Sermon Audio
May 22, 2016 Trinity Sunday
Connection
Isaiah 6:1-8, Psalm 29, Revelation 4:1-11, St. John 3:1-15
What might the church look like today if not for the Trinity? It’s not a rhetorical question and the answer is not elusive. All we need do is look at those broad empty spaces where the doctrine has been abandoned.
To exalt any of the Persons of the Godhead above the others is to fling open the door to error, heresy and even apostasy . . . but many churches have done just that.
Charismatics, infatuated with the Holy Spirit, diminish Father and Son and end up with an unmediated relationship with God that has little need of the written word.
Evangelicals, enraptured with the Son, make God a combination of their best friend and favorite uncle and abandon the majesty of the Lord enthroned on high.
Mainline Protestants, ever so comfortable with a detached Father, dally with deism, the notion that the Creator made the world and sits back and watches to see what it will do with itself.
The Trinity, however, is not an identification – a way to “think about” God. It is an identity – the very essence of who He is. And He is equally Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three in unity and one in Trinity. We must approach Him in no other way.
This, beloved, is not some high-blown exercise in theology. It is instead an understanding at the very core of who God is and who we are. The Trinity expresses the interconnection of the Persons of the Godhead, to be sure, but it gives us even more. It teaches us the interconnection of human persons as well.
For the former provides the model for the latter. Father, Son and Holy Ghost are of the same essence and so perfectly compatible. This is the basis for marriage, in which man and woman become “one flesh.”
Before the fall, Adam and Eve corresponded perfectly to one another. God had formed her from a piece of him. In marriage, they reunited and completed one another. Their sin corrupted the unity but it did not obliterate the ideal.
In the end and for all time, Christ the Bridegroom and the church, His bride, will live in beatific harmony. Because they are wedded collectively to the One who erased the stain of sin from the world, the members of the church will find the bliss of loving one another that God built into His perfect plan.
It will not come through physical union but through spiritual essence. Sin polluted the human essence. Through our Lord Christ, God has restored its purity. We will live in that purity eternally when we join God in His paradise, and dwell in His presence as Adam and Eve did before the fall.
We find here as well the underpinning of the biblical command not to be unequally yoked. To approximate the “one flesh” nature of Eden as closely as possible, each of us is under orders to join ourselves in marriage to another believer.
This is God’s way of allowing His people a foretaste of the everlasting joy of the undiluted harmony of existence with Him. It does something more as well. It creates the maximal condition for raising up the next generation of committed Christians – who will then train up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
So the Trinity demonstrates for humanity the reality of two becoming one while remaining two. It also reveals the principle of equality of essence with a distinction in roles.
The Father sends, the Son saves, the Spirit seals. The incarnate Son, who was sent, can say, “My Father is greater than I” (John 14:28) and in no way degrade His own rank as one of the three equal Persons of the Godhead.
Here again is the divine model informing the human interconnection. Man and woman enjoy the same stature in the eyes of their Creator, who loves them equally for they are equally His creatures in His image appointed to take dominion in His creation.
At the same time, as husband and wife they have different roles, functions and levels of authority. This is not the vexing abstraction some make of it when we first grasp the interrelations of the Persons of the Trinity. It becomes the entirely logical progression of human interconnection derived from the deity.
Now, I said this is not a matter confined to ivory towers on seminary campuses. It has dramatic implications for how we worship and how we live. We turn first to Europe, for Europe today routinely reveals where we will be in a few years.
Remember that God’s identity is the basis for human identity . . . and turn your attention to identity confusion. We go to Brighton, on the southern tip of Great Britain, a town in which I once spent a pleasant, sunny summer’s day at the races.
City Council sent a letter to hundreds of families telling them which school their child would attend in September and asked them to respond with which gender their child preferred. A note next to the tickbox for male/female explained that the national recording system only gives two options for gender and instructed these parents to help their children choose the gender they most identified with.
Brighton, it turns out, is a notoriously inclusive city. The latest controversy comes just three months after the council sent a gender survey to students at one school with 25 options to choose from. As well as traditional options of 'girl' and 'boy,’ children aged 13 to 18 were also invited to select from a list that included 'genderqueer,' 'tri-gender,' 'gender fluid' and 'intersex.' After some parents howled, the questionnaire was called a mistake and withdrawn.
On our own shores the federal government, aflame in its arrogance, has threatened public schools with loss of funding if they do not throw the bathroom doors open to one and all.
