Communion, Trinity

I want to begin this sermon by asking all of you to imagine
that you don’t know anything about Christianity and the Christian faith.
Try to clear your mind of all the knowledge and understanding about Christianity
that you have built up over the years.
This will take longer for some than others.
Now try to also forget anything you might know
about any of the other religions of the world.
So what I am asking you to do is to put yourself in a place
where you would have absolutely no prior preconception
of any religious or spiritual belief at all.
Of course this is impossible,
we cannot unlearn what we have learned and we cannot but be influenced by our past,
but let’s do what we can.

Now, knowing nothing about Christianity or any other religion,
imagine that you begin to think about your life,
about why you are alive, what might have caused you to exist and even,
if there might be a purpose for your existence
which goes beyond merely living out the physical life that you know.
Perhaps you might begin to imagine
that there might be more to life than just what you can see.
Perhaps some of you might come to the conclusion that there is a force,
a higher power, call it God if you like, that is behind life as we know it.
Now if I were to ask you, knowing nothing about this force, this higher power, this God,
if I were to ask you to imagine what interaction, if any,
there might be between this God and you,
and what that interaction might look like, what would you say?
I suppose there might be as many different answers to that question as there are people, but my theory is that there some answers that are more probable than others.
What seems reasonable to me,
and remember that when we’re dealing with something
that is ultimately a shot in the dark,
the word reasonable needs to be understood in its proper context,
what seems reasonable would be to conclude
that God is everywhere and in everything, even in us.
What seems reasonable would be to conclude
that by being in harmony with our life and the life we see around us,
or by coming to somehow understand this life in a deeper sense,
by living on a level that seems to transcend the physical needs
that tend to take up so much of our time and effort,
we might become more attuned to the force which is behind our existence.
I know that all of this seems very nebulous and vague.
My point is this,
left on our own, there are religions and there are faiths in our world
which seem to be more in tune than others
when it comes to what we might conclude about God,
about a higher power or about the force behind all of life.
Many of the Eastern religions such as Buddhism see life as a journey
towards becoming more in tune with the universal force behind life
and there are many other religions which are rooted in animism,
the belief that all things have a soul, whether living or not, whether human or not,
and that we are all part of a greater force which unites the universe.
Left to our own devices we might come to conclude many things,
but I would suggest that few, if any,
would ever come to conclude that we are the creation of a personal, loving God,
who not only created us, but became one of us in being born into human existence,
lived among us and died on the cross for our sakes
and then three days later was raised from the dead.
All of this is to make the point that the Christian faith,
as we have come to know it,
is unreasonable, it is unimaginable on our own terms.
There are far more obvious conclusions to arrive at
than the conclusion that the Christian faith insists upon.

The point is this, our faith ultimately is rooted
not in reason and logic, but in revelation.
Our faith is rooted in the revelation of God to us.
What we have as the story of God’s interaction with humanity,
is not the logical, reasonable, rational conclusion of human minds and experience,
but the record of those whose lives have been the recipients of God’s gracious revelation. We know what we know about God only
because God has chosen to reveal these things to us.
We would never come to conclude what we believe about God
if it were only left to us, left to our experience and understanding.

This Sunday is Trinity Sunday.
Many people will say that there is no place in the bible where the word trinity appears. And they would be right.
So why do we celebrate Trinity Sunday today?
Why do we insist that the correct understanding of God
is rooted in the Trinitarian relationship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit?
Last week I said that we as the church worldwide are at our best
when we speak the language of grace,
when we are united in our service and compassion.
I said that often we are less than at our best when it comes to issues of doctrine,
when we bicker about words and phrases, about who’s more right than the other.
But I want to clarify that our identity as Christians
is not grounded in just feeling good about things or doing good work together.
These things are important, but they must stem from commonly held convictions,
from shared doctrinal beliefs.
The church is not about me believing in whatever appeals to me
and you believing in whatever appeals to you
and us finding common ground so that occasionally we can work together.
There must be a common foundation of beliefs that all Christians can share and confess. When it comes to doctrine,
I tend to agree with whoever first coined the phrase,
“In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity.”
It of course falls to reason that we can disagree on what constitutes the essentials,
but within the orthodox Christian faith, one of the essentials has been,
since the near the very beginning of the church,
the Trinitarian nature of God.

