Trinity Sunday

Trinity Sunday
May 31, 2015
First Lutheran Church
Louisville KY

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Sh'ma Yis'ra'eil Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad.
Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.

Kurios Iesous.

Jesus is Lord.

The first of the theological affirmations I just proclaimed in my bad Hebrew is the Sh’ma, the prayer from the Book of Deuteronomy that is said at least twice a day by devout Jews and which is recalled in many other ways throughout the day, is the closest thing Judaism has to a creed.

·       It’s an affirmation of monotheism, the oneness of God.

·       It’s also an affirmation of God’s authority.

The second affirmation, in my equally bad Greek, is the first and most basic creedal statement of Christianity and in common use among Christians by the time of Paul’s letters in the mid first century.

For Christians, both of these statements are equally true and so it was soon evident that there was a theological problem.

·       The Lord is the one God.

·       Jesus is the Lord.

·       Jesus is the one God.

·       What can it mean to say the truly human Jesus, whom people still living had seen and known in the flesh, was truly God?

·       Experiencing the power of the Spirit in their lives, the question of the Holy Spirit also soon arose.

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is the product of several centuries of Christians wrestling (sometimes literally) with this theological issue.

From our perspective, it’s easy to suggest that two millennia of sometimes heated discussion about the nature of God and the persons of the trinity is nothing more than a vain attempt at defining God and, at worst, a test for membership in a club we call church.

Dear friends, I would like to suggest, no that’s too wimpy a word, I am proclaiming, perhaps even insisting, that the doctrine of the trinity is, in fact, good news for us and for our world.

3:16 "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.

In perhaps the most quoted verse from the New Testament, we are told that God is for us and, even more importantly, that God comes to us.

Furthermore, today’s Gospel lesson reminds us that God dwells in each of us through the Spirit.

God for us!

God with us!

God in us!

God for us means that our salvation is God’s doing.

·       We can give up trying to save ourselves by our own good works.

·       We can give up trying to save ourselves through power, money, and their demonic offspring war.

God with us means that our bodies, our human experiences, and this world in which we live have been and continue to be made holy by God’s physical presence in Jesus.

·       The flesh, as spoken of negatively in today’s lessons, is an allegiance to hedonism, an affirmation that I am lord and doesn’t refer to our actual bodies or the creation, all of which God has called good.

·       We are not alone as is expressed in the ancient Christian greeting “The Lord be with you.”

God in us means that we have the power and the freedom to be more than we could ever dream or imagine.

·       God’s Holy Spirit is at work in us making us God’s hands and feet in the world.

·       The Spirit makes us, like Isaiah, friends of God and prophets.

·       The Spirit enlivens us and will one day restore these mortal bodies of ours so that we might be like Christ in glory.

Finally, to say that God is Trinity is to say that God is by nature a community of love, that is, God is love.

·       Having been created in the divine image, then, we are not made to be the rugged individual so praised by our culture.

·       Resplendent in our individual identities, like Father, Son and Spirit, each of us has none-the less been made to be a part of a “we”.

·       That “we” can be experienced in family and friendship but is especially made manifest in the Church.

·       We are not baptized into just a personal relationship with Jesus, but into a community of faith centered in love around a triune God that uses us to invite others into that same relationship.

The Father is not the Son and not the Holy Spirit.

The Son is not the Father and not the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is not the Father and not the Son.

There are three persons.

The Father is God.

The Son is God.

The Holy Spirit is God.

There is one God.

These formulations sound clumsy and soulless to many of us today.

·       Their dependence on intellectual categories seems foreign to our culture which is obsessed with feelings.

·       But clumsy and foreign though they might be, they have no other purpose than to be of service to the good news.

I hope you’ll agree that God for us, God with us, and God in us is indeed good news.

I hope you’ll agree that to say that God is love and that we have been created to be loved and to be lovers is indeed good news.

This feast of the Holy Trinity then, is not some theological litmus test nor a celebration of some philosophical argument, but a proclamation of the good news.

To the Father give glory, to the Son give glory, to the Holy Spirit give glory; now and forever. Amen