The Hoy Trinity
Exodus 34:4b-6, 8-9 | 2 Corinthians 13:11-13 | John 3:16-18

Grant, we pray, almighty God, that we who have come to know the grace of the Lord’s resurrection may, through the love of the Spirit, ourselves rise to newness of life. 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.

We’re about to begin what we call the ordinary time of the year, and so during these last many, many weeks, we’ve been focusing on the heart of the message that we find in this mysterious book called scripture, the story of God’s relationship with his people, an invitation for us to enter into that experience in our own life, a relationship with God that is real, powerful, effective and transforming.  And so it seems appropriate that, as we end this, we’re looking at, okay, here’s a feast that’s focused on simply who is God.  How do you describe him?  What’s his name?  And the interesting thing about the God that we believe in is that he’s a Trinitarian God.  That’s a really interesting thing, and I want to focus on it, because it’s a way for us to understand that the essence of this figure is so far beyond our full understanding that we have to at least approach it from three different sides.  Yet we know that somehow the ultimate goal of every human being is to know this God, not just by information but through, first, experience.  And then ultimately, the goal is that one day we will be with him, and we will see him face-to-face.  We will see his face, which is so interesting to me, because it implies that we’ll see the way that he sees us, and the way he sees us is confusing at times.  

When you look at the story of salvation history, it is the most amazing compilation of book after book, chapter after chapter that gives experience after experience of this God with his people, and it’s in time, meaning it started close to 4,000 years ago.  And who we were 4,000 years ago is not who we are today, so there’s a part of this whole thing that demands a certain way of reading it, a certain way of understanding it.  We can’t take it literally, as if every phrase in the scriptures is what God would say to the people today if the situation were somewhat similar.  I love this first reading from the book of Exodus, because God is telling us who he is.  He’s using words, and he said, “I’m a gracious God.  I’m a loving God.  I’m a forgiving God.  I’m there for you.”  And Moses’ response is, “Well, if you are that and you’d like to join us, we can certainly use some help, but we’re pretty stiff-necked, and we’re pretty difficult to deal with.  But if you would like to, we would like you to help us.  We’d like you to come with us on this journey.”  And the book of Exodus has this image of a God joining a people who are longing for something they do not have, and what they don’t have is freedom.  They want to be freed from slavery, from that which keeps them from being who they really are, free, open receptive, the gifts that are around them and to use those gifts as a form of developing who they are and then using their evolution of higher consciousness to help other people.  That’s the plan, but at the same time, you go back to the book of Exodus — I was reading the same chapter that this is from, and there was a phrase in there, and God was telling them that they needed to do certain things if he was going to walk with them.  And one of the things they had to do was keep the Sabbath, and that was not to do things on the Sabbath that would distract them from concentrating on who God is and spending time with him.  And he simply said, “Anyone who doesn’t keep the Sabbath, I will kill them.”  I thought, “Wait a minute.  That doesn’t really sound very gracious or loving or kind.” 

It’s so easy, in a way, to take anything in this story out of context to give you an image of a God who isn’t really who he is, and I would say that everything in scripture is pointing to who God is and recalling how he’s worked with us over centuries.  But it’s not the source, the primary source that we go to to find out who he is.  The only way you can really know who God is is to experience him, to have him — allow him to somehow reveal himself to you personally, and he does that.  He does that over time, and if you look at salvation history as an image of the way God works with human beings over a long period of time, it’s easy to see that it’s exactly the way God works with every individual over time.  In the beginning, he’s the discipline of your parents.  He’s the one who tells you, when you’re two years old and you can’t do it, “You’re going to have to do, and if you don’t, you’re going to be punished,” or something like that.  You can see the kind of simplicity of people back then.  They were like children, in a sense, compared to us today, and then you see them moving away from rules and laws and regulations into something much more intimate, much more personal.  Then you see the New Testament.  Imagine the Old Testament is God working with people when they’re really, really limited, in terms of their ability to understand much beyond justice.  

So let’s look at the role of God the Father in the beginning, and the role of God the Father in the beginning was to enter into people’s lives and help guide them on a journey toward freedom.  And one of the things that would make them free and enable them to grow was to live in community, and one of the things that was necessary for them to live in community was to be just, to be fair — an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, not an eye for ten eyes or a tooth for ten teeth.  No, it made sense in the beginning, as they worked together in a community that, if someone did something wrong, you could do it back to them but only in the same proportion they to you, and that was a real step forward.  That was a real movement toward understanding the way in which God intends us to live together — in justice.  And he tried to lead us into a place of freedom by finding people who could guide us and show us the way.  There were patriarchs.  There were prophets.  There were priests.  There were kings, but whenever God works through the authority of another, the human nature of that other gets in the way, because nothing is harder on people than giving them power, in terms of helping them to really be there for other people.  It’s such a temptation.  We know it.  Anyone with authority can so easily use that authority over another and rob them of their dignity and their worth.  We see it everywhere, especially today in race relationships.  So that’s a stage we went through, but then you realize there had to be another stage. 

