Much More to Say

Last Sunday was a beautiful day, filled with joy and hope and celebration for God’s presence is with us. Pentecost Sunday is the day we remember and give thanks for the gift of God’s the Holy Spirit. The Sunday after Pentecost is Trinity Sunday. It is the only Sunday in the church year that we celebrate a doctrine. The word Trinity doesn’t appear in the Bible. It isn’t an event. It is a doctrine, a teaching presented for belief or acceptance.

The doctrine of the Trinity is an attempt to explain what is beyond explanation, unfathomable mystery. How does God work? The most we know about how God works is in the passage I read this morning from John. The Spirit of Truth reveals to us what God authorizes. The Spirit of Truth brings glory to Christ and reveals Christ. All that the Father has are Christ’s…so, there is nothing that reveals the Father that doesn’t also reveal Christ.

It really is a mystery…and we cannot solve it. Rev Bruce Prewer warns against reaching on the Trinity: “Whenever preachers try to speak about theTrinity, they will either make a fool of themselves or commit a grave heresy– usually both. If you want to play it safe, you just recite the formula ‘God in three persons, blessed Trinity’ and say not another word.” All our language about God is appallingly inadequate, but Christians have clung on tenaciously to the Trinity as a way of preserving the tiny truths that God has revealed to us. Maybe our formula of the Trinity is only 1% of the truth about God, but it is a critical 1% that makes all the difference.

We don’t have all the information. Jesus told the disciples, “I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” Just like an Agatha Christie novel with Miss Marple, or a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes, we cannot solve the mystery. Information that is critical to making all the pieces fit is not in our possession.

We are like a group of blind people trying to describe an elephant.
An elephant is like a wall, says one stroking its side.
No, an elephant is not like a wall, the elephant is like a rope, says another clutching its tail.
A rope? No, a sheet! Says a third, holding the ear.
This elephant is like a soft, large hose, says the fourth grasping the trunk.
No – a tree, strong and firm, says another, who has wrapped his arms around a leg.
The elephant is definitely like a solid pipe, says the sixth, taking hold of the tusk.
Each of them knows part of the truth. Together they know much of the truth. But, they do not know fully know, and neither do we fully know God.

The Companion to the Book of Worship says “Trinity Sunday, in a sense, synthesizes all we have celebrated over the past months which have centered on God’s mighty acts: Christmas-Epiphany celebrating God’s taking flesh and dwelling among us in Jesus Christ; Easter celebrating Christ’s death and resurrection for us; Pentecost celebrating God the Holy Spirit becoming our Sanctifier, Guide, and Teacher.

The triune God is the basis of all we are and do as Christians. In the name of this triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we are baptized. As the baptized ones we bear the name of the triune God in our being. We are of the family of the triune God. We affirm this parentage when, in reciting the creeds, we say what we believe. Our discipleship is rooted in the mighty acts of this triune God who is active in redeeming the world. The triune God is the basis of all our prayers — we pray to God the Father, through Jesus Christ, by the Holy Spirit. The Trinity holds central place in our faith. …
In celebrating Trinity Sunday, remember that every Lord’s Day is consecrated to the triune God. On the first day of the week, God began creation. On the first day of the week, God raised Jesus from the grave. On the first day of the week, the Holy Spirit descended on the newly born church.”

We proclaim our faith in the One Triune God, even as we confess that how God is Three-in-One is to us an unfathomable mystery.

The early church struggled with questions about God. Was there an Old Testament God with no beginning, a God of the law, and a New Testament God whose beginning was in Bethlehem, a God of grace. Were they related or the same? What are they made of – are they the same substance, the same spirit, or different? The Bible doesn’t have a full discussion of these questions, so by the 3rd Century, Christians were in a dilemma about what to believe.

Constantine, the first Christian emperor, decided that the question of the relationship between the Creator and Jesus had to be resolved. There were two camps: Arius and Alexander.
Arius, a priest of the church in Alexandria, asserted that the divine Christ, the Word through whom all things have their existence, was created by God before the beginning of time. Therefore, the divinity of Christ was similar to the divinity of God, but not of the same essence.
Alexander, his bishop, affirmed that the divinity of Christ, the Son, is of the same substance as the divinity of God, the Father. To hold otherwise, he said, was to open the possibility of polytheism, and to imply that knowledge of God in Christ was not final knowledge of God.
Emperor Constantine wanted to settle the matter. After all, his motto was, ““One God, one Lord, one faith, one church, one empire, one emperor.” So, in 325 A.D. he asked the bishops from the entire church to come together at Nicaea to discuss and agree on a creed. They gathered, and this was the beginning of the writing of the Nicene Creed. They gathered again in 381 to edit and expand the creed to include the Holy Spirit.

Today, The Nicene Creed is the most ecumenical of creeds, used as an affirmation of faith by Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and most Protestant churches.

The message of hope for the church today is that God is speaking truth to us. A council of bishops gathered in Nicea because the emperor was not going to have a split in the church. And the Spirit of Truth revealed God to them. Not everything, but some, as they could bear. Two groups, with their heels dug in, came together and came to know more about God than they had before they entered this time of prayer and dialogue.

The Spirit of Truth revealed to them that God is maker of all that is, seen and unseen. Jesus is eternally begotten on the Father, not made, of One being with the Father, and through him all things were made. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, and is the giver of life. They intertwine but are distinct.

Jesus told the disciples that the Spirit of Truth comes and leads us into all truth, but not all at once. Revelation is a progressive process. William Barclay said about revelation, “All truth is God’s truth, and the revelation of all truth is the work of the Holy Spirit.”

God is still leading us, still revealing truth to us. All of our discoveries, everything we learn, is a gift from God.

In a few weeks, the General Assembly of our denomination will gather. Last Saturday, our Presbytery commissioned three delegates – a pastor, a lay person, a college student, and a seminarian. Regional gatherings have taken place to begin conversations around the issues that face the church today. I encourage you to pray for God to speak, for the Spirit of Truth to lead us. Pray for our delegates, many of you know Kirsten King, who is our lay delegate.

And pray for the Spirit of Truth to lead you to know God more fully. I love what William Barclay says about God’s revelation, “Revelation,” he wrote, “comes to us, not from any book, or creed, or printed word. Revelation comes to us from a living person. The nearer we live to Jesus, the better we know Him. The more we become like him, the more he will be able to tell us.”

May we come to know God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as we live like Jesus showed us to live. Amen.