How Can One Be Three?
Sermon
Growing in Christ
Sermons for the Summer Season
Object:
Jesus spoke to Nicodemus about the interactive Spirit of God the creator. Nicodemus replied, "How can these things be true?"
Jesus answered, "We testify to what we have seen; yet you do not believe our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you don't believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?"
-- John 3:8-12 (paraphrased)
It's Trinity Sunday. I can read your mind. "Oh no! It's the last Sunday in May, the beginning of tenth week; we are fatigued; what little gray matter is still functioning needs to be placed in reserve for finals; please not a sermon on the doctrine of the Trinity!" We are too tired to play mind games. "The Father is infinite; the Son is infinite; the Holy Spirit is infinite."
"Nicodemus replied, 'How can these things be true?' "
The Holy Trinity. The very topic brings back memories of confirmation classes past -- a pastor desperately looking for a glimmer of interest in the eyes of a lethargic class of thirteen-year-olds. Looking, pleading, the pastor says, slowly, "The Trinity -- one God but three persons -- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit -- creator, redeemer, sanctifier." And the eyes of the students were empty. The students were waiting -- catatonic -- just waiting for the hour to be over.
Alister McGrath, who teaches historical and systematic theology at Oxford University and who wrote a book titled, Understanding the Trinity, once began a lecture on the topic of the Trinity by saying, "One of the most vivid memories of my youth involves being in church and reciting the Athanasian Creed. We got to the bit that reads, 'The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible.' And then the young man sitting next to me muttered, too loudly for comfort, 'The whole damn thing is incomprehensible!' "1
Nicodemus added, "How can these things be true?"
I talked to some of you and other students at Wittenberg about the doctrine of the Trinity, asking you to remember the various ways your confirmation or Sunday school teachers struggled to explain to you, wiggling in your seats, the concept of the Trinity -- Three as one, and one as Three -- the one God-force of existence, revealed in three forms. How was it explained to you?
One student remembered the egg illustration -- told to the class with an actual egg for visual reinforcement. God is one unity, like one hard-boiled egg, but formed (as the priest cracked the egg open), but formed of three distinct parts -- shell, yolk, and albumen. Eyes didn't glaze over in that class, but stomachs were turned thinking of God coming as albumen, or in all that yolky cholesterol desiring to clog your arteries.
How can one God be experienced in three distinct forms?
Another student remembered the apple illustration: One apple and yet three distinct parts -- the outer skin, the inner white juicy meat, and the seed core -- each serving a different purpose but one apple.
And there is the chocolate-covered peanut M&M illustration.
Yet another student told me one I had not heard before: "The Trinity is like a cherry pie illustration." She said, "The crust contains it all -- the cherries have real material substance -- and the red filling flows out all over the plate and onto your fingers like the Holy Spirit coming to you personally."
We decided such images of God as apple cores and eggshells probably drove more young confirmands into paganism and agnosticism than into any Trinitarian revelations, sort of like that scene in the film Nuns on the Run. An escaped convict masquerading as a nun is forced to teach a confirmation class, but he gets the traditional symbolism a bit confused. Teaching the class about the Trinity, he said that God is like a three-leaf clover -- small, green, and a weed, or something like that.
"How can these things be true?"
There is the Philadelphia Trinity house explanation: So-called Trinity houses were first built ironically when deism captured the imagination of colonial intellectuals such as Franklin and Jefferson. Trinity houses were tall, narrow, stone row houses. One house but formed of three floors -- kitchen level, living room level, and bedroom level -- each serving differently the needs of those who lived within but one home. (It has more promise than the cherry pie illustration!)
