St. Thomas Evangelical Lutheran Church
3800 East Third Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47401
(812) 332-5252
Sermon for Holy Trinity Sunday (May 18, 2008)
Liturgical Color: White
Reverend Doctor Lyle E. McKee
A Balancing Doctrine
Grace to you and peace from our loving God, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Most folks are aware that my alma mater, Yale, and Harvard are bitter rivals. That rivalry extended even to the divinity schools, and I have an example of how it was expressed. I'd like to use it as a way of introducing this morning's message.
Two Yale alumni were playing golf, and one of them was really hot on the greens. He was sinking putts from all over—six feet, twelve feet, thirty feet. He couldn't miss. His partner was incredulous. "I'll tell you my secret," he said. "I got the priest to bless my putter."
The other Yalie was skeptical, but he couldn't argue with the results. So he decided he'd try it. He made an appointment with the most saintly minister in town. "Sir," he said, "I know this sounds a bit irregular, but I would really appreciate it if you would say a prayer over my putter." "Putter?" said the old man, "What's a putter?" The golfer, embarrassed, excused himself.
He remembered seeing a scholar in a corner of the library poring over ancient biblical manuscripts, so he gave it a try: "Excuse me for interrupting your studies, sir, but I wonder if you would say a prayer over my putter." "Putter?" asked the scholar, peering over thick glasses, "What's a putter?"
He didn't stop to explain, because he remembered a young man recently graduated from Harvard Seminary who seemed a worldly-wise sort of fellow. "Hey, friend, do me a favor and say a prayer over my putter." A momentary puzzlement passed across his face. Then he took his pipe from his teeth and said, "Prayer? What's prayer?"
Such is the disdain held at Yale for Harvard's capacity for spiritual enlightenment.
And it is, sadly, the kind of response many people, even clergy, have when confronted with Trinity Sunday and the prospect of talking about the doctrine of the Trinity. Many a Christian has asked, "Trinity? What's a Trinity?"
In liturgical churches such as our own, we begin the liturgical year in Advent with a look at God the Father, who is the covenanting and creating God of heaven and earth. We then celebrate the coming of Jesus, the Son of God, the redeemer, who completes the work of salvation. And, with last Sunday, the Day of Pentecost, we commemorate the gift of the Holy Spirit, the comforter.
Today we follow the celebration of Pentecost with a Sunday that serves to remind us that our liturgical year has brought us to the place at which the Church began. The Church could not take shape without the fullness of God's revelation of the Godhead—what we now call the Trinity—God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
In this morning's gospel, Jesus commissions and commands his disciples with a trinitarian formula: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." But what is this trinity?
The first lesson speaks of a God who is one, not three. If it is a metaphysical puzzle that we have to solve, we're beaten before we begin. As the writer of Romans reminds us: "O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!" (11:33). We will never be saved by how much we know about God; salvation is not knowing about God but standing in a relationship with God. The church, religion, and faith are about relationships, not philosophy. And relationships are precisely that to which the doctrine of the trinity points.
The trinity isn't a puzzle; it's a very human way of attempting to make sense of our experiences of God. It's a formulation that can help us as we seek to know God, much as analogy helps us to understand abstract concepts.
Jesus uses applied analogy—metaphor—often. For example, in speaking of the kingdom of heaven, Jesus uses the metaphor of birth. When talking to Nicodemus Jesus says: "You must be born anew." As with us, Nicodemus' first impulse is to take Jesus literally. He asks how one is to enter a second time into the womb. Jesus is amazed at his being so thick-skulled. "Are you a teacher of Israel?" Jesus asks. Surely a teacher should be able to get an inkling of the depths that can be plumbed only through metaphor. Jesus is surprised that a teacher doesn't recognize the tools of his own trade. In teaching, Nicodemus has surely made points in similar ways.
I mention that passage because Jesus here makes use of the birth metaphor in order to communicate a spiritual truth through a material means. He communicates salvation through creation imagery. And that demonstrates how intimately salvation and creation are linked.
The trinity does the same. God the Father has to do with creation as we commonly understand the trinity. God the Son, Jesus, is the bringer of salvation. In the trinity, too, creation and salvation come together. What we know as the roles of the three persons of the trinity are really not so easily separated as we would have them in the Apostles' Creed. Still, the formulation is useful, as long as it's understood as metaphor.
