Trinity Sunday 2015
This morning is Trinity Sunday, a time when we celebrate the
incredible life of God who has been revealed to us in the Father, the Son and the
Holy Spirit. The good news of God being
a Holy Trinity allows us to understand God as a loving community, a community
that we are invited to be a part of. God
is not primarily all-powerful or all-knowing or all-anything, although God is
also those things. The primary attribute
of God, as Saint John tells us, is that God is love. We’re going to explore this understanding of
God as love in a community of three persons who invite us to join in that love. But first, I want to look at other ways
people have thought about God, and their limitations.
We start long ago, in the time when pagan gods ruled the
landscape. God had not yet revealed
himself to Abraham, or made a covenant with his people. Most of the ancient gods were violent and
capricious, filled with anger, lust and pride.
They had to be propitiated to bring fertile harvest, prevent diseases,
and bring victory in battle. They were
limited, assumed to care for particular people in particular places, jostling
for control in territory and spheres of influence. Paul calls these gods nothing more than
demons, spiritual forces of questionable goodness that pale in power before the
living God. These gods are still
worshipped in various parts of Africa, Asia and Oceania in isolated tribes that
have never heard the good news of Jesus Christ, They are also regaining a
foothold in the United States as many people seek some benevolent force in
nature since too many Christians have done a poor job in stewarding creation
and loving their brothers and sisters.
Many wise and learned people, rejecting the chaos and lack
of ethics found in paganism, turned to a philosophical understanding of a God
who created the universe and set things in motion. These early monotheists rejected the rule of
petty spiritual forces in their daily life, but they also believed that God
must be impossibly distant to us. This
belief has been common throughout Western Civilization, from the Greek
philosophers, to the deists at the time of the American Revolution, to those in
many mainline churches today who believe in a relatively impersonal God that has
more important things to do than be in relationship with us or care for our
particular needs.
About the same time the early philosophers were asking their
questions, God began to reveal himself to the people of Israel. The God who came to Moses in the burning bush
was a different kind of God altogether.
This God, who intentionally created heaven and earth and everything in
it out of love, was a God who cared about justice and righteousness and heard
the cry of the poor. This God entered
into relationship with people and created covenants with them. This God gave people instructions for how to
live, and could be trusted to keep his promises. This God brought the children of Israel out of
slavery in Egypt and brought them into the Promised Land, while also allowing
them to go into exile when they were disobedient.
The people of Israel came to know their God as all-powerful
and all-good, and also above every other god of the pagan people around
them. God was not distant, like the
philosophical God, but was experienced by them through God’s Spirit and in
other direct ways.
Then came Jesus.
Jesus was the eternal Word of God, the Wisdom of God, the only-begotten
Son of God. Jesus revealed God the
Father in who Jesus’ was, in his teaching, in his miracles, in his passion,
death and resurrection. Jesus was the
image of the invisible God, so we could know God in an even more personal way
than we had before. Then at Pentecost,
Jesus sent the Holy Spirit down on his disciples. Through the Holy Spirit proceeding from the
Father and the Son to us, we had a particular glimpse into the eternal life of
our Trinitarian God. Even more
gloriously, through the Holy Spirit, we received an invitation into that
Trinitarian life.
The men and women of the early church prayed their way into
experiencing the life of God. What these
mystical theologians came to understand was that God the Father is the fountain
of all being and the source of all love.
The love is given eternally to his Son Jesus Christ, who receives
everything that is the Father and gives it back. The way that God the Father and God the Son
give that love back and forth is through the Holy Spirit who is also God and
love. But this eternal loving in the
heart of God’s being is not some unapproachable distant process. The early mystics of the church described
this Trinitarian life of God as a dance.
What better way for us to understand the loving, dynamic,
passionate interaction at the very heart of God than as a dance. The three persons of God eternally express
the depths of their love for each other in a way that is beautiful and
expansive. Even more importantly for us,
this dance does not stop within the life of God. God invites us to join in the divine
dance.
God invites us into relationship with God the Father through
the life and death of God the Son and the power of God the Holy Spirit.
God invites each and every one of us to enter into the very
heart of our relational, loving, Trinitarian God. We learn God’s eternal dance as we come to
love God and our neighbor more deeply. Our
joyful praise to God and our loving service to each other are how we balance
and swing, promenade and pirouette, twist and shout our way more deeply into
the divine life of the Trinity.
The Kingdom of God that Jesus promised is nothing more than
all creation entering into the midst of this Trinitarian life of God. Learn God’s eternal dance of love of God and
neigbor, then pass it on.
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