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Trinity Sunday
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Scripture citation(s): Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17
A Sermon by
Fr. Austin
on
Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17
✛
Trinitarian Doctrine is Good for the World
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The first thing to say about the doctrine of the Trinity is that we Christians should not be ashamed of it. Yet many Christians easily talk about Jesus; some will speak of the power of the Spirit; lots will talk about “God” and about love and about justice and peace; but about the Trinity, one detects an embarrassed silence. The Trinity, felt to be difficult and obscure, is treated as if it had little to do with real Christian life.
This is not true. We do the world no favors when we hide our light under a bushel. Christian doctrine, and particularly the doctrine of the Trinity, is good for the world. We need not apologize for it; to the contrary, let us own it boldly. Here is my effort to do so, and to encourage you to do the same.
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The Trinity is God, and the doctrine of the Trinity is just what God has revealed to us about himself. God exists in three identities, which are called Persons. However, these Persons are not individuals, but are one Being. This is a fantastic teaching, one that is frankly beyond what the human mind can grasp. Christian doctrine stretches us towards the amazing trinitarian truth of God-in-himself.
In addition to the revelation of who God is in himself, the doctrine of the Trinity also claims that God chooses to relate himself to the world that he makes. First we have God “the Father Almighty, creator . . . .” This is God as the giver of existence, the one who makes me be and you be and this island of Manhattan be and everything else be. God makes it all. He is somewhat like the author of a story, and in fact “authorship” is a good way to think about creation. God creates out of nothing, by which we mean there is nothing in the world that causes the world to be. Similarly, J. R. R. Tolkien, say, does not use anything in his books to create his books. He does not make Middle Earth out of things that are in Middle Earth. From the point of view of a character in the story, the world is created out of nothing.
What God has done, however, is not only create the world, he has desired (so he tells us) from the very beginning also to be a creature within the world. This author desired to be a character in the story he was writing. God so loved the world, that he sent his only-begotten Son . . . .
And there is still more. Not only is God the creator of the story, and not only has God desired to be a character in the story, God has so loved the world that he wants the story to be a good one. He wants things to turn out well in the end. God doesn’t want this world to be nothing more than sound and fury, signifying nothing: he wants the world to be meaningful. And so God gives the Holy Spirit as the promise that there is a future, and that he is there too, already, there as the future.
All this could be written as a story of God; and while God in himself is beyond our comprehension, strange and awesome in his eternal changelessness, God as related to us does have a story, because he has given us a story and put himself in it.
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A robust and unashamed proclamation of the Trinity pays off in practical ways. Here are two.
First, when the Trinity is taught, prayer makes sense, and without the Trinity prayer is nonsense. If prayer is just a creature trying to talk to “God,” there’s no getting around that as a picture of vain manipulation (at best) or psychosis (more likely). Once a few of us students were having dinner at St. John’s College, and (even back then!) one of them asked if I’d like to say grace. I turned to my atheist friend (my best friend) who said, “Go ahead; the Prime Mover doesn’t know, doesn’t care!” Indeed, Aristotle’s Prime Mover is sovereignly indifferent to the universe that is attracted to him. And a character in a story who attempts to speak to the author of the story needs psychiatric medication. Characters just don’t speak to authors.
Christian teaching about prayer is different. When we pray, we are within God’s own triune being, participating in the divine communications that constitute God’s being. Ye have received the Spirit of adoption, Saint Paul says, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. God’s Holy Spirit has been given to you, and he dwells within you. Prayer is the voice of the Spirit rising up to address Abba, Father, an address that is done through the Son (he is the Spirit “of adoption,” making us sisters and brothers of the Son, Jesus, who himself prayed Abba, Father). To pray is to be in the midst of these divine communications, which are the dynamics of God’s own Being. And so, for Christians, there is no problem of how a creature can speak to its creator, no problem of a character in the story trying to address the author. No problem, because God has given himself to us, and God is the Giver, the Gift, and the Goal.
Second, the doctrine of the Trinity secures for us the great Christian virtue of hope. It is our hope that the story of the universe will turn out to be a story of love rather than hate, that in the end all forms of injustice will be unmasked and revealed for what they are and decisively conquered for good, and that when this happens, when that is to say our Lord Jesus returns from heaven to judge the quick and the dead, we hope to find that our own lives, small as they may be in the cosmic picture, are nevertheless lives that have a good story, a story of good, that our lives will turn out well in the end, that we will see God and move and live and have our being ever thereafter in the unending dance of the divine Being.
Where will this be? It will be where Jesus has gone in his Ascension. The Ascension of Christ, of course, was not a trip into outer space. Heaven is not in some distant part of the universe. Heaven exists in relation to this world as an author’s physical world exists in relation to the world that the author creates. When Jesus ascends, as (Christian doctrine boldly claims) both body and soul into heaven, it means the created world (or one piece of it, namely, Jesus’ physical body) is taken into God’s own being, the “place” of the uncreated. What marvelous symmetry this is! At the Incarnation, the author enters the story, the Word takes flesh and comes to be amongst us, one of us. At the Ascension, the opposite movement occurs: the story enters the author, the marriage of earth and heaven is consummated, and our hope is given its location.
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Christian doctrine is good for the world. It grounds hope. It shows how prayer is possible. It tells us truth about God. Let us not be in any way ashamed about doctrine, but rather let us proclaim boldly that we believe in the holy and undivided Trinity. Please stand, and say the Creed, today as every Sunday, with a confident faith. I believe in one God . . .
