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A Sermon for DaySpring
By Eric Howell
“The Mystery of the Holy Trinity”
Romans 8:12-17
Trinity Sunday
May 31, 2015
The mystery of the Holy Trinity is at the heart of our Christian faith. This mystery
distinguishes us from other religious traditions that also believe in one God and
certainly distinguishes us from those who believe in no god at all. Believing in one
God over all and through all is challenging enough in a world in which God’s active
presence isn’t always obvious. Believing in one-God-in-three stretches most of our
spiritual and intellectual capacity to our limits and makes children of us all.
Though Christians have confessed the Trinity in creeds and prayers, and though
Christians have debated the inner life of the Trinity, and though Christians have
written much about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: one God in three persons . . .no
one can penetrate this mystery.
It’s not for a lack of trying and of worthy efforts. There’s a lot at stake here and
Christians have taken it seriously.
Start with a basic question that arises from reading the Bible: how is Jesus both
divine and human? Begin there and you naturally move to the questions that follow
about how we understand divinity if Christ was divine. What is the relationship
between Father and Son? What is the relationship between Son and Spirit? What is
the relationship between all three? And how do you put that into a song or a prayer
or a sermon or a confession of faith?
Clearly there’s a need for mature, thoughtful, scholarly, philosophical reflection on
the nature and character of God. It takes a seasoned, thoughtful person to wade into
those deep waters and scripture calls Christians to be seasoned, thoughtful persons.
Scripture doesn’t just bracket out a handful of super-scholars to carry the
theological water for the church. We are all called to maturity. This is a theme
running through the New Testament.
Hebrews 6:1. Let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity,
not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith in God.
1 Corinthians 2:6. Among the mature, we do impart wisdom.
Colossians 1:28. Teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone
mature in Christ.
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Hebrews 5:14. Solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of
discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.
That last passage from Hebrews is a poke in our ribs. Here’s the whole passage:
About this (talking about the nature of Christ) we have much to say and it is hard to
explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to
be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles
of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in
the word of righteousness since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for
those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to
distinguish good from evil.
In that passage and others like it, what we are hearing is a challenge: Grow up in
your faith. One reason why so many adults reject the Christian faith they were
raised in is that their faith has not grown along with their understanding of the
complexities and ambiguities of the world, their hurts and disappointments, and
their understanding of the world in its manifold complexity. So they hold up the
complexity of the world alongside their faith from grade school, and conclude that
faith is child’s play and insufficient for the real world. One feels totally real. The
other feels like make-believe.
Somewhere along the way, lots of people did not learn that your faith has to grow
alongside everything else in your life. Faith matures. It grows. It changes and
develops and deepens. It grows stronger. It grows softer.
This is the ‘grow up’ season. Over the last ninety days since Epiphany we have
celebrated the manifestation of God in Christ, Ash Wednesday and Lent, Holy Week
and Easter, Ascension and Pentecost. The foundation has been laid for us to move
into an extended season in which we enter prayerfully and joyfully into the life of
God made known among us and through us. (Adapted from Porter Taylor, Patheos).
Trinity Sunday is the door into the next season. It is the life of God in all its beauty
and wonder, commission and call laid out before us.
The threshold of the door is Trinity. Today’s reading from Romans is one of those
few instances in the New Testament where we meet with Father, Son, and Spirit all
together in one passage. It is the Spirit who gives us power to call God our Father,
the Spirit who confirms our relationship with Christ, and the Spirit who gives us
strength to suffer with Christ in order to be glorified with him (Prior Christian,
Christ in the Desert).
When we are drawn into the life of the Triune God we sit up a little straighter in
reverence and shrink down a little lower in a bit of shame that we don’t measure up.
We aren’t mature enough to grasp the nature and character of God even though
scripture tells us we should have already gotten there long before now.
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We’re little more than Nicodemuses knocking around in the dark, seeking answers
we can’t understand to questions we don’t even know how to pose, to a God we
don’t know well enough to handle. It’s like having a tiger by the tail. It’s like trying
to catch the wind in your fist. It’s like being born again.
And that’s the funny thing that happened on the way to sophisticated theological
maturity to which we are called and in which we really do want to grow. Childhood
happened: Not a reversion to the childhood we once had, or an excuse to stay lazily
in the one we’ve gotten stuck in, but rather a new spiritual childhood. For as often
as scripture calls us to the sophistication of theological maturity, we are also called
to spiritual innocence and wonder.
As often as we are called to confess: We believe in one God, the Father Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible, we are also
invited to cry, “Abba Father.”
As often as we are called to confess: And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the onlybegotten Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light
of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with
the Father, by whom all things were made, we also find ourselves, even with our
best words still hanging on our tongues, muttering, “I am a person of unclean lips
and everyone around me is too.”
As often as we are called to confess: And we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord
and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the
Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, we are also invited to
see the kingdom of God by being born again and to receive a simple meal of bread
and juice and call it the bread of life and cup of salvation.
In the end, and here’s the secret as if you didn’t already know it, the end of Christian
maturity is like a new, fresh, vibrant spiritual childhood. Think of it like a fruit. We
commonly say that a fruit ripens or matures. When it does, think of the character of
a mature fruit and think of how the same is true for people: fruit begins hard,
somewhat colorless. And then it grows; it matures. When it does it is tender,
sweetened, fresh, vibrantly colorful. Fruit is mature when its skin isn’t so thick
anymore. It’s vulnerable which means it can get bruised more easily, but it also
means it’s so good, never better than when it is most vulnerable. The fruit isn’t
hiding anymore among the leaves, but stands out ready to give its life.
Hear the parable: all the words we use for mature fruit are words that when we use
them for people are in the realm of childhood: tender, sweet, fresh, vibrant, colorful,
vulnerable. Maybe there’s something to learn here. We learn it from Isaiah too.
In the reading from Isaiah, mystery overwhelms maturity in the vulnerable, humble
prophet who, though almost childlike in awe, is willing to go wherever God sends,
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even if he cannot begin to wrap his human mind around a God that is so magnified
that the whole temple, which was thought by many to contain God, is seen by Isaiah
as filled by a tassel from the fringe on the hem of his robe.
Then there’s the story about St. Augustine who was one of the greatest minds that
ever existed in the Church. He actually wrote a book called The Trinity, one of the
most important meditations on God’s nature and character in history. He was trying
to comprehend the mystery of the Holy Trinity, in which he firmly believed and
placed his trust, yet realized it was no easy thing to grasp fully, even for he who
wrote the book on the Trinity. In his contemplation, Augustine decided to take a
walk along the seashore.
There he saw a child playing in the sand near the shoreline. Having dug a hole in the
sand, the child was bringing over handfuls of water from the nearby ocean to fill the
hole. After watching the child for a while, Augustine asked him what he was trying
to do. The youngster replied that he wanted to empty the entire ocean into the hole
he had dug in the sand. “But that is impossible,” Augustine observed. “Can’t you see
the ocean is infinitely greater than the hole you have dug in the sand?” The boy
paused, looked up at him and said, “I will sooner empty the sea into this pool than
you will get the mystery of the Holy Trinity in your head.” And then the boy is said
to have disappeared.
As we now come to confess our faith with the ancient words, we come as children
who have not a spirit of slavery and fear about us, but as those who have received
the spirit of adoption as children of God, who cry Abba Father, who are heirs of all of
God’s goodness and grace . . .grace enough to grow up and mature more and more
into simple wonder at it all.
Copyright by Eric Howell, 2015