All around the United States young people are jumping body and soul into the trap of the denial of differences. Technological advances and women’s liberation have flung open the doors of the job market to all; the elimination of distinctions in work roles has fostered the fiction that male and female are identical except regarding sexual organs.
Next comes the notion that anyone who chooses may switch sexes in the interest of finding happiness. Governments are codifying this new attitude, even as they are corrupting the once-hallowed institution of marriage by opening it to persons of the same sex.
Trouble is, God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. He made them to correspond to one another that they might replace themselves over and again. Opposites attract, likes repel. It’s only natural.
How, then, have we come to this state of affairs?
Steeped in the postmodern culture, young people have grown to majority convinced that feelings trump all. We must not be surprised. In their world, reality is not what is but how the individual reacts with what is.
There can be no overarching narrative such as the Bible’s that explains the relationships of man and man or man and nature – and certainly not man and God -- because the objective reality their ancestors knew has given way to a constantly shifting matrix in which right and wrong are transitory at best and illusory at worst.
If, that is, one can speak of best and worst.
Moral concerns do exist but they are internally discerned, not handed down on stone tablets from the summit of Mount Sinai.
Beloved, I have dragged you off into the muck of the culture wars this morning for a reason. There’s a great deal more going on here than the potty politics roiling the surface.
When God made man male and female He created the family. To deny the distinct and reciprocal natures of man and woman is to undermine God’s rationale for the family. Gender roles are at the heart of human identity and thus of relationships within the family.
How much liberty can we endure? When our liberty as moral agents mutates into license to cast away the identity God assigned us, we join Adam and Eve in thumbing our noses at our Creator. To deny the identity God gave us is to repudiate the image of God within us.
We have seen that God in His infinite power makes distinct beings that merge with other beings without forfeiting their natures. Two become one while remaining two. To reach into the Godhead for still another illustration, Jesus Christ took on a fully human nature without surrendering His fully divine nature.
In the same way, the human body and soul are at the same time fully integrated and yet distinct. To alter the body in such a fundamental way as to change its God-given gender is to rupture its relationship with the soul.
That’s why we find soaring rates of not only sexually transmitted diseases but also addiction, depression and suicide among persons involved in same-sex relationships.
God designed sexual attraction in the context of the cultural mandate: Be fruitful and multiply. Following that direction, Adam and Eve were to push back the boundaries of Eden until their innumerable descendants covered the earth, all worshiping the one true God.
To obliterate the sexual identity God gave us is to turn sex into recreation apart from procreation, into fleeting pleasure that produces no lasting treasure.
Rebellion against the nature God gave us is rebellion against God. To tamper with our gender assignments is to enthrone man as lord. And to enthrone man is to depose God.
Our lessons for this Trinity Sunday show us a God who is high and lifted up. In Isaiah’s vision, He is pictured in heaven using imagery from the Jerusalem temple. The seraphim cry out, “Holy, holy, holy.” Those Jews of yore must have used the Sanctus in their worship as we do in ours.
In the gospel, our Lord tells Nicodemus He must be lifted up as Moses raised the serpent in the wilderness with its saving power. Jesus will be worshiped on His cross because on His cross He will vanquish sin and death.
In our lesson for the epistle from Revelation, it is St. John who enters the heavenly cathedral as Isaiah had before him. As God sits upon His throne, it is this time the four living creatures chanting, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come.”
Intriguing word, revelation. It sounds tame enough in English but the Greek behind it is “apokalupsis.” An apocalypse is a thing too strange and terrible and powerful and wonderful to behold, the eschatological triumph of good over evil.
But that victory will come dear. John has heard from the Lord already, “Be faithful even to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life” (Revelation 2;10).
This final book prepares the church for the eschaton, the things to come.
How St. John must have shuddered as, in the Spirit, he surveyed the celestial array before him, gazed upon the One in Three and Three in One. How it must have dazzled and bewildered and terrified him. What did this revelation mean?
The theologian Gerald Bray sums up: “The sense of the presence of God is so overwhelming that we can move among the persons almost without noticing, yet we are always fully conscious of their presence.
“There is never any confusion in the reader’s mind about who is speaking or acting, yet in coldly logical terms, the three cannot be clearly distinguished from the one God. Father, Son and Holy Spirit reveal themselves to John, and so also to us, as one God, living and moving in the fullness of his trinitarian being.
“The doctrine, culled from the rest of Scripture, and laboriously constructed, is here presented to us in all its profound complexity and splendid simplicity. The God whom we cannot explain, we know, the One we cannot picture, we see.
