Sermon, June 3 2007 -- John 16:12-15

One For All and All For One (Trinity Sunday C)
Rick Olson, June 3, 2004

This is what you might a teachable moment . . . it's Trinity Sunday, when were supposed to contemplate the one-ness of the Godhead. of all the mysteries of the church, this may be the most mysterious . . . and at the root of it is what we=re going to sing it in the final hymn: "God in three persons, blessed Trinity." How can there be three persons in one? How can we speak of one God, when in the bible it's as if there are three? Well, the way we usually do it is . . . we don't. We say the words but don't really understand it, or . . . I'll go so far as to say . . . believe it. But there it is: it's a bed-rock doctrine of the Christian faith. And if you ask any Christian theologian on almost any seminary campus, she'll tell you that you can't be a Christian without believing in the Trinity.

Which used to tick my friend Daniel off mightily, because he claimed to be a Christian without believing in the Trinity. He’s an official in a denomination called "The Church of God, General Conference, Morrow, Georgia," and when I knew him he was publications editor, and he was a classmate of mine at Columbia, which just happened to be the nearest seminary to . . . you guessed it, Morrow, Georgia. And the reason he didn't believe in the Trinity is that it isn't in the Bible. Really . . . it isn't in the bible. As far as members of the Church-of-God in Morrow Georgia are concerned, if it ain't in the Bible, they don't believe in it. If God were really three-in-one, they imply, God would have told us so in the Bible. And so, my friend Daniel would wince every time somebody in our theology class--usually the teachers--would make some snide comment or another about non-Trinitarians. Of course Church of God, General Conference, Morrow Georgia-ites don’t accept the divinity of Christ, either, but that’s another story . . .

But for orthodox Christians, the Trinity is a bedrock doctrine, even though it isn’t in the Bible, a fact that I know surprises some folks, they say what do you mean, it’s not in the Bible, look – here it talks about the Spirit, and over here the Son, and it’s just full of talk about the Father, and of course that’s right, in the passage I just read—the lectionary passage, by the by, you’d think that if it were in the Bible they’d schedule it for Trinity Sunday—in the passage I just read, it talks about the coming of the Holy Spirit . . .

But the Trinity isn’t about the Father or the Son or the Holy Spirit—or to put it economically the Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer. It’s about the unity of the three, the identity of the three, and it’s a concept that developed over time in the early church. The problem was that the identity of Jesus—who he was on his own and in relationship to God, not to mention in relationship to that mysterious Spirit we celebrated last week—the problem was that this identity was not anywhere near clear. First of all, what kind of being was Jesus? There were Gnostic Christians who believed that he was a spiritual being, who merely took on human form—like putting on a human-suit—when he was down here on earth. At the other extreme were the folks who thought he was a human being—a very good human being, but no more than that.

Then there was the question of his relation to God . . . Christianity grew out of Judaism, which was unique in the first Century in that it was monotheistic. If Jesus was divine, were Christians no longer monotheistic? Did they worship two Gods, or even three, if you throw in the Holy Spirit? And if he was divine, was he subordinate to God, as his title “Son of God” would indicate? Was he—like the Valentinian Gnostics claimed—a kind of demi-urge, a God created by Jehovah, and thus subordinate to him? How did that fit in with John’s magnificent poetry, which contends that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God?”

By the beginning of the fourth century, things were beginning to come to a boil, and the main figure was a guy by the name of Arius, who took the view that God was indivisible and unitary and therefore that Christ—in his spiritual form prior to the incarnation—was created by God and thus inferior to God. Arrayed on the other side were the Trinitarians, who believed that God was one being with three persons, and that Christ was therefore of the same substance as God . . . Now all this was going on at about the same time Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity, and by 325 he was beginning to get a little bit worried . . . how could the Church be a stabilizing influence on the Empire if there were splits and factions and infighting? So he called the Council of Nicaea which, after about two months of debate, endorsed the Trinitarians with a creed, and 56 years later, at Constantinople, the position of the Holy Spirit in the Trinity was clarified, and the definitive Nicene Creed we know today was finalized.

So, what’s the point of all this? Well, for one thing, the development of the doctrine of the Trinity illustrates how theology is done in the Church. At our 1500-year remove it’s tempting to think that things we take as foundational just dropped whole-formed from the mouth of God. It’s tempting to think that, but almost always not accurate. Theology is messy, it’s most times a mixture of expediency, belief and politics, sometimes not in that order . . . it began as a practical problem . . . how do we figure out who Jesus is? How do we answer the critics who claim we’re not monotheistic, who claim we worship three Gods like the Egyptians or the Mesopotamians? Attempting to answer that question produced strong differences between committed Christians, Christians who were wholly sincere in their beliefs, who were much better versed in scripture than I am . . . and finally, when Constantine wanted to use the church for political ends, it got settled . . . kind of . . . and who’s to say how much influence the Emperor had on the proceedings? He was a strong proponent of a single God who ruled with an iron hand, which concept—just coincidently, I’m sure—helped legitimize his own God-like rule.

