possible.

By the end of the First Ecumenical Council only two of three hundred bishops refused to sign the decision.

Why is the teaching of the Trinity important?

During the debates in the Council a phrase emerged that helped clarify the issue. The phrase is: What he (Jesus) did not assume he could not redeem.

The apostolic witness in the New Testament is very clear. Only God can save. No prophet, priest, king or angel has the power to transform sin into love and death into life. Salvation is Jesus Christ because only in Jesus does the Eternal and Infinite Love of God unite divinity with humanity. Only in that union can Jesus transform sin and death into love and life.

The apostolic witness is very clear that salvation touches the very essence of our being. It is, to use the language of philosophy, ontological not just legal.
The Council relied most on the apostle John’s writing in his gospel. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

It is only the co-eternal Beloved of the Father, incarnate in Jesus Christ, who can reunite a lost broken and rebellious humanity with God. It is Jesus Himself who describes the Holy Spirit as coming from God, having a unique and defined personality, and as being co-eternal with the Father and the Son.

In the end, the Ecumenical Councils recognized there was no other way of describing what the apostles experienced in their lives and wrote in the New Testament than what is set forth in the Nicene Creed.

The Trinity is not a reality the human mind can analyze and prove. The Trinity is the reality of God Jesus invites us to experience.

The Bible never seeks to prove God’s existence. Moses and the Prophets never attempted to prove God’s existence. Jesus is himself the proof of God’s existence yet virtually everyone he knew rejected him, abandoned him and betrayed him. God is “I am”. He is the infinite and eternal self existence that created the universe and became a particular human being within the confines of the universe to rescue human beings from self imposed separation.

We cannot logically prove the Trinity any more than we can logically prove the existence of God. Jesus invites us to experience the reality of the Trinity by faith through grace.

Jesus is himself the key.

Jesus reveals that the one God is not static transcendent inapproachable perfection. Jesus reveals that the One God is an active dynamic outpouring personal love. Within the reality of the eternal, God actively expresses his essential nature in the dynamic out pouring of love. God the Father is the Eternal Lover, the one who loves. God the son is the co-eternal Beloved of the Eternal Father. God the Holy Spirit is the Presence and Power of that love. One way of experiencing the Trinity is to participate in the new life of The Divine Lover, The Beloved and The Love.

Salvation is a new life in the active dynamic and infinitely creative eternal outpouring of divinity in the three persons of the One God.

We baptize into the Trinity to reunite with life.

We experience sanctification of our minds, hearts and wills in communion with the Trinity to be transformed in holiness.

We enter into eternal unconditional self giving love most fully and completely at the altar of sacrificial worship in the Divine Presence of the Trinity.

Jesus assures us and encourages us to remember that he is always with us. Through Jesus Christ we who live in a universe of matter, energy, time and space are also actively participating in the Divine Life and Love of the One God in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.