On the Trinity

Ann and I are participating in one of the oldest rituals that there is in human existence- one that goes probably goes back to Adam and Eve. The discussion of what to name the baby. I have a strong preference for two names. The first, for a girl, is Miriam. I think in Miriam, Moses' sister, we get the example of a faithful devotion to God filled with happiness, gratitude, fortitude and singing. Ann finds this to be a beautiful name as well. The name that I would pick for a boy is Athanasius. Ann isn't quite as enthusiastic about that one. My sister has said that if we settle on these names, she hopes for a girl. I admit that Athanasius is not a very common name, and it might take a while to learn how to spell, but his namesake, Athanasius of Alexandria of the fourth century was used by God in a way that few others have been. God used Athanasius to help us to understand the Trinity. Did you get that? Athanasius helps us to understand the true nature of God, he helps us to speak well about God. Some of you still look skeptical. As our call to worship, we read Athanasian Creed. I admit, it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. But if you spend some time with it, you can see the nutshell of our faith. This morning, we are going to look ever so briefly at what this might mean.

This Sunday is Trinity Sunday. It is one of the times during the year where we pause for a moment and ask the big question to God- Who are you anyhow. The response that the faithful get is I am. I am the Father, I am the Son, I am the Holy Spirit. And we ask, which one? I am. I am the Father, I am the Son, I am the Holy Spirit. And this would be as good as a spot as any to end this sermon, because once we get past saying that God is the Father, Son, and Spirit, we start to get into trouble. But I am going to go on anyhow.

The most common criticism of Christianity by Muslims is that we are tritheists. A faithful Muslim would say, “there is but one God, Allah. But these Christians, they worship 3. They worship God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. They baptize their children in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They give their lives to three, not one”. A faithful Christian must respond, “No, we worship but one God, in three personas.”

[Certain Tibetan Buddhist Monks ... chords]

This would have been a big help in the early third century, when Turtullian struggled to find a word to describe the three aspects of the one God.

(3-1) Let's try it together. This side says 1, this side says 3. I think that there is a message about why the church needs diversity in order to get the whole story, but that was a sermon that some of you already suffered through on Wednesday.

3-1. St. Patrick's Day children's sermon. [3 leaves or 1 leaf] What Pat really said though was, we do not even have the language to describe a shamrock accurately, how can we describe God? So maybe I better stop here?

No, lets give it our best anyhow.

The Athanasian creed that we read sets out four rules for speaking well about God.

1. there is one God

2. the Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God

3. these three persons of the Trinity are distinct. the Father is not the Son or the Spirit, the Son is not the Father or the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father or the Son.

4. this is the essence of what Christians believe, so you better pray hard about it

To understand the basics of the Trinity is to understand the basics of God. God is excessive. God is overflowing abundance. Right now, on some deserted island, there are tens of thousands of flowers blooming that no-one will ever see. What a waste. No, God is like that. God doesn't do anything half way. We also know that God is love. Not that God has love, but God is love. And it is an excessive love. It is a love that is so excessive and perfect that the only object of this love that can handle it is Godself. God's love pours out from the Father and into the Son, and out from the Son and through the Spirit and from the Spirit and into God and it still spills over into all of creation. This excessive love that we see this in the Trinity shows us something quite amazing about God, if you think about it. Our God is a relational God. Not some mastermind in the sky. Not some cold. unconcerned great principle. No, our God, the God of love, the God of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is relational. And this is good news sisters and brothers. We are direct recipients of God's overflowing love and thank God for that.

God is relational. This is how we can understand how we can have 3-1. Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” Now, in these days of Oprah, we all take it for granted that we are to love ourselves. But lets step back and look at that for a second. When we speak of love, we are usually implying that there is a subject and an object. “I love Ann.” “Ann loves Eggplant Parmesan (and me too, I hope).” There is a person that is doing the loving, and there is someone or something being loved. But Jesus tells us it is perfectly reasonable to love yourself. In fact it is the benchmark for fulfilling our Gospel call to love our neighbors as ourselves. The subject is I, and the object is I. There are not two separate 'I's, but one I that loves and receives the love. So it is with the Trinity.