There is the classic example of the masks of God: One powerful life and future, but experienced by us in the divine wearing different masks of expression -- the mask of creation; the mask of human form -- Jesus; and the mask of inspiration and compassion imbedded within our own heart of community as Spirit. For Tertullian, who first stated this illustration, the word "person" was connected to a role in a drama. (The Latin word persona originally meant "mask.") A Roman actor wore different masks to represent the different characters that he or she portrayed. The Trinitarian concept of "one God in three persons" means one force of action -- appearing in different forms -- creator, redeemer, sanctifier -- yet all played by the same actor -- the one God-force of loving.
I like that illustration, but today, "masks" also carry the image of deception.
Perhaps the best illustration remembered by a student: God as total personhood. Think of your own parents -- your mother, for example. She is a mother and a wife and to her colleagues perhaps, a lawyer. One loving person (hopefully loving!) -- one personhood, but experienced as mother, wife, and legal counsel, yet the same person, but encountered in different ways, in different situations.
There was a time once when Christians became really emotional about the concept of the Trinity and demanded to know: How can there be one God when we talk about distinct differences between the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit? Doesn't the Trinity push us into some form of Pantheism? Three in one and one in three.
Nicodemus said, "How can these things be?"
But such emotion and expressed confusion is not the problem today. Actually there are two problems today. First, many people just don't believe in, or care about, God (in whatever form) today. Many share the belief of science superstar, Francis Crick, as outlined in his book, The Astonishing Hypothesis. Crick wrote that there is no God nor any ultimate meaning to our life together. Our joys and sorrows, memories and ambitions, our sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.
"How can these things be true?"
Our dialogue with such people is critical today. It's part of our call as highly educated Christians in this postmodern age. And a Trinitarian view of God can best be understood by our contemporary, non-Christian neighbors. But in our assigned text, Nicodemus was a person who did believe in God.
The second problem group we encounter each day are the ones I want us to consider on this Trinity Sunday. Most of the people that we know are like Nicodemus and believe in some sort of God. Today most of those we know probably would consider themselves to be Christians, but many of them also, unknowingly, fracture the Trinitarian formula into separate components, and latch onto just one of these expressions of God. I believe they miss the total call of God, and in so doing further distort their own humanity.
For example, I have known here at Wittenberg a student I will call "A." If asked about his belief in God, student "A" would probably look at you strangely for a moment, wondering why anyone would ask such a strange, irrelevant question, but would eventually respond by admitting that "Yes, sure" he believes in some grand creator -- some God. But he has given up church, for one thing.
For him, fellowship at the moment is found in softball and beer and friends at the house. Being "whole" is an issue of medical science. Mention love to him, and he thinks of sex. His concept of death is pretty vague, "When you gotta go, you gotta go" but he doesn't like to think about such things that have the ring of failure. His plan for after graduation is to try whatever works; beat the red tape; avoid long lines; learn what the public wants and either do it or sell it to them.
He is, of course, more complex than this. Friendship is important to him, perhaps also his family. But it appears that at the heart of things his hope and future is precariously balanced on his own production, his own producing of events and opportunities. It is a fragile future, even self-destructive because it's not hooked into the due process of caring love and responsibility, or the universal unity of God's forgiveness and grace. There is no apparent realization of the availability of the Holy Spirit or of Jesus as the Christ "in, with, and under" the hidden lives that we touch or touch us.
Student "A" claims a belief in God, but his only perceived experience of God is God as the creative source of existence -- the prime mover and cosmic mystery -- a God who is distant, impersonal, some master machinist far removed from the human relationships of day-to-day living. It is not the God who comes to meet us where we are.
The Trinity has been fractured. The creative source alone (God the Father in traditional terms) bears only partial resemblance to the God who is described throughout scripture and within Christian experience.
For student "B," Rwanda and Haiti have their effect -- the injustice is overwhelmingly obvious. She's also very concerned about the quality of the water forming our nearby Buck Creek, all those herbicides and pesticides are fertilizers washing off the Reid Park golf course; and the impact a trash-burning incinerator would have on local air quality. But she often feels alone in her concerns, in her anger. Why does she feel so strongly about those issues of the quality of life? Who else cares? What difference does it all make anyway?