That was God the Father, and now we’re going to look at God the Son.  God the Son enters into the world to do something more than the Father could ever do.  He has to model for them something that goes beyond justice, and what he’s modeling is a thing called love.  And the word in the New Testament is forgiveness.  Another word for forgiveness is full, radical acceptance of what is, what is true, to see goodness for what it can accomplish, to see evil for what it destroys, and the more we see both of those things, the more we’re imbued with an experience of one living in the world, manifesting this thing called mercy, called love, called no judgment.  It opens us up to a whole other way of interacting with each other.  It’s so interesting when God says, “One thing I want you to do —” he said this through his son.  “Stop judging each other,” and I think to myself — I’ve said that to people.  “God does not want us to judge.”  And then they’ll quote the creed that we say on Sunday.  “And God is the judge of the living and the dead.”  It’s so interesting.  You’ve got to understand judgment in this way.  Judgment is not discernment as to whether something is live-giving or death-dealing.  That’s called discernment, but judgment has to do with value, people’s value.  And to judge someone is not valuable, not worth saving, not worth working with, not worth being saved, that’s what we can’t ever, ever fall into, and yet that’s what justice tends to lead to.  Sort of like the people who harm us, they should not only be dealt with justly, if they cause pain, they should be in pain, and the mindset is there’s something ugly and horrible and bad about these people, like bad people don’t deserve love, affection, forgiveness.  That’s judgment, and the most amazing thing that Jesus came to do — it’s another dimension of who God is, because we have God the Father, then God the Son, then God the Spirit.  So I’m trying to make a distinction between each of their roles in our lives, particularly in time now.  I’m talking about the way they’ve been revealed to us, because it’s one God.  It’s one person, but when the time was right, we had God the Son, God the brother of humanity, the one who came into the world to reveal the fullness of what justice leads — what justice began, and that is mercy, understanding, compassion, empathy.  And when that’s engaged, something moves from people living together in a fair, just way to people interacting with each other where there’s a flow of something, a life-giving flow.  It’s called mercy.  It’s called forgiveness.  There’s another word.  It’s love.  When you move from justice to love, you’re into a whole new category, and that’s the evolution of what God is trying to be in our life.  He went from a God of justice to a God of mercy, but being a God of mercy wasn’t enough either.  There needed to be another stage, and so that’s the stage we’ve just gone through in celebration of Pentecost.  

And what I realized in that feast is what we’re saying is that this God who is both just and now merciful is also this mysterious thing called light, life, and that light and life is truth.  And so what God is ultimately designing his relationship with us to be is one that moves into this mysterious place where his indwelling presence enters into us and changes us.  We’re transformed, and that transformation leads us to be not just aware and conscious of what is true and what is real and what is life-giving, but we become the source.  We’re actually resonating those gifts.  It’s not that we’re doing them necessarily.  That’s one thing, but you can have people doing good things for bad motives.  So doing it is part of it, but there’s something much deeper.  And that’s this mysterious world of the Spirit, the transforming power of God, and where does that lead us?  It leads us to the place we are now, where we’re living in the age of the Spirit.  And it seems to me that that’s where we should be focusing on who God is.  It’s one thing to say, “My God is good and gracious, and he’s there for me.  He’s willing to support me.”  Okay, that’s God the Father, the creator, the artist.  He sees what he made, and he sees it as beautiful and valuable.  And then he says, “I want you to understand how it is that you’re going to live together, and you’ve got to start with justice.  But then you move to this wonderful thing called mercy.”  And mercy is so much more than letting your brother off the hook, of not condemning him. No, it’s being aware of who God has empowered you to be in this world that we live in, and this is the place we’re living now.  This is the age of the Spirit.  This is the fullness of God.  It’s like you hold all three of these together, but the Holy Spirit sometimes is the one that is not dealt with as much as God the judge or Jesus the brother who is forgiving.  But the Spirit is the fullness of who we are and the destiny that we’re here to fulfill, and I wish I could describe it to you in a way to say, “Do this, and you’ll feel it.”  No, it demands you are open to the reality of this figure God as a person, as not an idea, not as a historical figure, but it’s somehow saying, “I know you’re here.  I know you’re alive.  I know you live in me.  I know you’ve taught me all these things, but I want you to be a part of my life.  I want it, and I say yes to it, and I’ll accept all the confusion, all the craziness of the world.  It’s darkness.  I’ll live in that with you, and I will know that somehow in all of it, in every single thing that goes on, you will use that as a catalyst so that I, each of us individually, when we respond to things that are happening in the world, have the ability to respond in the Spirit.”  And the Spirit is the thing that gives us this enormous, transformative power.  

It’s interesting.  We call the first person in the Trinity God the Father.  Jesus is our brother, and the Spirit is our advocate — our advocate, our lawyer.  Isn’t that interesting, that the fullness of the relationship that God wants with us is that he’s created us, he now loves us in mercy and forgiveness, and he’s there to protect us.  From what?  What does a lawyer protect you from?  A misuse of the law.  The law, if you break it, you’re condemned, but the law is also something that Jesus came to say, “I’ve come to destroy its power over you.”  So we break the law.  Jesus broke the law all the time, not the law of love or the law of forgiveness but the legal law, and so it’s so interesting to also see this dimension of this resonance in us of God working through us to save the world, also, free of the limitations of so many of the rules and laws.  It doesn’t mean that we can get away with doing anything negative.  It just means that we are here to be such a mysterious instrument that no set of rules, no set of organized ways of dealing with life is going to fit.  We need wisdom, and wisdom goes beyond law.  And that’s the beauty of this incredible gift of the Trinity, but nothing is more important than finding and sensing and realizing its fullness and live ultimately in the Spirit.

Father, your greatness is too much for us.  All that you’ve planned, all that you have invited us into seems beyond our comprehension and beyond our abilities, and yet you continue to call us into places where your power works through us beyond anything we could ever do on our own.  Open us all to this great gift of your presence in our life.  Help us to be encouraged and enlightened and empowered so that we can accomplish all that you ask us to do, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.