My identity is relational as well. I am a pastor. I am a husband. I am a friend. I will soon be a father. I am a son. I am me. Each of these entail different roles, different relationships. I say and do things differently in the role of a pastor than I do as a husband. But they draw from the same me. The same character, the same characteristics, are applied to all aspects of my life. So it is, in a sense, with God the Trinity.

There are many other ways that our church Fathers and Mothers have left us to understand the Trinity, and I love to explore, so if you want to talk more about it, give me a call. Seriously. But for now, lets go with this.

“Within the Trinity, there is constant movement, interaction, as the Father gives to the Son, and the Son is constantly returning praise and glory to the Father, and the Father and the Son give to the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit constantly draws everything back to the Father and the Son. There is the Beloved, the Lover, and the Love.” (Willimon)

Next week, we will answer the question. “So what? How does God being a Triune God affect my life in some other way than giving me a headache.” But for this week, I think that it is enough that we pray for increased understanding of God. That we continue to seek to learn more about God, in the same way that we ask a newfound friend questions about their life and who they are so that we can have a deeper relationship with her. God's very nature is based on relationships. So we, as creatures with the image of God in our breasts- we are called to be based in relationships. We are called to give and take, to assert and sacrifice, to be willing to compromise with each other, even if it means not naming your child Athanasius, even if you know that it is the best possible name, to offer ourselves wholly to one another.

God being abundant, effusive, gracious and ridiculously generous in God's outpouring of love calls us to be abundant, effusive, gracious, and ridiculously generous in our outpouring of love. When we reflect on the awesomeness of the nature of God in the Trinity and our relationship with God, our illusions of lack melt away. We are introduced into a different way of seeing our lives. We see abundance. We see that we partake in God's abundance. The world tells us to hide away our talents, our money, and be cautious about who we love. The Trinity tells us that to stop moving through relationships is death. That if you bury your talents, you lose them. If Amen? Amen.

baptized by water and fire

Art has power. I turn to art almost as much as I turn to theological treatises in order to get my spiritual imagination flowing. But sometimes, this power can lead us astray. Sometimes we can get an image in our mind's eye that is radically different than what the scripture paints. This morning I am thinking specifically about depictions in paintings of the Holy Spirit. Think about pictures you may have seen of the Holy Spirit. For example, the baptism of Jesus. The Father is at the top, old man with a beard, doesn't look like he gets out much, or sometimes God is shown as a ray of light. On the bottom is Jesus, young white man with a beard. In between is the Holy Spirit as a dove, hovering over Jesus, ready to poop God's love on Jesus. This is the image of the Holy Spirit that we have a tendency to grasp on to.

One novelist put it like this... “They paint the Holy Spirit descending upon the Apostles' heads in the form of a dove. For shame!…Where did they find that innocent, edible bird? How can they present that to us as spirit? No, the Spirit is not a dove, it is fire…(that) clamps its talons into the very crown of saints, martyrs, and great strugglers, reducing them to ashes. Abject souls are the ones who take the Holy Spirit for a dove, which they imagine they can kill and eat… Wake the fire! That is (our) duty…(This) is how (we) collaborate with God…Ignite the world, transform it into fire, and render it unto (God, who) will turn it into light.”

This is the image that we see in todays text. The Holy Spirit comes down upon those gathered as tongues of fire. Fire.

Think about fire. In your minds eye, think of a raging, spreading prairie fire. That is what the Holy Spirit is like. {help to visualize it}.

Think about some of the characteristics of fire. First off, there is nothing that it touches that it doesn't change. That it doesn't transform into something other than what it was. For this reason, fire is dangerous. We want our house to remain a collection of wood and nails ordered just so, not a pile of ash. We want our communion sets to be functional, not a mass of metal and glass which is what this became after the 1960 fire here at the church. We want our lives to stay just as they are. To stay right here in our oblivious comfort thank you very much, rather than becoming martyrs, or worse yet, saints.

But there comes a time when a strange stirring comes creeping up in your heart. A desire, a longing for life, and for life abundantly. These first stirrings come straight from God's spirit. Wesley called it 'prevenient grace'. This is the grace that we celebrate in baptism. In The Articles of Religion, John Wesley asserted that, “Baptism is not only a sign of profession and mark of difference whereby Christians are distinguished from others that are not baptized; but it is also a sign of regeneration or the new birth. The baptism of young children is to be retained in the church.” Baptism of an infant powerfully portrays the utter dependence which all of us have on God. It is not about anything that we do. The sacrament is the sign of God’s promise of ongoing grace, offering continual forgiveness and transformation throughout our lives. But we do not receive all of the benefits of baptism at once; this is particularly obvious when infants are baptized. At whatever age it is received, baptism demonstrates our inclusion in the covenant with God and our access to the divine grace that claims, sustains, and saves us.