Though the idea of Trinity is not explicitly cited in scripture,
it has long been the common understanding of the church
that the revelation of God in scripture is clear about the Trinitarian nature of God.
From the very beginning of scripture in Genesis, when God said,
let us make humankind, in our image, according to our likeness,
thus implying a plurality within God’s nature,
to the incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth,
to passages such as ours this morning from the Gospel according to John
when Jesus speaks of the coming of the Holy Spirit,
the concept of Trinity has been revealed to the church.
Remember at the baptism of Jesus
when the Spirit of God descended upon Jesus in the form of a dove
and a voice from heaven declared,
“This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
Recall also the command of the risen Christ to the disciples
to go and baptize in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
The Presbyterian Church in Canada, in Living Faith,
confesses our faith in one God, eternal Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
three in one, one in three, equal in power and glory.
God is the Father to whom we come,
the Son through whom we come,
the Spirit by whom we come.
There are countless more examples which I could cite,
but the issue for us really isn’t whether or not
there is warrant for the Trinitarian nature of God,
but rather why should God’s revelation about himself to us be in such a form?

So why the Trinity?
The doctrine of the Trinity was first formally articulated
at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D.
At Nicaea the church produced the first uniform doctrinal statement,
which we know now as the Nicene Creed.
This was a response to the assertions of people such as Arius,
who taught that God the Son was not eternal and was created by God the Father.
In the Nicene Creed we read that,
“We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.”
In successive formulations of the Creed it is also made clear that,
“The Spirit proceeds from the Father and from the Son
and that with the Father and the Son, He is worshipped and glorified.”
1+1+1=1.
Though God exists in three persons, they are of one substance.
Its not necessarily logical or reasonable,
but it is God’s revelation to us.

And God’s revelation is never trivial.
1+1+1=1.
The oneness of God in three persons is critical for us because the nature of God
allows us to know something about the nature that God has intended for us.
If we are truly made in God’s image,
then our nature ought to at least strive to be something like the one who gave us life.
We are united when speak the language of grace.
That grace is most clearly revealed to us
through the essential doctrine of what God himself is like.
We speak and we live with grace more fully
when we know more fully the nature of the God
who has commanded us to love one another as he has loved us.

Jesus says in our text this morning,
“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.
When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth,
for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears
and he will declare to you the things that are to come.
He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.
All that the Father has is mine.
For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you”
Father, Son and Holy Spirit are united,
all that the Father has is mine, says Jesus.
And the Spirit will declare it to you,
he will continue the revelation of Jesus,
revealing a truth that comes not from our own knowledge but from God’s grace.
Perhaps the most critical part of our passage are the words,
he will glorify me, that Jesus says when speaking about the Holy Spirit.
The Trinitarian nature of God reveals that the Spirit seeks no glory for himself,
indeed by continuing the revelation of the Son, and by extension of the Father,
the Spirit brings glory to the Son and to the Father.
One theologian says, we have here the ultimate deferential community of sharing.
Glory comes when each person promotes the other two.
The doctrine of the Trinity reveals that at the heart of God
lies a deferential joy in each person of the Trinity.
(This Week at the Centre for Excellence in Preaching. June 03, 2007)

Why should the ancient doctrine of the Trinity matter to us today?
How many people do we know who have so little use for something like the Trinity? How often do we hear that its all about Jesus and me,
that there’s no need for doctrine?
Remember, in essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity.
The Trinity is an essential
because for us to know why we should speak the language of grace,
why we should live with grace, act with grace, serve with grace,
we need to know something about the God whom we serve.
If at the heart of God lies a deferential joy,
if the Trinitarian nature of God speaks of each person of the Godhead
seeking to glorify the other,
then how can we, who are made in God’s image,
not work towards the same understanding for our lives, for our existence?

My friends, do our lives as people who are invited to speak the language of grace,
do our lives reflect a similar heart of deferential joy towards others?
We live in a very broken world
and we live in a culture that tells us to always look out for number one.
How would our world change if more of us adopted a heart of deferential joy?
How would our society change if more of us found the true joy
that comes when others are glorified by what we do?
How would our lives change if we adopted the attitude
that lies at the heart of our Triune God?
I was trying to explain something of the Trinity to my kids this week
and I wasn’t sure that they were getting what I was trying to say,
especially about the deferential joy part,
how we should put others ahead of ourselves.
Then one night my daughter looks up at me and says,
you mean we have to do them first?
Crudely put, but right on the mark.
We have to do them first, we have to put others first.
Deferential joy means taking delight in the pleasure of others,
even if our own pleasure may be delayed.
We have to love as God has shown us
by how God’s love is expressed in the Trinity through deferential joy.

We come to this Table before us this morning knowing that God has put us first.
He sent his Son for us so that we might know his heart for us.
The revelation of God the Father is that he so loved the world
that he gave us God the Son, that all who believe in him by the grace of God the Spirit, may not perish but have everlasting life.
Come and share in God’s grace
so that we may be the people of God’s grace for God’s world.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.