I don't think that she realizes that she is in tune with the very "itinerary of creation by God" -- the intended harmony and stability. Her will for justice would fit well within the peace of God as lived by Jesus and desired by the active Spirit of God. Here is the ultimate reason for her struggle for righteousness.
She doesn't see the divine connection to her concern, nor her connection with other Christians. She feels so alone, angry, and frustrated. "Who cares?" she wonders. The Trinity is fractured.
Or there is student "C" who claims Jesus as her personal Savior. There is a future offered her and she knows it. She seems to care only about those who are just like her in her beliefs and cultural expression. She forms clear distinctions between secular matter and spiritual matters. She, too, has lost the unity of the Trinity. She sees Jesus as the Christ, touching lepers, feeding the hungry, praising the Samaritan, talking responsibility to the temple and government authorities, accepting, loving, and healing the whole neighborhood. She has missed the gift of God as universal creator, Savior, and engaging Holy Spirit.
It is Trinity Sunday. It may seem to some as an outdated festival but its message is at the heart of our Christian confession. The God revealed in the Trinity formula holds our life together.
Nicodemus asked, "How can these things be true?" Jesus said, "We speak of what we have experienced; we testify to what we have seen...."
The Trinity is where earthly and heavenly things merge in life-sustaining love for each one of us.
I end this sermon in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit: God as loving parent, sustainer of the totality of meaningful reality.
God as the Son -- the Christ -- God coming into our own history, having lived our pain and fear, and our joy and peace. The Son is God walking with us -- the story of love intersecting our stories and sharing even our death and still offering us more.
God as Spirit -- the Holy Spirit -- God's daily offer of help and hope; the power of loving transformation. The Holy Spirit is God penetrating all our depths -- all the psychological layering of our selves, and all our times and places, and offering peace.
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit -- one God of love.
Sermon delivered May 29, 1994
Weaver Chapel
Wittenberg University
Springfield, Ohio
____________
1. Alister McGrath, Understanding the Trinity (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing Company, 1988).
Jesus answered, "We testify to what we have seen; yet you do not believe our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you don't believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?"
-- John 3:8-12 (paraphrased)
It's Trinity Sunday. I can read your mind. "Oh no! It's the last Sunday in May, the beginning of tenth week; we are fatigued; what little gray matter is still functioning needs to be placed in reserve for finals; please not a sermon on the doctrine of the Trinity!" We are too tired to play mind games. "The Father is infinite; the Son is infinite; the Holy Spirit is infinite."
"Nicodemus replied, 'How can these things be true?' "
The Holy Trinity. The very topic brings back memories of confirmation classes past -- a pastor desperately looking for a glimmer of interest in the eyes of a lethargic class of thirteen-year-olds. Looking, pleading, the pastor says, slowly, "The Trinity -- one God but three persons -- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit -- creator, redeemer, sanctifier." And the eyes of the students were empty. The students were waiting -- catatonic -- just waiting for the hour to be over.
Alister McGrath, who teaches historical and systematic theology at Oxford University and who wrote a book titled, Understanding the Trinity, once began a lecture on the topic of the Trinity by saying, "One of the most vivid memories of my youth involves being in church and reciting the Athanasian Creed. We got to the bit that reads, 'The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible.' And then the young man sitting next to me muttered, too loudly for comfort, 'The whole damn thing is incomprehensible!' "1
Nicodemus added, "How can these things be true?"
I talked to some of you and other students at Wittenberg about the doctrine of the Trinity, asking you to remember the various ways your confirmation or Sunday school teachers struggled to explain to you, wiggling in your seats, the concept of the Trinity -- Three as one, and one as Three -- the one God-force of existence, revealed in three forms. How was it explained to you?