And then there is a moment when we respond to this Grace. A moment when we stand up and say, “I am so tired of compromising. I am so tired of lukewarm living.” There comes this moment when we let the floodgates wide open and say Lord, set me on fire. Here I am with my heart wide open. Take it, Lord. Take all of it. I have no use for any of it if it is not in your service. It is this ongoing moment of awakening, when we give ourselves wholly and completely to God, that Wesley called Justifying Grace. At this point, when we allow the Holy Spirit to have its way, that we get burned. That we get transformed. Its a pure fire that wipes away our sins clean. We are burned beyond recognition, back to the state of grace in the garden before the fall. We may still be guilty of our sins, but God declares us not guilty. We celebrate God's justifying grace in the service of confirmation.

Unfortunately, what happens if you burn a field of weeds and then abandon it again. The weeds come back. So it is with sin. This is why we are in need of perpetual grace. We need to keep going back to the fire for further refinement. This is called Sanctifying Grace, and we practice it through communion. This is why we practice communion with increasing frequency, because we want to get back, to that state of divinity with Jesus Christ.

It has been 50 days since Easter, both for us and the disciples. The setting we read in Acts is very public. Luke gives a list of 15 distinct language groups. We are told that there are many faithful and we hear from skeptics. This is not an encounter with the divine that happens behind a locked door in a monastery. This is God making Godself present in the midst of community. “Christianity is lived out not in isolation, but in community with other Christians.” The church does not allow private baptisms except in the most extreme situation of imminent death. The congregation needs to be present to “reaffirm its own faith and commitment, to promise to nurture, teach, and support those whose commitments are being affirmed. We need mutual nurturing, by both proclamation and example. We grow in faith, service, and discipleship within a community of love and forgiveness.”

“And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost”

Sisters and Brothers, we are the community that was created in this holy fire. We are the ones who have felt God's call and are responding to it.

{“Nothing but fire kindles fire.” “If you want to set someone on fire, you have to buuurn a little bit yourself.” “A burning heart will soon find for itself a flaming tongue.”}

In a little bit, you will be invited to take on an awesome responsibility and you will need to keep these three principles in mind. We will be accepting one person into Christianity, one person into the United Methodist Church, and one into our local community at FGUMC. You will be asked if you will proclaim the good news and live according to the example of Christ. You will be asked if your will surround the Rueffs with a community of love and forgiveness. You will be asked if you will pray for them. If you do not intend to live up to these commitments, do not say them. Can we effectively do these three things on our own? No. And so we will need help from the fire of the Holy Spirit.

So how is it that we will proclaim the good news. How is it that the word of God spread from these initial 120 people that we read about in Acts to the entire world. How is it that we are expected to spread the word of God in a culture that already gets too much information. That has playstations and ipods and 300 channels on the TV. How can we possibly spread the word in such conditions. I'll tell you how. “Nothing but fire ... kindles fire.” People were on fire...

How can we express our love for this family, to surround them with a community of love and forgiveness. Simple, we need to make ourselves vulnerable. We need to put our pride on the shelf, or better yet send it back to Satan and tell him to keep it. If you are struggling in the faith, share it with someone. If you are sinning in any way, burn it out- don't let it fester. If we are going to be of any use to anyone, we cannot pretend like we are perfect. We need to burn a little ourselves. If you want to set someone on fire, you have to ... burn a little bit yourself.

Finally, how will we pray. We will pray passionately for them to have life and have it abundantly. A burning heart will soon find ... a flaming tongue. If we truly cultivate a love for this family and all of the families in our congregation, we will passionately desire that they have abundant life in Jesus.

We are going to take the offering now. Val and Deb are going to sing, and the rest of us are going to consider the responsibility that we are going to take on. We are going to ask God to reclaim our own lives so that we might be an effective Christian witness. We are going to ask that our hearts be filled with fire. Amen?

May the ushers please come forward.