Some people are surprised to learn that the word "trinity" never appears in scripture. And yet, it is clear that in the early Church, people knew that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit belonged together. The baptismal formula presented in the final verses of Matthew are selected as the gospel for this service on Holy Trinity Sunday because they witness to that fact.
As did Jesus, scholars and ordinary folk continue to resort to analogy as they attempt to make sense of the doctrine of the trinity. My favorite uses water. We experience H2O in three basic ways: as solid, liquid, and gas (ice, water, and steam). So also, we experience God in three basic ways—the ways described in many places in scripture—as creator and parent, as redeemer and friend, as comforter and indwelling presence. We know God in the beauty of creation. We know God in the life lived by Jesus Christ. We also know God as a presence that is extremely difficult to describe, but which is known powerfully at times (in prayer, in pain, in joy).
When we have an experience of God's presence, we often want to put it into words. We naturally desire to communicate it—to share it. The doctrine of the trinity is one way of doing that.
So what difference does all this doctrine make? How does it help our faith? What does it tell us about appropriate ways to live our lives?
The answer to those questions is that, mostly, the doctrine of the trinity reminds us that God isn't easy to understand (though God is easy to know), that God transcends human categories—that God is by nature communal rather than individual, relational rather than isolated. And it reminds us that when we think that we have God figured out, we're dead wrong, and we're in for a surprise. You just can't say everything there is to say about God in one breath. And we get into trouble if we pick out just one part of what God is and ignore the rest.
Consider for a moment what happens when we make that mistake. If we believe in God the Father, the creator, and ignore the Son and the Spirit, then we would likely have great respect for creation. We might support conservation and oppose projects that threaten the environment. We might declare a moratorium on our carbon emissions for a day and bike or walk to worship. We might have a clear sense of our solidarity with all the peoples of the earth. Justice, stewardship, and order would be very important to us. But we would run the danger of making a god of the world. We would try unsuccessfully to redeem the earth by sheer effort. We might have difficulty forgiving ourselves and others for shortcomings. We could become moralistic and burdened with the guilt of not being able to do everything that we ought to do and of not being able to live as we ought. We would lose hope.
If the church believed in Christ, the Son of God, to the exclusion of Father and Spirit, we would know a redemptive personal relationship with Jesus. We would be enriched by the discipleship that is called for through the life of love that Jesus lived. But such faith is likely to be individualistic, even bigoted. Jesus might come to be seen as a kind of cult leader with an exclusive band of followers. We all know of such churches even today, and the dangerous tendencies of cults stem from that type of individualistic and exclusivist thought. Concern for people other than those who have an intimate relationship with Christ could be lacking, especially absent the sense of the God who is creator and parent of all—not a select few. Worship could be dry and doctrinaire.
And if we believed in the Holy Spirit above all, we would be open in some very wonderful ways to the joy and the power of the faith. We hear of folks who are looking for a "spirit-filled" church. They want the good feelings that come from knowing the joy of the presence of God. But without the corrective of the Father and the Son, faith can become highly subjective. Whatever feels right must be right. The Christian faith gets detached from the real world, having lost a sense of the holiness of creation and the importance of relationships. A group of such persons can become rigid and exclusive and fearful of others who don't share their feelings, since salvation becomes a matter of sharing a specific kind of experience of God.
Believing in the trinity calls us into a close community of relationships, since the God in whom we have faith is communal by nature. Our particular community of faith is blessed with new members this morning. In this congregation and in the whole Church, we're invited to honor one another. We are invited to recognize and embrace diverse peoples and to respect those of other faiths. We are called to enjoy, learn, and grow from our experiences of one another.
The doctrine of the trinity is far from being a mere metaphysical puzzle. It is a pattern for living a whole faith. Even though we can't begin to understand the full nature of God, we can learn from the ways the Church teaches what God has revealed to us. As even those in the early Church knew, the interplay among the ways of experiencing God, which we call Father, Son, and Holy Spirit balances our tendencies to over-emphasize one or the other.
The trinity presents for us a mystery that can continue to yield insight if we look deeply. Still, it is not a puzzle to keep us confused or an obstacle to obscure faith. It represents a fruitful way of coming to know the God who is revealed and known in unlimited and surprising ways. Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep our hearts and minds through faith in Christ Jesus our Lord unto eternal life. Amen.
