Why the Trinity Matters

Sermon delivered on Trinity Sunday A, June 11, 2017, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.

If you prefer to listen to the audio podcast of today’s sermon, usually somewhat different from the text below, click here.

Lectionary texts: Genesis 1.1-2.4a; Psalm 8; 2 Corinthians 13.11-13; Matthew 28.16-20.

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today is Trinity Sunday where we focus on the triune nature of God. What does that mean, you ask? Well, let me tell you. When your priests drew straws to see who would have to preach today, I lost. I was hoping Fr. Gatwood would draw the short straw as he has a much greater propensity to make himself look foolish. But no, I am the lucky one who gets to show you the size of my peabrain. I have the unenviable task of musing on how God can exist as three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—which is what we mean when we talk about our triune God—and yet still remain one God. In other words, I am given the task of explaining to you the unexplainable. No problem, as this short video demonstrates.

Given the minefield of bad teaching about our triune God, it seems to me the best way for us to approach this subject is to look at how God has chosen to reveal himself to us in Scripture and experience. Doing so allows us to look at God in the various contexts the Bible speaks about God and hopefully we can gain some edifying insights about who God is and why knowing this triune God is important to us and our faith.

We begin by looking at God the Father, the Creator of heaven (God’s space) and earth (human space) and all that fills both dimensions. It is important for us to get our understanding of creation right because if we don’t, our understanding about God will not be right, precisely because God is our Creator. See the creation rightly and we will surely begin to see our Creator rightly. As the first part of the creation narrative in Genesis makes clear, God spoke into existence out of nothing this vast cosmos with its overlapping dimensions of heaven and earth (more about that in a moment). After each creative period, God looked at his finished work and declared it to be good. And then on the sixth day, God created humans in God’s own image and declared us and his creation to be very good. And astonishingly, as our psalm lesson and Genesis 1-2 make crystal clear, God in his wisdom created us humans in his image to rule over God’s good creation on God’s behalf. And please, folks, don’t treat Genesis as a book of science. Please. The writer of Genesis is not at all interested in how God created the cosmos. He is interested in the fact that God created the cosmos and all that that entails. Don’t get sucked into foolish debates over false dichotomies as some opposed to the Judeo-Christian faith would like.

So what does this teach us about creation and God the Father? Let’s start with the obvious. The first thing we must be clear about when we think about creation is that it is good. God wanted to bring his creation into existence and did so because it pleased him. For whatever reason, God values physicality, not just things immaterial or spiritual. That means we too are to value God’s creation and see it as good. This has all kinds of implications for us as Christians, from how we see the environment and interact with it to how we see and treat each other as Paul summarizes in our epistle lesson. We were created to be stewards of God’s good world, to take care of it and to reflect God’s goodness and glory out into the world by our faithful stewardship of it. God did not create this world for us to exploit and abuse it. He created us to take care of it. Faithful stewardship of this world is a good indicator of our understanding of the goodness of God’s creation and creative activity. Likewise with how we treat other humans. Given that every human being bears at least a semblance of God’s image (granted some have worked very hard to obliterate that image), how we choose to treat others (or mistreat them) will serve as a powerful indicator of our proper understanding of the goodness of God’s creation and the importance and goodness of God’s image-bearing creatures.

Second, as St. Paul reminds us in Romans 1.18-20, the goodness and beauty of God’s creation give us glimpses of the beauty, goodness, and power of God so that no one has an excuse for not worshiping God or giving thanks to God for God’s good gifts. This is seen most clearly in our psalm: “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers/ the moon and the stars that you have ordained/ What are mortals, that you should be mindful of them/ mere human beings, that you should seek them out?” Despite the mind-boggling size of this universe, here we are on this tiny planet, the focus of God’s attention and love. This gives us a constant insight into the importance of creation and the mind and purposes of God the Father, thanks be to God!

Last, the creation narratives remind us of the proximity and overlapping nature of heaven and earth. We see this most clearly when the text tells us that God created humans in God’s own image for the purpose of running God’s world on God’s behalf. This is temple language, which suggests God created this vast cosmos to function as a temple. Temples are temples because they are believed to house the deity for which they are built. In the case of creation, God is the builder and we are to reflect God’s image out into the world, which serves as God’s temple. In effect, we are living statues that actually have functional meaning and purpose.