“The Book of Revelation is first and foremost a revelation of the Trinity, and it is only when we understand this that we will be equipped to interpret its meaning, which is nothing less than the mystical vision of God.” So wrote Gerald Bray.
Once, it seemed not-so-strange. The Athanasian Creed catches it nicely. It refers to ‘the Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible.’
And so it must be. The Trinity is not for finite minds to penetrate. But the mystical vision of God is not too remote for us. The author of Hebrews, in fact, promises us we ascend into the divine presence when we worship even now.
Who can make bold to aspire to this journey into the heavens? Who may plunge into transcendence? Just plain folks, for all are naked before God. When our Lord confronts the wealthy Pharisee Nicodemus, He encounters a man who is wedded to the law of Israel, the fount of all that is good.
Nicodemus comes by night, but the wonder is he comes at all. Nicodemus – God bless him! – is more enchanted than he is afraid. He must know who this Jesus is. A teacher of the Jews who performs wonders never seen? He must have come from God. What precious jewels of wisdom must He bear!
But the truth Jesus reveals gives Nicodemus a good old jolt: Only one who is born again can see the Kingdom of God.
Now, already unhinged, Nicodemus must grapple with the Greek word anothen. It may indeed mean “again.” It may mean “from above.” It may mean “in the beginning.” Or might it mean that to see the Kingdom of God one must be born again from above and restored to his sinless state in the beginning?
Oh, dear. Nicodemus blurts, back into the womb? A literal-minded man, he latches onto “again” and he is supremely befuddled. At last, he is in a state to receive divine instruction.
And so, says Jesus, one born of the flesh has naught but his own meager resources but one born of the Spirit has within him the victorious life of God. He is re-created. The God who has come to earth to usher in the Kingdom has graced him with transcendence – and our gender will be our gender forever and ever.
When we enter into the mystery of the Trinity we find the humility to accept the reality that God has given us the pattern for a connected life . . . in Him. The template He gives each of us at birth is not open to amendment according to human whims because God Himself has stamped His imprint upon it.
We had a gender, you and I, when God thought of us in eternity past; we have it today, and we will have it everlastingly. The Trinity is no passing fancy, and so neither is our identity. Amen.
Connection
Isaiah 6:1-8, Psalm 29, Revelation 4:1-11, St. John 3:1-15
What might the church look like today if not for the Trinity? It’s not a rhetorical question and the answer is not elusive. All we need do is look at those broad empty spaces where the doctrine has been abandoned.
To exalt any of the Persons of the Godhead above the others is to fling open the door to error, heresy and even apostasy . . . but many churches have done just that.
Charismatics, infatuated with the Holy Spirit, diminish Father and Son and end up with an unmediated relationship with God that has little need of the written word.
Evangelicals, enraptured with the Son, make God a combination of their best friend and favorite uncle and abandon the majesty of the Lord enthroned on high.
Mainline Protestants, ever so comfortable with a detached Father, dally with deism, the notion that the Creator made the world and sits back and watches to see what it will do with itself.
The Trinity, however, is not an identification – a way to “think about” God. It is an identity – the very essence of who He is. And He is equally Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three in unity and one in Trinity. We must approach Him in no other way.
This, beloved, is not some high-blown exercise in theology. It is instead an understanding at the very core of who God is and who we are. The Trinity expresses the interconnection of the Persons of the Godhead, to be sure, but it gives us even more. It teaches us the interconnection of human persons as well.
For the former provides the model for the latter. Father, Son and Holy Ghost are of the same essence and so perfectly compatible. This is the basis for marriage, in which man and woman become “one flesh.”
Before the fall, Adam and Eve corresponded perfectly to one another. God had formed her from a piece of him. In marriage, they reunited and completed one another. Their sin corrupted the unity but it did not obliterate the ideal.
In the end and for all time, Christ the Bridegroom and the church, His bride, will live in beatific harmony. Because they are wedded collectively to the One who erased the stain of sin from the world, the members of the church will find the bliss of loving one another that God built into His perfect plan.
It will not come through physical union but through spiritual essence. Sin polluted the human essence. Through our Lord Christ, God has restored its purity. We will live in that purity eternally when we join God in His paradise, and dwell in His presence as Adam and Eve did before the fall.
We find here as well the underpinning of the biblical command not to be unequally yoked. To approximate the “one flesh” nature of Eden as closely as possible, each of us is under orders to join ourselves in marriage to another believer.
