The Holy Trinity: B 23-24

The Holy Trinity
Deuteronomy 4:32-34, 39-40 | Romans 8:14-17 | Matthew 28:16-20

God our Father, who by sending into the world the word of truth and the spirit of sanctification made known to the human race your wondrous mystery, grant us, we pray, that in professing the true faith we may acknowledge the Trinity of eternal glory and adore your unity, powerful in majesty.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

This feast is one of the three feasts that we end this incredibly important season that started in Lenten and ends week after this, and the three feasts focus on the Trinity.  Last Sunday it was Pentecost when we hear the story of how this mysterious, powerful force entered into human beings who were longing for something more than they could ever achieve on their own, and they found themselves being enlightened and empowered to communicate in a way that was just, in a way, mysteriously effective.  It was like whatever they were speaking at that moment was understood by people who didn’t necessarily speak the language.  So it was that moment when spirit becomes integrated into our human spirit, divine spirit in human spirit.  We have an enormous power, effectiveness in changing hearts, in awakening people to truth.  Then today we celebrate the Feast of the Trinity, which is the focus on the notion that we have God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit.  So this is the wholeness of God that we want to talk about today, and then the next one is the Feast of the Body and Blood of Jesus.  It’s that focus on this incredible gift of being able to take this image of Jesus, who is the fullness of God, and take him into our body and to feel its nourishment and its cleansing power.  So we focus on the Trinity.  We focused before that on the Holy Spirit, and then we focus on Jesus. 

So what I’d like to do today is see if I can’t clarify something that I find often creeping into people’s spirituality, and that is a misunderstanding of the whole notion of Trinity.  And the big misconception is that there are three Gods or three very different aspects of God, so different that they remain somewhat separate.  So there’s a lot of people who will tell me, “I like God the Father.  I don’t like Jesus, because Jesus seems too wishy-washy and too easy on people, and I like things clear and black and white.  So I like God the Father.”  Other people say, “I don’t like God the Father, because he’s so tough, and he’s angry so often and punishes and is demanding.  So I like Jesus better.”  And then this Holy Spirit figure, well, we don’t know much about that, but I remember one friend of mine used to describe trying to teach the Trinity to American Indians, and they’d say, ‘Honorable Father I understand.  Honorable Son I understand.  Honorable bird I don’t understand.’”  And the Spirit is hard to understand, because it’s a mysterious event that happens in the person who receives both the gifts of the Father and the gifts of the Son, and those are the same God. 

So let me see if I can help you integrate these three, because the way to do it is not to ever imagine that there was a God the Father, then a God the Son, then a God the Spirit.  These are three stages of the evolution of who God is.  And why does he come in the three different images?  Well, it’s because of a mysterious thing called the Law of the Three.  I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, but it’s very important, and it’s pretty simple, and I can explain it.  It goes like this.  There’s a way to see the world in a black and white, either/or binary world.  That’s not the way the world really is.  It’s a triune sort of thing, and what I mean by that is, when we are seeking the truth, it’s not a matter of finding all the things that are true and following those, destroy all the things that are wrong, and then we’ll find we live solely in the truth.  No, it’s the tension between what is right and what is wrong, and that tension creates a third thing called wisdom. 

So if you know anything about literature — and you know we live for stories.  Without stories, we would be almost not human.  We need a story to work on.  I go to Netflix, and I go to Amazon all the time, and I want to check the latest story, the latest episode of a story I’m already into.  We grow from stories.  They’re sources of all kinds of wonderful, wonderful things that we need to see and understand.  So if we look at scripture as a story, and it’s the story, and it’s probably the — well, not probably.  It is the most read and pondered story ever in existence.  It starts with God creating the world and ends with the Spirit of God entering into people.  That’s the basic story, and it’s not a story you would go to — and maybe this is more the Old Testament — where you go and say, “Okay, I’m here in the world to do what is right.  So tell me what is right.  Tell me what is wrong.  I will always choose what is right and always reject what is wrong.”  That is an incomplete image of what a story does and what it’s for.  No, it’s a story about a protagonist and an antagonist.  Every story has those two characters.  One is the one who is there to make the point of the story.  That’s usually a hero.  It’s usually a good person who’s there to bring truth to the world, and then there’s an antagonist, a resistant person who wants to destroy that and not allow it to take its root in people and change them.  And the story is always about the tension and the struggle between the protagonist and the antagonist. 

Well, what is the protagonist and antagonist in the story of scripture?  Well, I could use this: the protagonist is God wanting something, and God’s longing is for human beings to become all that they need to be.  And he knows and wants to teach us that there’s only one way that can happen, and that’s when he enters into us and works with us.  So he has a goal, and the goodness of his goal is our fullness, which can only take place if we surrender to his strength.  And the antagonist is human nature.  We see human nature revealed so clearly in the Old Testament in those first books of the Torah when we see that human beings, first of all, when told what to do, they don’t respond very well.  So the story of Adam and Eve is human beings who really do like to be on their own.  They like autonomy.  They’d rather be like God than need God.  So we see that part of human nature revealed in the Adam and Eve story.  Then the Cain and Abel story, again, shows us there’s a kind of competition and jealousy in human beings.  We like not only being autonomous; we like being better than other people.  And the Tower of Babel story is about our addiction to success.  So there’s a tension: a God who wants us to become like him, who we’re intended to be, and human nature that resists it.  And then the third part is watching the story unfold and watching how they work together until there’s some kind of integration, and then there’s an ending.  And the integration part is what’s so interesting to me, because the integration part is somehow found in that incredibly interesting figure called Jesus.  You have God the Father in resistance to human beings resisting each other because of the dichotomy that they can’t come together in understanding what they’re there for, and then in Jesus, this mysterious creature, we find this work.  And that’s the work that we’re all engaged in, how to live in the world filled with the Holy Spirit, with God’s presence, and then somehow, in the struggle, you find in Jesus, suffering. 

