Betsey Moe

Holy Trinity Sunday

26 May 2024

 

Romans 8:12-17

12 So then, brothers and sisters, we are obligated, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh— 13 for if you live according to the flesh, you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. 14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. 15 For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” 16 it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God,17 and if children, then heirs: heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if we in fact suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

John 3:1-17

1 Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. 2 He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with that person.” 3 Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”4 Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” 5 Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. 6 What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ 8 The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” 9 Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” 10 Jesus answered him, “Are you the teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

11 “Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen, yet you do not receive our testimony.12 If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? 13 No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. 14 And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up,15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. 16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 17 “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him.

I remember asking what I thought was a simple question to my Sunday School teachers in fifth grade: “How is God three in one?” You would have thought I asked where babies came from. They stammered, turned red, starting flipping frantically through their pre-packaged lesson plans. One of them gave it her best effort and, going off script, said that it was kind of like Ice, Water, and Steam. The ice becomes water, and the water becomes a fine steam that we can’t see. Then a smarty pants raised his hand and asked, “So that means that God couldn’t be two forms at the same time – so when Jesus was on earth, God didn’t exist?”

I think our class was dismissed early that day. None of us was trying to be difficult; it’s just that the Trinity is hard for even the best teachers to explain.

Take Jesus, for example. “The wind blows where it chooses,” he told Nicodemus. “You must be born of water and the Spirit.” “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whosoever believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.” Can we blame Nicodemus for being confused?

Today is Trinity Sunday, one day in the church year in which we remember and honor the mystery of God as three-in-one. Of course, every Sunday, we begin our worship in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Every Sunday, we say the Nicene Creed, written to make sense theologically of various things said about God, Jesus, and the Spirit in different parts of the Bible. You could say that Trinity Sunday is a culmination of the last six months of seasons and holy days; in Advent and Epiphany, we focused on God taking on flesh and being revealed to all people in Christ; in Lent and Easter, we focused on the death and resurrection of Jesus; and at Pentecost, last Sunday, we celebrated the manifestation of the Spirit in the church. Trinity Sunday is a day we recognize the fullness of the triune God before we move on to stories in scripture that talk in a more general way about God’s work.

When John wrote, around the Year 100, the word, “Trinity” had never been spoken. Actually, it was largely John who planted the seeds for the intense debates that would take place over the next 200 years about how God, Jesus, and the Spirit were related. In a way, Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus was just the beginning. It wouldn’t be until the year 325 when a special council wrote the Nicene Creed that the Christian church would come to a consensus about how God existed as one God in three persons. It might seem to some that John unnecessarily opened a can of worms. Didn’t speaking of God in terms of Father, Son, and Spirit just complicate things rather than making the gospel message clearer?

Whatever the case, John saw this concept of God as three in one as absolutely necessary to include. Matthew, Mark, and Luke hardly spent any time wrestling with the nature of God as three in one. Yet in John, Jesus repeatedly claims to be one with the Father, and speaks of the Spirit and the Spirit’s role in several different settings before “blowing” the Holy Spirit onto the disciples in chapter 20. John knew that the story of Jesus was more than a story about Jesus at a certain period in human history. It was a story that began with God the creator, continued with Jesus the Redeemer, and was always animated by the Spirit who sustained life and action. John knew that for a story this expansive, these three guideposts would be necessary: Father, Son, Spirit; Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.

Catherine LaCugna, a contemporary Catholic theologian, wrote an article that opened up the concept of the Trinity for me called, “The Practical Trinity.” It’s a catchy title, because, really, who sees the Trinity as practical? It seems like the most impractical, abstract topic the church can talk about. But LaCugna  pointed out that the early church’s discussions of the Trinity leading up to the writing of the Nicene Creed necessarily focused on the messy logistics of how Father, Son, and Spirit are one. In the wake of Jesus’ life and teachings, then death and resurrection, the church had to wrestle with the three-in-one relationship. But in this era, the Trinity needs to be reclaimed, LaCugna wrote, as a practical tool – a tool which helps us communicate the story. It is, in a way, a three-part picture that reminds us of the whole story of the gospel: that the God of Israel has come in Jesus Christ to redeem the world and continues that work by being present in the Holy Spirit.

When my children were young, I loved reading books to them before bedtime. Of course, the experience of physical closeness with them was the main reason I read to them, but I actually loved the books themselves – the colorful pictures, the simple stories. When Zoey was about three, before she could read, she liked to tell me the stories in her favorite books as she turned the pages. She was remarkably accurate. She would look at the pictures, which triggered the memory of the words in her mind, and so she was able to “read” me her favorite stories.

She knew the stories so well that when I would read to her and try to leave a part out because of time, she would call me on it. “That’s not what it says.” Because those darned pictures had already triggered the words.