This is God’s way of allowing His people a foretaste of the everlasting joy of the undiluted harmony of existence with Him. It does something more as well. It creates the maximal condition for raising up the next generation of committed Christians – who will then train up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
So the Trinity demonstrates for humanity the reality of two becoming one while remaining two. It also reveals the principle of equality of essence with a distinction in roles.
The Father sends, the Son saves, the Spirit seals. The incarnate Son, who was sent, can say, “My Father is greater than I” (John 14:28) and in no way degrade His own rank as one of the three equal Persons of the Godhead.
Here again is the divine model informing the human interconnection. Man and woman enjoy the same stature in the eyes of their Creator, who loves them equally for they are equally His creatures in His image appointed to take dominion in His creation.
At the same time, as husband and wife they have different roles, functions and levels of authority. This is not the vexing abstraction some make of it when we first grasp the interrelations of the Persons of the Trinity. It becomes the entirely logical progression of human interconnection derived from the deity.
Now, I said this is not a matter confined to ivory towers on seminary campuses. It has dramatic implications for how we worship and how we live. We turn first to Europe, for Europe today routinely reveals where we will be in a few years.
Remember that God’s identity is the basis for human identity . . . and turn your attention to identity confusion. We go to Brighton, on the southern tip of Great Britain, a town in which I once spent a pleasant, sunny summer’s day at the races.
City Council sent a letter to hundreds of families telling them which school their child would attend in September and asked them to respond with which gender their child preferred. A note next to the tickbox for male/female explained that the national recording system only gives two options for gender and instructed these parents to help their children choose the gender they most identified with.
Brighton, it turns out, is a notoriously inclusive city. The latest controversy comes just three months after the council sent a gender survey to students at one school with 25 options to choose from. As well as traditional options of 'girl' and 'boy,’ children aged 13 to 18 were also invited to select from a list that included 'genderqueer,' 'tri-gender,' 'gender fluid' and 'intersex.' After some parents howled, the questionnaire was called a mistake and withdrawn.
On our own shores the federal government, aflame in its arrogance, has threatened public schools with loss of funding if they do not throw the bathroom doors open to one and all.
All around the United States young people are jumping body and soul into the trap of the denial of differences. Technological advances and women’s liberation have flung open the doors of the job market to all; the elimination of distinctions in work roles has fostered the fiction that male and female are identical except regarding sexual organs.
Next comes the notion that anyone who chooses may switch sexes in the interest of finding happiness. Governments are codifying this new attitude, even as they are corrupting the once-hallowed institution of marriage by opening it to persons of the same sex.
Trouble is, God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. He made them to correspond to one another that they might replace themselves over and again. Opposites attract, likes repel. It’s only natural.
How, then, have we come to this state of affairs?
Steeped in the postmodern culture, young people have grown to majority convinced that feelings trump all. We must not be surprised. In their world, reality is not what is but how the individual reacts with what is.
There can be no overarching narrative such as the Bible’s that explains the relationships of man and man or man and nature – and certainly not man and God -- because the objective reality their ancestors knew has given way to a constantly shifting matrix in which right and wrong are transitory at best and illusory at worst.
If, that is, one can speak of best and worst.
Moral concerns do exist but they are internally discerned, not handed down on stone tablets from the summit of Mount Sinai.
Beloved, I have dragged you off into the muck of the culture wars this morning for a reason. There’s a great deal more going on here than the potty politics roiling the surface.
When God made man male and female He created the family. To deny the distinct and reciprocal natures of man and woman is to undermine God’s rationale for the family. Gender roles are at the heart of human identity and thus of relationships within the family.
How much liberty can we endure? When our liberty as moral agents mutates into license to cast away the identity God assigned us, we join Adam and Eve in thumbing our noses at our Creator. To deny the identity God gave us is to repudiate the image of God within us.
We have seen that God in His infinite power makes distinct beings that merge with other beings without forfeiting their natures. Two become one while remaining two. To reach into the Godhead for still another illustration, Jesus Christ took on a fully human nature without surrendering His fully divine nature.
In the same way, the human body and soul are at the same time fully integrated and yet distinct. To alter the body in such a fundamental way as to change its God-given gender is to rupture its relationship with the soul.
That’s why we find soaring rates of not only sexually transmitted diseases but also addiction, depression and suicide among persons involved in same-sex relationships.
