A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — June 19, 2011
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Texts: John 3:1-10;  Matthew 28:16-20 —  TRINITY  SUNDAY

The wind (Spirit) blows where it chooses… — John 3:8

…baptizing… in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit… — Matthew 28:19b

Today is Trinity Sunday.  I once heard of a man who went to church just one Sunday a year, and it wasn’t Christmas or Easter.  It was Trinity Sunday.  He said he went then because he loved to see the preacher get so confused.  Maybe that’s why in 20 years as a pastor I’ve rarely preached specifically about the Trinity.

Well, instead of sowing confusion this morning by trying to explain the Trinity, I’ll share an old story of an Irish bishop who set out long ago in the time of sailing ships on a voyage to fulfill the Great Commission to “make disciples of all nations.”  When his ship stopped at a remote island to take on fresh water, he strolled along the shore on the lookout for potential new disciples and soon came across three fishermen mending their nets.  He began to speak to them of Jesus Christ, and in pidgin English they explained that missionaries had visited the island centuries before.  “We Christians!” they said, proudly pointing to one another. 

The bishop was impressed and asked if they knew the Lord’s Prayer.  When they said they’d never heard of it, he was shocked.  “How do you pray?” he asked.

 

“We lift eyes in heaven,” they said.  “We pray, ‘We are three, you are three, have mercy on us.’”  Appalled at their primitive, downright heretical prayer, the bishop worked to teach the three the Lord’s Prayer.  They struggled mightily, and before setting sail he was pleased to hear them pray the prayer without error.

Months later the ship passed near the island at dusk, and the bishop recalled with pleasure those three fishermen who now were able to pray properly, thanks to his patient efforts.   Peering at the island, he noticed a spot of light coming toward the ship, and he gazed in wonder to see three figures walking on the water.  The captain stopped the ship, and everyone stared in amazement.  When the three drew near, the bishop recognized the three fishermen.  “Bishop,” they cried.  “We see your boat go past island and come hurry hurry meet you.”

“What is it you want?” asked the awe-struck bishop.

“Bishop,” they said, “we so, so sorry.  We forget lovely prayer.  We say ‘Our Father in heaven, holy be your name,’ but we forget.  Please tell us prayer again.”

The bishop felt humbled.  “Go back to your homes, my friends,” he said, “and each time you pray, say ‘We are three, you are three, have mercy on us!” ¹

I love this story because it catches some of the wonder and mystery of the Trinity without getting bogged down in quibbles about theological doctrines or the need for the Trinity to make rational sense.  The early Christian church, after all, did not develop the image of the Triune God—God in three Persons yet still One—from scratch as an objective, logical construct.  What people did was try to make sense of their own experience.  Their tradition gave them the image of Yahweh, the Holy One of Israel, who created the heavens and the earth and also brought the people out of bondage.  But without setting aside this tradition, the early Christians increasingly focused on how they knew this same God in the person and ministry of Jesus Christ.  Further, after Jesus’ death they experienced the ongoing presence of this same God in their midst through the power of the Holy Spirit.  They knew three ways of encountering and being encountered by the very same Holy Mystery.

When Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night, we see something of the beginning of this threefold experience.  As a Jew, steeped in the notion of one God, Nicodemus struggles with Jesus’ counsel that if he truly wants to experience the kingdom of God, he himself must undergo a change of identity and community.  He’d have to be born anothen—that’s the Greek word, meaning both “from above” and “anew.”  As a resident of God’s kingdom, as a recreated person, Nicodemus was told he would be introduced to the Holy Spirit/Wind of God that blows where it chooses and also to the giving of the Son as a gift of love.  Faced with these new images of the Divine, Nicodemus can only ask the same question that modern rationality asks of the idea of the Trinity, “How can these things be?”

In essence, the Trinity offers us a limited, human expression of a glimpse of wholeness—of divine unity—a glimpse we get from the multiple and partial perspectives of our fragmented world.  When Jesus says at the end of Matthew to baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, he’s not giving three names to be required in any baptism formula but rather saying that baptism is in the name of the fullness of God no matter how partial the names we use.  Harry Emerson Fosdick liked to illustrate the idea of the Trinity by pointing to various portrayals of Theodore Roosevelt.  Roosevelt’s Autobiography portrays him as a statesman, politician, president, and public figure.  His book, Winning the West, depicts him as a sportsman, hunter, and soldier.  A third book by him, Letters to My Children, offers up a winsome, loveable, gentle father, husband, and family man.  Each one of those portrayals is true enough to who Teddy Roosevelt was.  Read one and you know something of the man.  Yet the whole person was something beyond even all three put together.