And this whole situation should sound familiar to us today, and perhaps give us a sliver of comfort as we duke it out amongst ourselves over whatever the controversy du jour is . . . discerning the mind of God, the will of Christ, the doings of the Holy Spirit, it’s all pretty messy and convoluted, and is hardly ever pure as the driven snow. There are factions and power struggles and hidden agendas, but there are also strong beliefs, people of good faith, committed Christians on all sides of every question.

So be of good cheer when observing the current messy debates—that’s kind of the way the process has always worked . . . and although it might be hard on our denomination, it’s hardly unique and—perhaps—hardly unnecessary. It seems to be the way business is done in the community of God . . .

But there’s a larger issue, of course, and it can be summed up this way—what good is the doctrine of the Trinity? What possible difference could it make for us that God is one, but with three persons, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost? Haven’t we gone beyond all of that, haven’t we evolved in our belief system to the point that we don’t have to worry about it? What does it mean for us? Well . . . plenty. The late theologian Shirley Guthrie said that all heresies are Trinitarian . . . he meant that all wrong-thinking, harmful thinking can be traced back to wrong-headed conceptions of the Trinity. Arianism, for example, is alive and well today . . . faintly embarrassed about the incontrovertible male-ness of Christ, some progressive Christians give God prominence of place and in essence subordinate Christ—not to mention the Holy Spirit—to a single, rather fuzzy deity. But subordinating the Son to the Father tends to subordinate the work of the Son—such as redemption—to the work of the Father, such as creation. Creation theologies—as admirable as they are—run the danger of this, of placing God’s ongoing creative work before God’s ongoing redemptive work.

And while we’re on the subject of the works of each member of the Trinity, an equally Bad Thing is to separate out—as I just did—works of each person as exclusive to that person. Of course, that’s exactly what we all do, it’s hard not to, even Jesus did it in our passage and other parts of John . . . but human linguistic systems—one of which he was using—are just too frail to properly encompass or discuss or even represent the reality, which is (in part) that the work of God the Parent is the work of God the Holy Spirit is the work of God the Son. Thus the comfort of the Holy Spirit is the comfort of God the Father; the Holy Spirit is redemptor every bit as much as Christ; and Christ is creator in every way possible, just as is the Father and the Holy Spirit.

If we can learn to get this—even just a little bit—it can help with some of the most pernicious problems of our times. It begins to explain how Jesus can say, in our passage, “All that the Father has is mine,” and in another section of John, “whoever has seen me, has seen the Father,” and in yet another passage “I and the Father are one” If Jesus is not fully God—not just a God, but the God of Abraham and Jeremiah and Ezekiel—the incarnation loses much of it’s power, because it’s another God, a perhaps subordinate God, that suffered temptation like you and me, it was another God that intimately knew his own creation, who felt it in his hair, breathed it in his lungs, sweated it out through his pores . . . if Jesus is not the God, then it was another God who was murdered on a tree, the scapegoat who has brought about the end of all scapegoating . . .

And taking the statement “I and the Father are one” seriously, as does the doctrine of the Trinity, we can begin to discern the outlines of God’s nature—what does it include and, equally important, what does it exclude . . . because Jesus is God incarnate, we can say—along with the Archbishop of Canterbury—that in God there is no un-Christlike thing . . . Jesus is not violent, therefore God is not violent . . . Jesus is not vengeful, therefore God is not vengeful . . . Jesus cares for the least of these, therefore we can say God does the same. It’s like Jesus is a filter for what we know about God . . . to know what God the Father is like, look at God the Son.

You know . . . people often say How can we know the will of God? Who can know the mind of God, what God wills for us to do, it all seems so complicated and hard . . . and it is. Dedicated, committed, thinking, Christianity isn’t ever easy, folks, but we do have a guide, an advocate . . . Jesus said that he would send that advocate into the world, that comforter . . . and because we are Trinitarians we believe that the advocate is no more and no less than the Holy Spirit, who is no more and no less than our divine Parent who is no more and no less than Jesus Christ the Son . . . the same Jesus Christ who’s life is recorded in the pages of this book, with all its sayings and doings, the same God whose loving interaction is traced in this book, the same Holy Spirit who intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And we can know what God wants us to do in our live, and equally, perhaps, what God doesn’t want us to do . . . all we have to do is look towards Christ. Amen.