This, of course, points us to the fact that God is present and active in his creation and our lives, contrary to the lie of deism that was foisted on us and that argues God is nothing more than an absentee landlord who is neither active in his creation or particularly cares about it or us. But Genesis attests God the Father does not work that way. What kind of Father would God be if God abandoned us to our own devices? Short answer: A lousy one. Indeed, before we humans rebelled against God, a disastrous event better known as the Fall, the creation narratives suggest that God was present and active in God’s creation to a far greater extent than he is today. There is nothing that happens in this world or our lives that is outside the purview and love of God our Father. Nothing. As Christians, therefore, we should not believe in happenstance or accidents or fate because of God’s active presence in his world. If God were indeed absent, this world would be utter chaos because at its heart our sin is both chaos and lawlessness. But despite the pervasiveness of human sin, God’s world is not entirely chaotic because God is a God of peace, not disorder (1 Corinthians 14.33). Just because the heavenly dimension is invisible to us doesn’t mean that God is far away. When we understand these fundamental truths about God and creation, it makes it a lot easier for us to love and obey God. What child who really loves his parents wants to displease them, especially when he knows they are always around? When we understand that God’s creation and creative purposes are good and for our good, we have objective Truth we can use to assess the goodness (or not) of our own thoughts and behaviors. And when we realize God is actively present in God’s world and our lives, this knowledge can be balm for our troubled hearts and minds when we fall victim to the forces of chaos and evil. In sum, God the Father is a good and loving Creator who created this world and us good, and its goodness, as well as ours, is of primary importance to God.

Of course, we all know that our first ancestors didn’t get the memo about being God’s good and faithful stewards over God’s creation. We weren’t and aren’t interested in being created in God’s image. That would consign us to a subordinate position to God. No, we wanted to be made in our own image so that we could run the show without God in the picture. You can read about the sad story of the Fall in Genesis 3. Our sinful rebellion caused God’s curse to fall on his good creation and allowed the forces of evil to enter and corrupt God’s good creation and creatures. We were no longer running God’s world on God’s behalf. Our sin and rebellion allowed the dark powers to usurp that role from us and enslave us to their power. This resulted not only in the corruption of God’s world and us, it also led to our death. As St. Paul reminds us, sin leads to death and none of us can escape its power because we are all enslaved to the power of Sin (Romans 6.16, 7.7-24).

Now if God were some unloving tyrant who doesn’t care about his creation and creatures, God would likely abandon his project of creation and start over. But as we have seen, this is not the case. God loves his creation and creatures and is faithful to it and us. This means that God isn’t going to start over. God is going to put things right. God intends to reverse the curse and rid his good creation and creatures of all that corrupts and dehumanizes it and us. In other words, God intends to rid his creation of the forces that hate God and his creation and to put us back in charge again. If we stopped right here (sorry, we’re not), this would tell us all we need to know about the heart and mind of God the Father. Despite our stubborn rebellion, despite our hostility toward God and God’s purposes, God loves us and wants to restore us to our full humanity. God wants us to live, not die, and so God moved in a most unexpected way to do this. God became human to die on a cross for our sins to free us from our enslavement to Sin and Death so we can become the fully human creatures God created us to be.

We, of course, are talking about the Second Person of the Trinity, God the Son. As St. John tells us, Jesus is the co-eternal Son of the Father, through whom the world was made (John 1.1-14). As St. Paul tells us, Jesus, the eternal Son of God, became human to rescue us from the dominion of darkness and transfer us to God’s kingdom of light (Colossians 1.13-23). God became human so that God could manifest his justice by rightly condemning our sins in the flesh, our entrenched rebellion and wrong-doing, bearing his right and just judgment himself. God loves us and wants to free us from our slavery to Sin and his terrible judgment on all that is wrong with us and God’s world, and so God the Son willingly took on God the Father’s right condemnation of our sins so that we would not stand condemned (Romans 8.1-4). Once we are freed from the power of Sin, i.e., once we receive forgiveness of our sins, we are ready to start ruling God’s good world once again as God’s faithful stewards. This is the story of salvation contained in the Bible, my beloved. God did not save us to take us to heaven and abandon his creation. That is a form of the old gnostic heresy that devalues creation. No, as St. Paul reminds us,