Images in a story become markers for how the story goes. And, of course, every part of a story is worth telling.

This is what LaCugna was talking about: God’s story of love and redemption in which every part matters.

When we think about God the creator, we may think of beauty, creativity, order, wholeness, covenant, power. But the story of God before God came in Jesus Christ also triggers the memory of human rebellion, bondage, and the lengths God went to to set God’s people free. We think of the brokenness, of the many ways humans tended toward lies and serving themselves, to which God responded by giving the law, and later by sending prophets to call the people back to lives of justice. Thinking of God the creator, the Father/Mother of Israel, I think of love and faithfulness despite human transgression. I think of justice, righteousness, the shalom at the heart of God that God desires for all creation.

But thinking of God as Mother/Father of all creation is not the whole story. As Christians, we believe that God became human. We might think of this as the second big picture in the story. In the Presbyterian tradition, one of my favorite confessions is called The Brief Statement of Faith from 1983. It includes a wonderful summary of Jesus’ life. It says:

Jesus proclaimed the reign of God:
preaching good news to the poor
and release to the captives,
teaching by word and deed
and blessing the children,
healing the sick
and binding up the brokenhearted,
eating with outcasts,
forgiving sinners,
and calling all to repent and believe the gospel.
Unjustly condemned for blasphemy and sedition,
Jesus was crucified,
suffering the depths of human pain
and giving his life for the sins of the world.
God raised this Jesus from the dead,
vindicating his sinless life,
breaking the power of sin and evil,
delivering us from death to life eternal.

Jesus is God’s affirmation of love to all creation. Through Jesus, all are invited into the covenant God made with Abraham and Sarah. Jesus fills out the picture of who God is in relation to humanity.

But wait…there’s more. In the God of Israel and in Jesus Christ, we still do not have the whole story.

The Spirit of God has been present since the beginning, moving over creation, breathing life into all that lives and forming community of love. The Spirit inspired the prophets and inspired the writers of scripture – poets, historians, priests -- calling whole communities into right relationship with God and with one another. The Spirit descended upon Jesus at his baptism and was with Jesus as he healed and preached and called out idolatry. That same Spirit blew through the earliest communities of faith, forming and giving life and direction to the church we are now a part of. The Spirit calls each of us into deeper commitment to following Jesus in the way of justice and love. The Spirit prays through us in sighs too deep for words, as we watch and wait for and work for God’s new heaven and new earth.

We need the Trinity – not to explain the exact act way in which God is three in one, but to help us tell the whole story without leaving something out. A single passage of scripture cannot communicate this story. Not even a single gospel, like John’s, can communicate this story. It takes all of scripture, it takes the ongoing work of the Christian church, to tell this story. And with a story this big and this worth telling, we need the picture of the Trinity to guide us.

How are we telling the whole story of the Triune God? What parts do you tend to focus on? What parts are you tempted to leave out because they are uncomfortable, or they require something more of you?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the whole story of God while living in Guatemala and working with CEDEPCA, the Protestant Center for Pastoral Studies, these past few years. I see the way various churches like to leave out parts of the story and how much it harms the most vulnerable. CEDEPCA’s women’s studies have brought to light the ways certain churches are resistant to considering the bigger picture of God’s love for all people. It is common to hear a pastor lean into the belief that God the Father is the ruler of all, at the top of an imagined hierarchy; underneath God’s rule is Jesus, underneath Jesus is the man of the house, and underneath the man is the woman and children. This is a view that leaves out major parts of the story: that men and women are created in the image of God, that Jesus honored and commissioned women and set into motion a new community marked by equity, a new community the Spirit (sometimes referred to as Woman-Wisdom), would continue empowering.

But there are parts of the story I admit I leave out and need others from other denominations and religions to remind me. I grew up Lutheran, and we did not talk much about decision and responsibility in faith. We were so focused on the grace of God and the fact that Jesus chose us, not the other way around, that we often left out the idea of response. It wasn’t until I went to a summer camp that was a part of a different faith tradition that I really understood the importance of human commitment to God, which then helped me to claim my faith and move forward with purpose.

Another part of the story I leave off because I don’t want to be lumped together with end times Christians is the part about our shared future – the new heaven and the new earth, or the glorious return that Jesus and many writers of the New Testament talked about. But avoiding this part of the story limits my understanding and my acceptance of hope.

Some people leave out sin, or leave out repentance, or leave out grace, or leave out justice, when they “tell” the story of God in their words and actions.

However, the Trinity calls us back to the whole story because it’s the whole story that gives life to the world. And it’s that story into which we have been included when we were baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Through your actions, through your words, may you tell the whole story of God – Father, Son, Spirit; Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer. May you and others be blessed by this story that gives life. Amen.