God designed sexual attraction in the context of the cultural mandate: Be fruitful and multiply. Following that direction, Adam and Eve were to push back the boundaries of Eden until their innumerable descendants covered the earth, all worshiping the one true God.
To obliterate the sexual identity God gave us is to turn sex into recreation apart from procreation, into fleeting pleasure that produces no lasting treasure.
Rebellion against the nature God gave us is rebellion against God. To tamper with our gender assignments is to enthrone man as lord. And to enthrone man is to depose God.
Our lessons for this Trinity Sunday show us a God who is high and lifted up. In Isaiah’s vision, He is pictured in heaven using imagery from the Jerusalem temple. The seraphim cry out, “Holy, holy, holy.” Those Jews of yore must have used the Sanctus in their worship as we do in ours.
In the gospel, our Lord tells Nicodemus He must be lifted up as Moses raised the serpent in the wilderness with its saving power. Jesus will be worshiped on His cross because on His cross He will vanquish sin and death.
In our lesson for the epistle from Revelation, it is St. John who enters the heavenly cathedral as Isaiah had before him. As God sits upon His throne, it is this time the four living creatures chanting, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come.”
Intriguing word, revelation. It sounds tame enough in English but the Greek behind it is “apokalupsis.” An apocalypse is a thing too strange and terrible and powerful and wonderful to behold, the eschatological triumph of good over evil.
But that victory will come dear. John has heard from the Lord already, “Be faithful even to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life” (Revelation 2;10).
This final book prepares the church for the eschaton, the things to come.
How St. John must have shuddered as, in the Spirit, he surveyed the celestial array before him, gazed upon the One in Three and Three in One. How it must have dazzled and bewildered and terrified him. What did this revelation mean?
The theologian Gerald Bray sums up: “The sense of the presence of God is so overwhelming that we can move among the persons almost without noticing, yet we are always fully conscious of their presence.
“There is never any confusion in the reader’s mind about who is speaking or acting, yet in coldly logical terms, the three cannot be clearly distinguished from the one God. Father, Son and Holy Spirit reveal themselves to John, and so also to us, as one God, living and moving in the fullness of his trinitarian being.
“The doctrine, culled from the rest of Scripture, and laboriously constructed, is here presented to us in all its profound complexity and splendid simplicity. The God whom we cannot explain, we know, the One we cannot picture, we see.
“The Book of Revelation is first and foremost a revelation of the Trinity, and it is only when we understand this that we will be equipped to interpret its meaning, which is nothing less than the mystical vision of God.” So wrote Gerald Bray.
Once, it seemed not-so-strange. The Athanasian Creed catches it nicely. It refers to ‘the Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible.’
And so it must be. The Trinity is not for finite minds to penetrate. But the mystical vision of God is not too remote for us. The author of Hebrews, in fact, promises us we ascend into the divine presence when we worship even now.
Who can make bold to aspire to this journey into the heavens? Who may plunge into transcendence? Just plain folks, for all are naked before God. When our Lord confronts the wealthy Pharisee Nicodemus, He encounters a man who is wedded to the law of Israel, the fount of all that is good.
Nicodemus comes by night, but the wonder is he comes at all. Nicodemus – God bless him! – is more enchanted than he is afraid. He must know who this Jesus is. A teacher of the Jews who performs wonders never seen? He must have come from God. What precious jewels of wisdom must He bear!
But the truth Jesus reveals gives Nicodemus a good old jolt: Only one who is born again can see the Kingdom of God.
Now, already unhinged, Nicodemus must grapple with the Greek word anothen. It may indeed mean “again.” It may mean “from above.” It may mean “in the beginning.” Or might it mean that to see the Kingdom of God one must be born again from above and restored to his sinless state in the beginning?
Oh, dear. Nicodemus blurts, back into the womb? A literal-minded man, he latches onto “again” and he is supremely befuddled. At last, he is in a state to receive divine instruction.
And so, says Jesus, one born of the flesh has naught but his own meager resources but one born of the Spirit has within him the victorious life of God. He is re-created. The God who has come to earth to usher in the Kingdom has graced him with transcendence – and our gender will be our gender forever and ever.
When we enter into the mystery of the Trinity we find the humility to accept the reality that God has given us the pattern for a connected life . . . in Him. The template He gives each of us at birth is not open to amendment according to human whims because God Himself has stamped His imprint upon it.
We had a gender, you and I, when God thought of us in eternity past; we have it today, and we will have it everlastingly. The Trinity is no passing fancy, and so neither is our identity. Amen.