[All] creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed [at the Lord’s Second Coming and our resurrection from the dead]. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. (Romans 8.19-21)

This is why Jesus’ resurrection is so important. In God’s new creation, a creation that will be a physical world in the manner of God’s current creation, God’s purposes for us as his image-bearers will be fulfilled completely. Our new bodies will no longer be susceptible to or corrupted by sin and we will therefore have the ability to fulfill God’s creative responsibility God gave to us.

This has several implications for us right now. We are reminded that we are set free from our sins for a reason and a purpose. That purpose is to learn how to be fully human beings once again. We cannot possibly hope to learn this if we are still enslaved by the power of Sin, which corrupts and dehumanizes us. But we are freed from its power, albeit only partially now, because of Jesus’ death on the cross. Unlikely as it seems in this crazy world in which we live, it is the NT’s adamant insistence that by the Son of God’s death and resurrection, God the Father has broken the power of the dark forces and has begun to restore us to our rightful role as God’s good image-bearing creatures (e.g., Luke 10.18; Romans 16.20; Colossians 2.15; Revelation 20). To be sure, this requires an act of faith because we all know evil, while defeated, is not yet finished. But its day is coming and we will see it in full when our Lord Jesus returns to raise us from the dead and finish his saving work for us and God’s creation that he started in his Incarnation.

So what does this look like for us on the ground? How does our understanding about God’s eternal plan to rescue God’s good but corrupted creation and creatures and restore it and us to our original goodness affect our behavior? I offer the following suggestions to jump-start your own thinking and reflections on these things. First, it makes the Great Commission in our gospel lesson an imperative for us. If the biblical narrative of God’s salvation in and through Jesus Christ is true, it is imperative for us to proclaim it to others. Of course, human nature being what it is, many will not listen to us. But some will and therefore we must obey our Lord’s command to preach the gospel and make disciples of all different kinds of folks. If, as Scripture teaches and we believe, salvation is possible only through the Son of God, and if we claim to actually love others, how can we not be about the business of proclaiming the gospel to those who have not heard it or who don’t know Jesus? Only Jesus is the resurrection and the life. This is why we must get our understanding of God the Father and the goodness and purpose of creation right. We must proclaim the biblical gospel, not a gnostic one. This is our image-bearing duty.

Second, if God has rescued and freed us from the dark powers that have enslaved us so that we are healed to become his image-bearing creatures again, then our focus must be on practicing our redeemed humanity right now. We do this by actively imitating the Son of God in his self-giving and self-denying love for others. This means we must learn to truly love and forgive and serve. It means our center of gravity is God, not ourselves, and all that that entails. Put another way, this life serves as a training ground for our eternal life in God’s new creation. This is impossible on our own, of course. But the gospel is not a gospel of self-help, much as we want to make it to be that. We cannot imitate the Son of God without the power and presence of the third person of the Trinity—God the Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit who makes the risen but invisible Jesus available to us, to lead us into all truth and teach us how to obey our Lord. It is the Spirit who helps us overcome the forces of evil and chaos we all have within us and who helps us defeat the Satan and his minions. From our salvation to the living of our days, we must learn that the gospel is not about self-help or trying harder. To be sure, we must put in our sweat-equity in learning how to become fully human again, e.g., we must make disciples and love one another as Christ loves us. But we must also remember that we are in the position to do this only because of what God the Father has done for us in and through God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Our actual salvation is based only on God’s work in Christ and fulfilled in the power of the Spirit, not ours. If we can begin to grasp and wrestle with this astonishing Truth, we will discover that we have a Power that is not our own that helps and frees us to live according to God’s original creative purposes for us. That must translate into Good News, my beloved, despite the chaos still present in God’s world and our lives, the Good News of our astonishing and loving triune God, now and for all eternity. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever.

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.