One student remembered the egg illustration -- told to the class with an actual egg for visual reinforcement. God is one unity, like one hard-boiled egg, but formed (as the priest cracked the egg open), but formed of three distinct parts -- shell, yolk, and albumen. Eyes didn't glaze over in that class, but stomachs were turned thinking of God coming as albumen, or in all that yolky cholesterol desiring to clog your arteries.
How can one God be experienced in three distinct forms?
Another student remembered the apple illustration: One apple and yet three distinct parts -- the outer skin, the inner white juicy meat, and the seed core -- each serving a different purpose but one apple.
And there is the chocolate-covered peanut M&M illustration.
Yet another student told me one I had not heard before: "The Trinity is like a cherry pie illustration." She said, "The crust contains it all -- the cherries have real material substance -- and the red filling flows out all over the plate and onto your fingers like the Holy Spirit coming to you personally."
We decided such images of God as apple cores and eggshells probably drove more young confirmands into paganism and agnosticism than into any Trinitarian revelations, sort of like that scene in the film Nuns on the Run. An escaped convict masquerading as a nun is forced to teach a confirmation class, but he gets the traditional symbolism a bit confused. Teaching the class about the Trinity, he said that God is like a three-leaf clover -- small, green, and a weed, or something like that.
"How can these things be true?"
There is the Philadelphia Trinity house explanation: So-called Trinity houses were first built ironically when deism captured the imagination of colonial intellectuals such as Franklin and Jefferson. Trinity houses were tall, narrow, stone row houses. One house but formed of three floors -- kitchen level, living room level, and bedroom level -- each serving differently the needs of those who lived within but one home. (It has more promise than the cherry pie illustration!)
There is the classic example of the masks of God: One powerful life and future, but experienced by us in the divine wearing different masks of expression -- the mask of creation; the mask of human form -- Jesus; and the mask of inspiration and compassion imbedded within our own heart of community as Spirit. For Tertullian, who first stated this illustration, the word "person" was connected to a role in a drama. (The Latin word persona originally meant "mask.") A Roman actor wore different masks to represent the different characters that he or she portrayed. The Trinitarian concept of "one God in three persons" means one force of action -- appearing in different forms -- creator, redeemer, sanctifier -- yet all played by the same actor -- the one God-force of loving.
I like that illustration, but today, "masks" also carry the image of deception.
Perhaps the best illustration remembered by a student: God as total personhood. Think of your own parents -- your mother, for example. She is a mother and a wife and to her colleagues perhaps, a lawyer. One loving person (hopefully loving!) -- one personhood, but experienced as mother, wife, and legal counsel, yet the same person, but encountered in different ways, in different situations.
There was a time once when Christians became really emotional about the concept of the Trinity and demanded to know: How can there be one God when we talk about distinct differences between the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit? Doesn't the Trinity push us into some form of Pantheism? Three in one and one in three.
Nicodemus said, "How can these things be?"
But such emotion and expressed confusion is not the problem today. Actually there are two problems today. First, many people just don't believe in, or care about, God (in whatever form) today. Many share the belief of science superstar, Francis Crick, as outlined in his book, The Astonishing Hypothesis. Crick wrote that there is no God nor any ultimate meaning to our life together. Our joys and sorrows, memories and ambitions, our sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.
"How can these things be true?"
Our dialogue with such people is critical today. It's part of our call as highly educated Christians in this postmodern age. And a Trinitarian view of God can best be understood by our contemporary, non-Christian neighbors. But in our assigned text, Nicodemus was a person who did believe in God.
The second problem group we encounter each day are the ones I want us to consider on this Trinity Sunday. Most of the people that we know are like Nicodemus and believe in some sort of God. Today most of those we know probably would consider themselves to be Christians, but many of them also, unknowingly, fracture the Trinitarian formula into separate components, and latch onto just one of these expressions of God. I believe they miss the total call of God, and in so doing further distort their own humanity.
