June 3, 2007 – Feast of The Holy Trinity
John 16:12-15.C
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Often, when I’m talking with people who are working on their faith questions I hear things like, “Pastor, I’m having some doubts, I keep having questions, I’m trying to discern what God would have me do and I am just not getting any answers…and I’m afraid I’m losing my faith.” Ahh. Now WHERE did we get the idea that questions were BAD or DUMB, or required an apology or permission? My response (in my head) is often that old Groucho Marx response: “Did I promise you an answer to the question?”
Last Sunday we celebrated the third great festival of the church - the Day of Pentecost - the coming of the Holy Spirit. We heard it from Luke’s version in Acts, with tongues and fire and wind and power. But today, we hear some of the same story from John, where Jesus says to his followers, “I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” So Jesus promises to send them the Paraclete, the comforter, a companion for their journey of faith who will reveal God to them “as they can bear it.”
Perhaps we can’t explain God because we know that we cannot comprehend the Trinity. It is a mysterium tremendum (in Latin,) a huge mystery, so we throw up our hands and throw in the towel with: “I can’t understand it, so I just won’t think about it.” But we certainly have “experienced” God in various ways - for we know God when we feel God’s presence - and certainly know when we feel God’s absence.
You know, God never promised us answers – and we struggled to make sense of God and god’s ways from the beginning of time. For Example, I want you to imagine that you are a follower of Jesus of the 1st century, hearing John’s story for the first time. Your situation is something like this: First, you are a Jew – a law-abiding, faithful Person of Israel - who has known and confessed the monotheistic God, Yahweh, for generations. Secondly, you’ve become a believer of Jesus of Nazareth – you’ve heard him preach, you saw him perform miracles, and know that he was crucified, raised, and has ascended to the Father. Perhaps your hair even caught on fire on the day of Pentecost, and you heard yourself speaking a language you did not know, or were one of the ones swept into the waters of baptism by the Holy Spirit of power on that day. But now, the Temple in Jerusalem has been flattened by the Romans, and you have no place to worship, no place to gather for the great festivals. Even your neighborhood synagogue, where you gathered for fellowship and learning, to hear the teaching of the rabbis, has kicked you out. Now you struggle to understand what it is you do believe. How to make sense of it? The Yahweh of generations has fulfilled the promise of Messiah, but you were expecting God to lift up another David, a human being – you didn’t expect Messiah would be the Son of God! And now Jesus has gone and sent his Spirit with such power that you cannot even comprehend what God is doing!
The concept of the Trinity is an attempt to answer the questions raised by people’s incredibly diverse EXPERIENCES of God. And the problem is that the God who is perfectly consistent, is also so maddeningly inconsistent. I remember when I was living in New York I saw the play, Equus, about a young man who blinds a stable full of horses and the subsequent sessions between this boy and a court-appointed psychiatrist. The loving and caring psychiatrist was played by a British actor at that time unknown in the U.S. His name was Anthony Hopkins, and he took my breath away in his performance, which I carried with me for years until I saw him again in Silence of the Lambs. In that film, he played Hannibal Lector, or Hannibal the cannibal, and I had two very different images of Anthony Hopkins. Neither one went away, and neither one was completely that man, or what he was capable of presenting.
It’s sort of like our Biblical witness to God, there is something for everyone: the Old Testament Judge and the New Testament Shepherd, the masculine whirlwind or the feminine brooding hen, gathering her chicks under her wings; the powerful King or the humble servant, washing the feet of his friends; the challenging Rabbi or the completely accessible friend. And it’s all there from beginning to end: In Genesis 1 – the Spirit, is hovering over the waters at Creation, inspiring the breath of life into a man of dust. (Well ok, Pastor Susan, 2 out of 3’s not bad!) But where is Jesus “in the beginning?” Well, turn to John 1 and you’ll find that The Word, Jesus the Christ also there: “In the Beginning was the Word and the Word waswithGod and the Word was God”
At Jesus’ Baptism in the Jordan the Holy Spirit dove and the Father-God’s voice were there.
And at the crucifixion, Jesus, hanging on the cross of death, speaks, “Father, into your hands I commend my Spirit.” And finally, the Spirit of God works a new creation in that Easter morning resurrection of a lifeless Jesus. They are all there, all the time – God in Three Persons. The idea of the Trinity is merely a story-telling device, and it doesn’t matter where you enter the story, at different times you may be able to bear different entry points.
So no matter if you have put the idea of MAKING SENSE OF THE TRINITY up on your “theological idea shelf” with other ideas you can’t understand - (like EVIL in GOD’S WORLD or PONDERINGS ON ETERNITY) – what you think about the Trinity will inform everything else you believe. If you don’t believe me, let me challenge you to think through some of these questions:
If Jesus is God, did God die on the cross?
Is Jesus God’s Son or God?
Why is God so different in the Old Testament and the New Testament?
How CAN three be one?
Why do bad things happen to good people?
If Jesus died to take away the sins of the world, why do we keep sinning?
If God’s loves us so much, what are we doing here?!
These are questions with no answers - but they are questions that are as old as the world. You see, we human beings are easily confused; and somehow we think ANSWERS give us control. But answers merely cut off the conversation, the debate, the learning.
“How How How? When When When? Why Why Why?” Just like little children, we might not really need the answers, but simply asking the questions gets us attention, and quality time with the one (One) who loves us. And questions keep us searching to know more about the God who is not us.
Questions feed our souls in ways that resolutions, answers do not. Faith feeds on open questions - and it is only where we are open, that the Spirit can fill us. Remember – it is NOT about the answers, but about the questions. Because we know, there really is only one true Answer. Sing it with me: “Jesus Loves Me this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Little ones to Him belong, they are weak, but He is strong. Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me, the Bible tells me so.” Amen.
