Sermon 5/22/05
Defining God - 2 Corinthians 13:11-13, Matthew 28:16-20
(view lectionary notes for this text)
After hearing how many of you in the congregation had read it, I finally joined the ranks and read The DaVinci Code myself, to see what all the fuss was about. I may include it as a sermon topic in the summer so that I can really “get into it”, but it was on my mind this week as I was preparing for this Sunday, Trinity Sunday. One of the characters in The DaVinci Code claims that Jesus was “voted” to be divine at a council meeting of the early church, where previously everyone just regarded him as a human. My recollection of my church history courses in seminary is strong enough to know that things didn’t unfold in quite that way, but The DaVinci Code was right about something. The early church sometimes discussed weighty matters in great council gatherings. And one of these discussions was centered not on Jesus’ divinity, but on the nature of the Trinity. The Trinity, as we would speak of it today, is God: The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or God: The Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer. In our two scripture lessons today we see this Trinitarian language appearing in both places.
But the Trinity is something that only occasionally makes clear appearances in our scriptures. The scriptures certainly never describe the Trinity, or even use the label “trinity”, or define what it means in any way. So the early church councils tried to hammer out what this Trinity thing was. They debated many questions about the Trinity, and there were strong “parties” that supported certain views. One party, for example, thought that any concept of Trinity would need to show that Jesus, the Son, was not comparable to God the father. But the Nicene party wanted to insist, with a very specific Greek word configuration, that God the father and God the son were “like according to substance,” even though this is never clearly stated in the scriptures anywhere. Another debate was over whether Christ was “begotten” or “made” – created by God, or existing with God in the beginning in a way different from the creation of human beings. Another debate questioned whether or not the fully human person of Jesus Christ was part of the Trinity, or just the divine Son. And they questioned what to do with that strange Holy Spirit thing, perhaps like we do today. They wanted to know if the Holy Spirit came from God the father directly, or from the father and the son together. All these details they eventually hammered out, though not always in a friendly way, not always without labeling each other as heretics. And the result, in part, is the Nicene Creed that you’ll find in your hymnals, which we’ll look at later. It is that mess, the Trinity, which we celebrate today!
Maybe we think that trying to define the nature of God, the nature of something as strange as the Trinity in a council meeting is crazy. It’s true, we don’t usually discuss such details at Administrative Council! But I think we do often engage in the same behavior – we’d really like to get a fix on God if we can. We’re always trying to define God, define our faith, define a set of rules for our life with God. It’s a natural urge – we want to know our Creator better, we want to know who this Being is who gives us life and who we gather to worship. We want to know who this God is that makes us and shapes us and calls us to do all of these things that are so difficult and challenging and frustrating. We want to know better who it is who gives us love and grace and calls us children as we call this Being a parent. It’s good and natural to want to know this God. But sometimes we cross a line, where we go from wanting to know God better out of a desire for a relationship with God, to wanting to know God so that we can contain and control God. After all, if we can control God, perhaps we can limit God’s control on us, and not feel so obligated to follow all of those pesky commands about loving our neighbors and enemies, about giving away all of our stuff, about following wherever we’re led. I remember when Ashley preached here in April, she talked about how her dad believes that we try to paint God into corner and put God into boxes. When we do that, we make God pretty small, and then we’re upset when our God is too small to handle our crises, to handle our pains and hurts and sufferings.
On Trinity Sunday, we’re called to embrace all that God is and wants to be for us. Instead of trying to pin God down, we need to reorient our focus. The Trinity, in all its mystery, is clear in this: Our God is a God who is all about relationships. Our God is not satisfied to be just one thing, one essence, one expression. Our God is not only our Creator, but also one who is willing to come and be with us in human form, to take on all that it means to be a human on earth. And God is not only one who does those things, but also one who is willing to dwell within us, to live in our hearts, and so guide our lives right from within the very core of our beings. This is a God who will seek us out for relationships in any way possible, so desirous is God of being a part of who we are, and having us be part of who God is. Our God is persistent, asking again and again, in different guises, to be let in to our lives. Our God is creative, meeting us where we’re least expecting to find God. And our God is pervasive, permeating every part of our existence. That’s the Trinity, even if it’s not a very defined definition. Indeed, it seems some of the very best things in the world are the ones we are least able to put into clear words, concise definitions. For all of the writings we have, movies and poems and books and classes that talk about love, it’s very hard to define what love is. But that doesn’t reduce love’s power or potency, or our desire to give and receive love in our lives. Love seems to be something you have to simply experience to know. It’s the same with this God who is Three in One and One in Three. Hard to define, but worth all the conversation. Easier to experience God – the best way we can go about knowing God.
So, instead of worrying so much about what we don’t know, what we can’t figure out, what we can’t categorize and label, we’d be better off if we worried about what is clear to us. In our passage from Matthew, called the Great Commission, Jesus gives us a task: Go and make disciples and make them part of the faith community in the name of this dynamic God who is too big, too great, too much to be pinned down or boxed in. Jesus doesn’t tell us to go and make scholars, or make theologians, or make teachers or leaders, though all of these roles are valuable. Jesus calls us to make disciples, and ‘disciples’ literally means ‘students’. That means that we’re meant to be learners, students, pupils of Jesus. And to be a student means that we don’t know everything, that we are still learning, that it is OK to wonder and have questions and need things explained again and make mistakes. We’re students of God, and our course of study is one that lasts a lifetime, as we continue to learn and grow in our faith, as we continue to experience our indescribable Maker.
As we go about this task of making and being disciples, we can do it in the very same in which God chooses to relate to us: always in dynamic relationships. That’s where our short and sweet reading from 2 Corinthians comes in. If God is always seeking to be in relationship with us, God is always also seeking for us to be in relationship with others. In 2 Corinthians we read Paul’s closing words: “Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you.” In building relationship with others, we build our relationship with God, as we see in them God who created them so uniquely, and Christ who calls them to discipleship, and the Holy Spirit of God that is dwelling within their hearts.
On this Trinity Sunday, I invite you to turn in your hymnals to page ____, and to recite with me the Nicene Creed, as we celebrate our dynamic God. Let us read together:
Benediction: Go into this week, held together by the love of God clothed with the nature of Jesus the Christ reinforced by the strength of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
(from Rev. Rex A. E. Hunt, http://www.rexaehuntprogressive.com/liturgiesA/trinityasj2005)