For example, I have known here at Wittenberg a student I will call "A." If asked about his belief in God, student "A" would probably look at you strangely for a moment, wondering why anyone would ask such a strange, irrelevant question, but would eventually respond by admitting that "Yes, sure" he believes in some grand creator -- some God. But he has given up church, for one thing.
For him, fellowship at the moment is found in softball and beer and friends at the house. Being "whole" is an issue of medical science. Mention love to him, and he thinks of sex. His concept of death is pretty vague, "When you gotta go, you gotta go" but he doesn't like to think about such things that have the ring of failure. His plan for after graduation is to try whatever works; beat the red tape; avoid long lines; learn what the public wants and either do it or sell it to them.
He is, of course, more complex than this. Friendship is important to him, perhaps also his family. But it appears that at the heart of things his hope and future is precariously balanced on his own production, his own producing of events and opportunities. It is a fragile future, even self-destructive because it's not hooked into the due process of caring love and responsibility, or the universal unity of God's forgiveness and grace. There is no apparent realization of the availability of the Holy Spirit or of Jesus as the Christ "in, with, and under" the hidden lives that we touch or touch us.
Student "A" claims a belief in God, but his only perceived experience of God is God as the creative source of existence -- the prime mover and cosmic mystery -- a God who is distant, impersonal, some master machinist far removed from the human relationships of day-to-day living. It is not the God who comes to meet us where we are.
The Trinity has been fractured. The creative source alone (God the Father in traditional terms) bears only partial resemblance to the God who is described throughout scripture and within Christian experience.
For student "B," Rwanda and Haiti have their effect -- the injustice is overwhelmingly obvious. She's also very concerned about the quality of the water forming our nearby Buck Creek, all those herbicides and pesticides are fertilizers washing off the Reid Park golf course; and the impact a trash-burning incinerator would have on local air quality. But she often feels alone in her concerns, in her anger. Why does she feel so strongly about those issues of the quality of life? Who else cares? What difference does it all make anyway?
I don't think that she realizes that she is in tune with the very "itinerary of creation by God" -- the intended harmony and stability. Her will for justice would fit well within the peace of God as lived by Jesus and desired by the active Spirit of God. Here is the ultimate reason for her struggle for righteousness.
She doesn't see the divine connection to her concern, nor her connection with other Christians. She feels so alone, angry, and frustrated. "Who cares?" she wonders. The Trinity is fractured.
Or there is student "C" who claims Jesus as her personal Savior. There is a future offered her and she knows it. She seems to care only about those who are just like her in her beliefs and cultural expression. She forms clear distinctions between secular matter and spiritual matters. She, too, has lost the unity of the Trinity. She sees Jesus as the Christ, touching lepers, feeding the hungry, praising the Samaritan, talking responsibility to the temple and government authorities, accepting, loving, and healing the whole neighborhood. She has missed the gift of God as universal creator, Savior, and engaging Holy Spirit.
It is Trinity Sunday. It may seem to some as an outdated festival but its message is at the heart of our Christian confession. The God revealed in the Trinity formula holds our life together.
Nicodemus asked, "How can these things be true?" Jesus said, "We speak of what we have experienced; we testify to what we have seen...."
The Trinity is where earthly and heavenly things merge in life-sustaining love for each one of us.
I end this sermon in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit: God as loving parent, sustainer of the totality of meaningful reality.
God as the Son -- the Christ -- God coming into our own history, having lived our pain and fear, and our joy and peace. The Son is God walking with us -- the story of love intersecting our stories and sharing even our death and still offering us more.
God as Spirit -- the Holy Spirit -- God's daily offer of help and hope; the power of loving transformation. The Holy Spirit is God penetrating all our depths -- all the psychological layering of our selves, and all our times and places, and offering peace.
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit -- one God of love.
Sermon delivered May 29, 1994
Weaver Chapel
Wittenberg University
Springfield, Ohio
____________
1. Alister McGrath, Understanding the Trinity (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing Company, 1988).
