Sermon - Trinity Sunday

Last week was the celebration of Pentecost, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.  Today, we continue in the season of Pentecost with Trinity Sunday.  The Trinity:  Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; one God made known to us in three persons.  As I close the service each Sunday with the benediction, I say:  And now may the grace and peace of God, the Father, the reconciliation of Jesus Christ, his son, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit be upon you each and every day.  God the Father is often thought of as God the Creator, the one that creates the world and establishes covenants with God’s people.  To Jesus we attribute the gift of forgiveness and the one that brings us into God’s grace.   The Holy Spirit is the one that sustains us each and every day, guides us through this life, gives us spiritual gifts in which we are to use in our service to God.  This Triune God has kept theologians in business for generations as people seek to explain how exactly God can be one God but manifests God’s self in various ways. 

            We like to use teaching tools to help our finite minds grasp God’s infinite being.  So, we try and explain the Triune God with images such as water.  Water is always water, and yet it exists in various forms.  Water can be a liquid, a solid, and a gas, yet it is always water.  I tried to explain to my children the other day that there is actually water in the air all around us.  We don’t usually feel it, but when we spill water on the table, in an hour or so, the water is gone.  Where did it go?  It evaporates into the air.  This is really hard for a young child to comprehend, and yet, they understand that the water is gone. 

            One way that I try and grasp this concept is how in our own lives we wear various hats.  Today, I have my pastor hat on, you all know me as pastor Carie.  While, at the same time, my children know me as mommy.  And my high school friends still remember me as a soccer player.  Same me, but known in various ways to various people.  Now, I have not always been soccer player, mother, and pastor but the potential for it has always been within me. 

            God has made God’s self known to people throughout the generations in various ways, and yet, we as Christian proclaim that God has never changed so God has always been three in one, God has always been Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  The early church was very deliberate in making sure that people understood that Jesus was not a new creation of God, but had existed with God from all time and only entered the world in human form in what we now call the Christmas birth story.  The same is true of the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit of God is not created or born at Pentecost, but rather has existed with God as God from the beginning of time. 

            Tucked away in various places of our scriptures we have a variety of creation stories.  Genesis is not the only Creation story as God makes the world in seven days and creates Adam and Eve.  Today, we have the passage from Proverbs of how Wisdom is with God in the establishing of the foundations of the world.  In Hebrew, the word for wisdom is hokma, and is in our Christian theology the Holy Spirit.  In this passage in Proverbs, God creates wisdom before God creates anything else, and then with the act of Creation, Wisdom is right there with God delighting in the work of creation.   

            In the Gospel of John we also get a creation story of how through the word God creates the world and the word is Jesus.  So, as we learn the whole of scripture, we see how God the Creator is also God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 

            So, as we wrestle with how God is three in one,  why does it matter in today’s world?  Can we just proclaim faith in God and not get caught up in the details of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?  Personally, I grew up with mostly God language.  I still remember the day in high school when the teaching the Jesus was not just God’s son, but God’s self sunk in.  I’m sure I had heard it over and over but never really paid attention.  But I finally heard it, and I started paying attention a little more to the teachings of Jesus and how they applied to my life.  This can also be true of the Holy Spirit.  Sure, we can say we have faith in God, and seek to live our lives as God’s people, but as we grow in how God the Spirit calls us to live, we may hear ways in which to deepen our faith. 

Joan Chittister says it like this:

Clearly, wisdom is not a gift; wisdom is a task; wisdom costs. Wisdom calls us, the Scripture says, to know ourselves, to squeeze out of every moment in life whatever lessons it holds for us, whatever responses it demands at that time.  It is wisdom that calls each of us to be everything we have the capacity to be.  It is wisdom that is the internal force that drives us to become the fullness of ourselves.  It goes without saying then that wisdom is not life lived at its most docile. It is, instead, life lived at its most demanding.  Let those who seek wisdom, in others words, beware. Scripture maintains that wisdom—which it defines in another place as “fear of the lord”—means holy astonishment, complete wonder and awe at what God does in my life and the life of everyone around me. Wisdom is the first thing God created, “The first of God’s acts long ago,” Scripture says. It is important beyond all telling, in other words. It is basic to life, fundamental to holiness, and full of unrelenting challenge…The real point of the reading lies in the fact that wisdom, if we seek it, is that which simply does not let us alone. Wisdom doesn’t settle down nor does it allow us to settle down. Wisdom leads us from one point to another in life until we learn what we’re supposed to learn, until we do what we’re supposed to do, until we each become what we’re supposed to become. With who and what we are Wisdom leads, prods, and will pursue us to our graves. Life—wisdom—is pursuing each of us, indeed sinking its teeth and nails into every one us, calling us to what the world calls madness, forcing us to mix the wines of our life…

            As the Gospel of Matthew closes, God’s people are called to go out into the world and make disciples, baptizing in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Each part of God has something unique to teach us and as disciples has something unique to give us as we live our lives.  If we only focus on one aspect of the Trinity, we may unknowingly not be listening to the other voices of God speaking to us.  The more we grow in our understanding of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the more aware we will grow of God’s presence with us each and every day. 

            Where was God present with you this past week?  Can we name the ways in which God was present in Creation?  Or perhaps a moment of forgiveness?  Or perhaps through prayer?  Was joy shared this week or letter or phone call made to connect with someone you have been thinking about?  These are all connections to God’s spiritual presence within us and within the world if we begin to listen.