Holy Trinity Sunday. Here ya go.
John 16:12-15; Romans 8:1-5; Psalm 8; Proverbs 8:1-4,22-31
For my first two or so years of seminary, through a series of complicated and unfortunate events, my mother and I found ourselves living in an apartment in downtown Salt Lake City. I was rather heavily involved in too many ministries at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Sandy, and I started to go to the Sunday evening mass at the Cathedral of the Madeleine in order to give myself the opportunity to just go somewhere and worship God without the busyness I felt at Good Shepherd.
One Trinity Sunday at the Cathedral, the priest read the gospel, did the responses, and everything was going perfectly normal, at least until he began his homily, which went something like this: “The Holy Trinity <pause> is a mystery.” Then he went back to his place, sat down for a moment, and immediately went into the profession of faith, namely the Nicene Creed.
Now, there is a little bit more involved when studying theology to say something is a “mystery” than we would immediately think. We hear “mystery” and think of mystery novels, or Scooby Doo, or something like it. In theology, however, a mystery is, as defined in the Catholic Encyclopedia, a “truth which we are not merely incapable of discovering apart from Divine Revelation, but which, even when revealed, remains ‘hidden by the veil of faith and enveloped, so to speak, by a kind of darkness.’”
The trinity is one of those things. We can’t quite wrap our heads around it, even though we accept it as part of who God is, so we try to explain it with various analogies. There’s the egg (shell/white/yolk), water (ice/steam/liquid), apple (skin/core/pulp), three bladed propeller, three leaf clover, Jaffa cake (I don’t know what one of these are but apparently involve sponge/chocolate/orange). There’s a few others but those are the popular ones, all of which emphasize that three things are one thing. Unfortunately, the more a person thinks about these things, the farther away from what the Trinity really is you get.
Too often these analogies end up in different forms of heresies. A few of the more “popular” of these heresies are tritheism (3 separate gods entirely), modalism (one god with three “roles” depending on what is going on), subordinationism (the Spirit is subordinate to the Son who is subordinate to the Father), and Arianism (the Son was created by, and therefore not equal to, the Father). All of these are refuted by the Athanasian Creed, which I still cringe at having to recite on Trinity Sundays when I was growing up, but does serve as a rather complete, if complicated, attempt at explaining how the Trinity works
So I’m not going to try to explain how the Trinity works, but as I was preparing for the sermon, I started to think that it’s almost a better idea not to explain the Trinity too much. Maybe it’s a better idea to think of it as a mystery – a truth that remains hidden even when it’s revealed. All things considered, I don’t need to know how God is put together; it’s enough for me to know the things that he has done for me.
In Proverbs 8 we heard that God created the whole world – setting everything in its place just right. In Psalm 8, we looked at our place in relation to everything, astounded that God would value us so much compared to all of the other amazing things He made. Romans 8 (kind of a lot of 8s this week) shifts the focus a bit, but still talks about the things that God has done – namely Jesus’ death for us. Finally in John 16 (What a strange coincidence – there are 2 8s in 16) Jesus tells us that the Holy Spirit will guide us and share with us everything that is the Father’s and the Son’s.
That was a really quick overview, but it’s also what’s important. Instead of trying to figure out just what God’s nature is, we should focus on what He’s done. We can’t understand the details of what makes God tick, we probably never will, but we can understand what he does. We can understand the love that he shows us. We can understand that God gave his life for us so that we can live. We can understand that despite the influence of sin in the world, God still is going to win the day. We can understand that when we need comforting, He will comfort us. That’s what is worth celebrating about Trinity Sunday, not the things about God that we can’t see, but the things that we can.