God Talk

        Today is Trinity Sunday, the only Sunday in the liturgical calendar named for a theological doctrine. As preacher and congregation, we should be grateful that there is only one such Sunday per year. Imagine how difficult it would be for me to preach year after year on, say, "Predestination Sunday." Imagine this scene at home on a Sunday morning:

        "Right, kids! Let’s finish breakfast and get dressed. We don’t want to be late for "Ecclesiology Sunday."

        Most of the time we are content to sing and pray our faith in the Triune God without making too much fuss about it. We recite the Creed (some of us with our fingers discretely crossed behind our backs). We sing the old hymns with their obligatory Trinitarian doxologies. We receive the three-part blessing at the end of the service, dismissed in the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit.

        Hang around the church very long, and you’ll find yourself using Trinitarian language without really thinking about it. "Father," you might pray, addressing the first person of the Trinity, "Send your Spirit on us as we begin this committee meeting . . ." Or you might sing this prayer to the second person of the Trinity as you sit down to dinner at home:

Lord Jesus,
Be our holy guest,
our morning joy, our evening rest,
and with our daily food impart
your love and peace to every heart.

        If a congregation is being true to its calling -- if it is being the church – then it is constantly talking Trinity. We don’t really need a special Sunday for that. For us Christians, there is no other way to speak about God.

        Christians were speaking Trinity long before the theologians managed to come up with a systematic theology to go with it. We speak that way because that’s how God has revealed God’s self to us. We speak that way because that’s the way scripture speaks.

        The ruach, the "breath" of God broods over the face of the waters in the first creation story. That’s in Genesis, of course. Flip over to other books. There the Spirit gives the prophets courage to call for justice in the city gate and to stand before kings and hold them accountable to God.

        Turn to Proverbs. There Lady Wisdom stands alongside the Creator like an architect at a construction site.

        "Where do I put the mountains?"

        "Over there," says Lady Wisdom. "Line them up and put some valleys in between."

        "Where should the shoreline be?"

        "Right about here, don’t you think? And a white-sand beach would be nice right there, along the Gulf of Mexico."

        Lady Wisdom sings of herself ". . . when [the Lord] marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him, always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race" (Proverbs 8:29-30).

        Centuries later the gospel writer John speaks of God’s logos, God’s word present with God at the beginning, becoming flesh, and pitching his tent among us, full of grace and truth. That living Word tells his disciples, "The Father and I are one (John 10:30). " . . . I am in the Father and the Father is in me." (John 14:10).

        In Luke’s Gospel that same Jesus whom John calls the Word takes up the scroll of the prophet Isaiah right in his own home synagogue and reads,

        "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." Then he rolls up the scroll, gives it back to the attendant, sits down to teach and says, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." (Luke 14: 18, 20).

That same Jesus, living Word made flesh, Spirit-anointed Messiah, says to his followers, "If you love me you will keep my commandments . . . and my Father will send you another Advocate . . . the Spirit of truth . . . he will be in you. (John 14:17).

        And sure enough, on the Day of Pentecost, something like tongues of fire settle on the disciples and they begin to preach in every tongue known to the Jewish world. "They’re a bunch of drunks," says the crowd. "No," says Peter. "We’re filled with the Holy Spirit."

        The Church speaks Trinity because that’s our mother tongue. We started speaking Trinity before we knew what it meant. We still speak it and we still don’t know fully what it means. But we have to speak this way because that’s the way God taught us to speak. It’s the best and most faithful language we have to express the reality revealed to us in scripture and in the face of Jesus.

        After all, the essence of God is too great for our understanding. We cannot get our creaturely heads around the vastness and otherness of God. With the psalmist we look at the heavens, the works of God’s fingers, the moon and the stars which God has established, and it blows our minds that God would even bother to pay us the slightest attention.

        But God has done more than that. God has revealed God’s own self in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The doctrine of the Trinity arose because of Jesus. We learned to speak this way because we came to know God by looking at Jesus. Jesus is the spitting image of the invisible God (Col. 1:15).

        T. F. Torrance is a Scottish theologian. He has written books in the field of science and theology that are so beyond my comprehension that I can’t even understand the titles. When Tom Torrance was a chaplain in the British army he was asked a question by a dying nineteen-year-old soldier. Later, when he returned to the pastorate, he was asked the very same question by an elderly woman, the oldest member of his congregation. This was their question: "Is God really like Jesus?"

        Because we know God as Triune, Tom Torrance was able to give the same answer to that young soldier and that elderly woman. Oh, yes. "God is indeed really like Jesus and . . . there is no unknown God behind the back of Jesus for us to fear; to see the Lord Jesus is to see the very face of God"  (Quoted by William C. Placher, “Three in One: Believing in the Triune God,” Christian Century, April 17, 2007, p. 32).

        That’s what Paul, or one of his disciples, meant, when he wrote to the Ephesians,

There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. (Ephesians 4:4-8).

        Cyril of Jerusalem, writing in the fourth century, said much the same thing: "The gifts of the Father are none other than the gifts of the Son, and those of the Holy Spirit, for there is one Salvation, one Power, one Faith . . . And it is enough for us to know these things, but inquire not curiously into His nature or substance."

        The first Christians spoke Trinity before the theologians tried to reconcile the Church’s language with the language of the philosophers. For all their valiant efforts at communicating the faith in the intellectual constructs of their own age, theologians never quite succeed in comprehending the incompressible.

        I think Jürgen Moltmann comes closest to the mark when he writes, "The doctrine of the Trinity is nothing other than the conceptual framework needed to understand the story of Jesus as the story of God."

        We Christians believe there is only one God, the God of love, the God we see in the face of Jesus. God’s very self is revealed in the crucified Jesus who lives in us by the indwelling of the Spirit.

        When congregations get off track, it’s usually because they emphasize one dimension of God’s tri-unity over the other two – or to use the classical language, one "person" of the Trinity over the other persons.

        The doctrine of the Trinity keeps us from settling for a God who is too small, or as is the case with so many modern "spiritualities," too big and vague to resemble anyone we read about in scripture. We worship the Triune God, the God who has a name, not what someone has dubbed the "Sacred Blur" of modern spirituality.

        No matter how clever our clever our words, we will never contain the God revealed to us as Father, Son, and Spirit. The Father who spreads out wings like a mothering hen. The Son who lays down his life for the world. The Spirit who breathes new life into old, dry bones and sets the church afire.

        We will never understand the Triune God. But hear this Good News: the Triune God understands and loves us. That’s why every hymn is in some sense a Trinitarian hymn, every prayer is to God the Three-in-One, and, if we are faithful to scripture, every Sunday is Trinity Sunday.

        In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of he Holy Spirit . . .