Just as we generally know friends and acquaintances best in certain of their roles—family, work, social, etc.—each of us tends to relate most comfortably to one of the three persons of the Trinity.  We may well experience God in all three ways, but we usually favor one or another, in a kind of “unitarianism.”  There’s the Creator God, loving Parent, revealed in the created world, in the beauty of nature, and in the mathematical order of science.  There’s the Suffering Redeemer God, who knows our pain and lightens our burdens by sharing them.  And there is the Nurturing, Sustaining Spirit, who brings energy and freedom and joyous surprise to life.  But all are revelations of the One Lord—glimpses of wholeness, not unlike the partial experiences the blind men have of the elephant in that old familiar tale.

What’s important is that our glimpses should lead us to acknowledge and to honor the validity in differing experiences of the divine… and lead us to a kind of balance.  I recall how when my daughter Kim was little she liked to have her long hair woven into a French braid.  Kathy was quite good at doing it.  The Trinity is something like that braid with its three equal portions smoothly plaited together, interrelated.  I wasn’t so good at doing the braid, at getting her hair equally divided into three parts.  The result was usually a little lopsided, and the braid tended to fall apart.  We are often a little “lopsided” in our various “unitarianisms” as we try to pin God down to one or another narrow, particular way of relating to us. 

The “unitarianism of Jesus” found in so much of Evangelical Christianity can lead us to forget the goodness of the created world around us.  So God’s roles as Creator and Life-Giver may need to be given greater emphasis.  As I noted last week in my Pentecost sermon, highly authoritarian forms of church, often rooted in images of God as King and Judge, may need to recall God’s freedom as Spirit/Wind blowing where it chooses, not just in the corridors of power but upon all people.  And Spirit-oriented folk who see themselves as “spiritual but not religious” might find in the communal interrelatedness of the divine Trinity a counter to a kind of go-it-alone individualism often apparent in many kinds of contemporary spirituality.  Finally, all three “unitarianisms” need a healthy dose of mystery to keep us from thinking we know it all already.

Someone once wrote that everything that is said or written about the Trinity is instantly heretical—that is to say, is so wrong as to be harmful to faith—except perhaps the ancient Athanasian Creed, which “only saves itself by contradicting everything it says as fast as it says it.”  Nevertheless we should continually seek new divine images, not to try to pin down the Trinity as doctrine or dogma, but to expand how we speak of and share our experiences of the Sacred in our lives.  The alternative Lord’s Prayer from the New Zealand Prayer Book addresses God as Earth-Maker, Pain-Bearer, Life-Giver.  Theologian Sallie McFague speaks of the Trinity as Mother, Lover, and Friend.  More than 1500 years ago, St. Augustine described the Trinity as the Lover, the Beloved, and the Love that exists between them.  All these are limited, human glimpses of the wholeness of Ultimate Reality.

 In a practical way, the Trinity suggests a three-in-one pathway for us to live so as to reflect the divine image each of us bears.  For instance, to embody God the Creator/Father, work with what is at hand.  What has the Creator given you, put in your life, all around you?  There is no perfect situation or job, so choose to find purpose in the small things and take delight in where you are.  To embody God the Redeemer, work with your experiences of pain and suffering to give them purpose.  Reach out to others who are in pain.  Recognize where you have been so you might know where others have been.  Seek to use your own wounds in the healing of others.  Third, to embody God the Holy Spirit, work with and develop your passion.  What do you care about?  What makes your heart sing?  Pay attention to what gets you outside of yourself and in touch with the world.  And think how wonder-filled life can be if all three divine aspects can be embodied in harmony!

In closing, if the idea of God as both Three and One is still more of a hindrance than a help to your faith, consider the advice offered by Frederick Buechner.  He says to go look in a mirror at yourself.  In his words:

There is (a) the interior life known only to yourself and those you choose to communicate it to (the Father).  There is (b) the visible face, which in some measure reflects that inner life (the Son).  And there is (c) the invisible power you have which enables you to communicate that inner life in such a way that others do not merely know about it, but know it in the sense of its becoming part of who they are (the Holy Spirit).  Yet what you are looking at in the mirror is clearly and indivisibly the one and only you. ²

In the Trinity—the Three and the One—we glimpse wholeness in the midst of our fragmented world and know the Good News that the mystery beyond us, the mystery among us, and the mystery within us are all one and the same, are the One and Only Lord God who creates, renews, and sustains us all.  Amen and amen.

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¹ Adapted from The Song of the Bird, Anthony de Mello [N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984] pp. 72-73.
² Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC [N.Y.: Harper Row, 1973] p. 93.