That’s the image I want to focus on that is the work that you and I engage in as people who listen to that story and try to integrate ourselves into the work that the story reveals to us that is our destiny, integration of humanity and divinity.  And how does it work?  I don't know.  I can’t describe it.  All I know is we see in the life of Jesus this struggle that he has at one point in his life, and he realizes that he wants more than anything else to take care of the human beings that he loves so deeply.  And yet he realizes that their resistance is so strong that they’re going to keep him from doing that, and then somehow he surrenders to that.  He suffers it, and while he sees himself being destroyed by the antagonist, when he gives in to it and forgives the antagonist, then it works.  Then the Spirit rushes in.  Interesting.  That’s the thing that I want you to feel with me when we think about this whole thing called how do we integrate this Trinitarian God into our life.  And we do it this way.  I can describe it as best I can.  We listen to God the Father, who is the giver of all truth, and we look at him and listen to him, and he tells us that there’s a destiny that we have and that we are to choose the thing that is right.  He wants us to do that.  His intention, the God intention of our Father is, “I created you for a purpose, and I long for you to engage in that purpose, because it is there, designed for you that you will find fulfillment.”  That’s the role of the Father, and then we look at our resistance to that.  And I know it.  You know yours.  It’s all different shades of those things I mentioned earlier.  It’s the shade of I’d rather do it myself, the sort of part of us that likes to be better than other people, the part that really loves to be successful.  All that, that’s ego. 

So do we just then integrate that?  Well, we allow the story of Jesus, which is the heart of who God is — he is God the Father.  He has that part of him that longs desperately to bring us into fullness, and when we have no way of understanding it, he turns it into rules and regulations, knowing that that would be better than just leading us into a place of self-destruction.  But then he knows, and he reveals to us through Jesus that there is this third way.  And the third way is that this beautiful image of God the Father comes out as a God who is like us.  So he moves from master to servant, and when — we understand the servant-hood that we see in Jesus is a part that’s always been in the Father and we’re seeing now both a Father who’s a master and a Father who is a servant, and that servant comes in the form of the Son of the Father, because we are to be reborn as his children.  And so humanity working out its tension with divinity in the person of Jesus is a description of what it means to be a son or a daughter of God, and then when we’re in that work, there comes this integration.  The integration is: how do I understand my humanity and the divinity that is in me?  How do I understand those two working together, and what takes away the resistance?  Well, it goes something like this, I think.  The first part of God’s revealing himself is the sense that he’s asking us to become someone for him.  What he’s asking us to become is who we’re destined to be, but we resist that.  So we have this tension, and so what he wants to do is he’s trying to say, “Okay, this is the tension I want you to learn to live with and to be engaged in, and then what I’m going to do is I’m going to integrate my Spirit into you.  And when you can feel my Spirit entering into you — and it’s going to awaken in you a wisdom.” And the wisdom is not simply that God needs you to be who he wants you to be by telling you what to do.  It’s this mysterious addition that he’s saying, “No, you, your nature — your nature wants me to be a part of you.  You need me.”  So the integration is God revealing himself as a God who wants us to be in union with him, and then we grow into human beings, through the integration of Jesus and the struggle of Jesus, we grow into people who want God.  That’s the way it’s resolved. 

The beauty of the Trinity is inviting us into a place where we allow God to use us for whatever he wants, but we also ask God to be the source of what we need to be able to do the things that we need.  In other words, we say, “I need you God.”  And God said, “I need you.”  So when you come to that integration of God needing you and you needing God, both of which is to bring us to the fullness of who we are, instruments of bringing grace and life to the world, we become this mysterious, spiritual power that transforms the world by who we are, human beings receiving God as a source and God delighting in we being the source that he needs to be able to reach people.  I never thought that God had created a world in which he depends upon us to bring his world, his truth to other people.  That’s the mystery.  That’s the beauty of this integration that comes from understanding the Trinity, we living in God, God living in us and both of us benefiting enormously where there’s no competition, and there’s no protagonist and no antagonist anymore.  There’s just union and communion.  It’s a gift to know the integration of all these different parts that we tend to keep separate, but when they come together, there is truth.

Father, the longing that you have had from the very beginning is union, communion with us, you needing us, we needing you. When we enter into that world, we find ourselves engaged in work that is beyond our imagining. It’s mysterious. It’s mystical. It’s the world of the spirit. So bless us with the courage that enables us to go through whatever process we need to, whatever integration of things that we think are separated bringing into oneness. Help us with this gift so we can truly be living a Trinitarian life, and we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.