Trinity Sunday C, May 30 2010

St. James Zanesville

Kathryn P. Clausen

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

Psalm 8

Romans 5:1-5

John 16:12-15

                                    Holy and Undivided Trinity 

I don’t know if I will ever be able to fully articulate a coherent concept of the Trinity.  Every year I try, it comes out a little different.  I think it is helpful to some who find the idea of God incarnate in Jesus to be too limiting to a specific time in history or a masculine or Semitic form.  Surely God is greater than that.  Thinking of God the Holy Spirit releases us from those historical and physical constraints, but not from Jesus Christ.  The Spirit represents Christ just as Christ represents God.  And, as I have matured, my own theology of God has also matured.  It does not stop with Jesus any more.  I am more comfortable with the concept of the Holy Spirit as also being God, without denying his Incarnation in Jesus Christ.  We don’t have to set limits and restrictions on God, any more than we can own him exclusively or trap him in a box like the Ark of the Covenant or the tabernacle with the consecrated elements.   

Last Sunday, we celebrated the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the third person of the Holy Trinity.  God sent his son.  Then the son made his final departure to heaven, and then the Holy Spirit was sent to protect and inspire us for the rest of time.  Sometimes I think that can lead to the impression that the persons of the Trinity are separate and individual, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  First one, then another, and then yet another.  But that is not our concept of God, either in unity or Trinity.  Separating the Holy Spirit from God or Jesus is to release us from all of the duties, responsibilities and constraints that God created when he sent Jesus among us.  It can lead to an unformed and uncommitted “spirituality” quite independent of Christian belief.  Persons can claim to be inspired by the Holy Spirit to create false dogma or bizarre actions or beliefs.  The Holy Spirit is not, and cannot be independent, some sort of free floating phantasm.  The Holy Spirit is the spirit of God and of Jesus his son.  None other. 

Today’s gospel says it well.  “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will not speak on his own.  He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”  And all that is comes from Jesus first came from the Father.  It is all the same, all one. 

The language of the Holy Trinity is the way we talk about God.  We don’t have the intellectual tools to fully comprehend God in all of his wonder and glory.  So we use other words, terms that are meaningful, to try to do our best to have a comprehensible sense of who God is and how to talk about Him or to talk to Him in prayer.  For Christians, the Holy Trinity is our theology of God.  God’s love for us, his saving grace, came to its fullness in the person of Jesus Christ, God incarnate.  Our image and concept of God is fully expressed in Jesus.  God sent the Holy Spirit to continue the teachings of Jesus.  The Spirit was not released into the world to confuse or distort, only to carry the words of Jesus to the rest of the world. 

Last year, one of the pastors in the downtown ministerial association, was going on about a college class he taught at the local branch.  It was a class about world religions, so he inquired of the students about their religious preferences.  He said a great number of them described themselves as “spiritual”, whatever that means, but not religious in any formal sense.  And perhaps one of the most abused terms in current conversations about faith is “spirituality”.  This is often “churchspeak” for having no faith at all.  One will hear, “I don’t have any formal religion, but I have spirituality”.  I guess that means that, without a firm religious foundation, they like pretty sunsets and have an interest in ecology.  It covers a multitude of unformed feelings that yearn to express a love of God but without any concrete expression of faith.  I suppose part of that is rejection of the modern religious institutions because of some of their flaws and occasional hypocrisy.  More likely, however, they are children of the lost generation of the 60s who rejected all authority, including religious authority, and raised their children without it. These days, we are seeing some grandparents picking up where their children left off or passed over their religious duties and obligations.  Maybe they will be able to fill that gap. 

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is a firm foundation of faith.  Through the Trinity, we can find God in all of his forms, in the body or in spirit.  Our faith is articulated through the Gospels.  We don’t have to make it up or guess about it.  And we were mandated by Jesus himself through the Holy Spirit to preach the gospel to all who would hear and to raise our children in the faith.  

In the course of our worship, at the mention of the Trinity and a few other times, we are invited to make the sign of the cross.  It is a physical expression of the Holy Trinity, traced over our forehead, heart, and shoulders.  When I was in seminary, I asked a priest friend of mine once what it really meant.  He said it simply meant that you are a Christian.  And not just because you believe in Jesus, but because you believe in the three persons of God.  We are not “Jesus only” people.  We don’t accept a “Jesus only” baptism.  Everything we do and say in our faith is done in the name of the Holy Trinity in total, not one or another person of the Trinity.   

God has offered us Himself in the three persons of the Holy Trinity.  Maybe he is present in other ways to other people.  It is not up to me to say or to either accept or refute such a concept.  God can work in strange and mysterious ways and there is undoubtedly much yet to discover.    

When you make the sign of the cross, you are not expressing a vapid and unformed spirituality.  You are acknowledging God as he has expressed himself to us.   You are declaring your faith in the Triune God; Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  That makes you a Christian.  Amen.