It’s Holy Trinity Sunday, which means I always finish my sermon with two Tylenol. Have fun!
John 16:12-15; Romans 5:1-5; Psalm 8; Proverbs 8:1-4,22-31
When I was in college, one of the classes I had to take was Quantum Physics. We got to talk about all kinds of fun things. Is light a wave, a particle, or both? What is the smallest thing out there? How can we use Schrödinger’s Wave Equation in this particular instance? Then of course there’s such joys as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. At lot of the stuff we learned in that class didn’t really make a lot of sense. Especially that light sometimes acts like a wave and sometimes acts as a particle. It’s like sometimes it’s a thing and sometimes it isn’t.
Sometimes when I think about the Trinity, I the same way I did in Quantum Physics. My brain just can’t wrap itself around someone/something who is three persons with one substance, as the traditional explanation goes. I’ve said a few times that the Trinity is three “who”s and one “what”. But even then, I want to understand the mechanics of it all, even though I really don’t have any hope of it.
So what is it that we know. Jesus says in our Gospel lesson that: 1) everything that belongs to the Father belongs to the Son; 2) the Spirit takes from what is the Son’s and makes it known to us; 3) the Spirit only speaks what he hears. From Romans, we know that: 4) we have peace with the Father through the Son; 5) the Father pours out his love for us through the Spirit.
Now, that covers a few things, but then again it doesn’t really explain what’s going on at all. In our Lutheran Confessions, there’s a creedal statement what tries to say how the Trinity works. In some churches I’ve attended over the years, on Trinity Sunday it would be used for the profession of faith in this day. I wasn’t about to put y’all through that today. If you’re curious, it’s called the Athanasian Creed and is found on page 54 of the LBW. It starts with, “We worship one God in trinity and the Trinity in unity, neither confusing the persons nor dividing the divine being.” Then it follows with a fairly through description of what is alike between the three persons and what is not alike. It also asserts several times that there are not three beings but one being.
All in all, the Athanasian Creed, thorough as it is, just leaves me with a headache. I don’t like dealing with what, in human understanding, is a big contradiction. I’d rather just step back and say, it’s how it is – God is three persons in one being. But even that is too much for me to “get”.
So instead, I focus on what I can understand. I believe in God the Father, who created all things through the Son and Holy Spirit. I believe that God sent only-begotten Son to Earth to take on my sin and die on a cross, only to be raised on the third day by the Holy Spirit and who ascended to the right hand of God. I believe that the Holy Spirit is with us in our hearts, and in the Word and Sacraments, and leads us to the Son and to the Father. It’s a lot simpler in those terms, and gives me something I can hold on to.
And when it comes down to it, when I stop trying to figure out how the Trinity works, I realize how cool this all is. God gives us a portion of himself, the Holy Spirit. Let that sink in a little bit. The Spirit isn’t a lesser part of God. The Spirit is God. The Spirit is as much God as the Father and Son. Yet the Holy Spirit dwells in us. God is inviting us into a far deeper relationship with him than we can really comprehend.
Let me do my best to draw this out. We know from 1 John 4:16 that God is love. God loved us even when we didn’t love him. But God’s being is also based in love – love between the Father, Son, and Spirit. When God sends the Spirit to us, He doesn’t just love us as his creation, he loves us in the same way that the Father, Son and Spirit are loved. I know this is a little tough get – and a lot of it is very heady – but I want you to understand that Trinity Sunday is as much about God’s perfect love for us as it is about God’s nature, because God’s perfect love IS his nature.
Then the question remains, if we have been loved to this extreme by God, such that the Father sent the Son to die for our sins, how do we respond? It’s impossibly simple – we love as we have been loved.