Trinity Sunday: God is Love

This morning we celebrate our most basic claim as sound of mind, rational Christians: that God is simultaneously one and three; Cue audience laughter! Now interestingly, we actually take it for granted that we’re talking about the same God when we mention The Father, the Son, or Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Maybe that’s because many of you grew up with the Nicene Creed where we confess that, “we believe in one God: the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth … and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God … And we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, and with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified.” If you struggle with this, don’t worry, while we have a summary in our Nicene Creed, the argument about how the Father, Son and Holy Spirit could possibly be our one and same God, actually took the Church hundreds of years, several councils, and pretty fierce argument and dispute, to work out! So does this mean that God only revealed himself to people who get complicated philosophical or theological concepts!? No. Not at all. In fact, we hear Paul say that those trained in philosophy are often the ones least likely to recognize God when he does show up and the most likely to doubt even when they catch a glimpse!

Instead, we hear something much simpler: that when we look at the full 33 year life, the death and the resurrection of Jesus - of Jesus living with us - we are seeing the fullness of who God is. We’re not seeing just one part or Person of God. We’re seeing God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit at work. We see this most especially in Jesus’s own Baptism; we see it when Jesus is taken by the Spirit out into the desert, just as the Father allowed Job to be tested, both by Satan, we see it in Jesus’s transfiguration before Peter, James and John, in his prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane; in his prayer that those of us who become followers might be made one as he and the Father are made one and then saying he will give them the Holy Spirit to complete and do even greater works than his own. We hear it in John’s declaration that Jesus was with his Father “in the beginning,” that he “is God” and that, all the things we heard about today in our reading from Genesis, “were created through him,” that all life came into being when Jesus was with his Father, through him, through them. Or again in the book of Revelation where John hears Jesus’s own declaration when he is seated at the right hand of his Father when the Spirit has gathered all things through him to the Father: “I am the alpha and the omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” 

We also see it in more personal stories when we hear Jesus calling out to those who experience confusion, frustration, desperation, poverty, violence, dismissive treatment, exclusion; calling to account through parables and direct or ironic comments, those who too often exercise presumptive pride, arrogance, lust, envy, jealousy, bitterness, hardness of heart, despair, laziness in thinking and acting, refusal to even engage one’s perceived enemy. In these stories we read year after year in the Gospels we see the fullness of not simply the words of a prophet or priest, but the fullness of God’s judgment and of his mercy.

But here’s the most stunning declaration God makes to us through his Word, his Scriptures: because Jesus is God, in his life with those we hear or read about, we are not glimpsing God with other people. Because Jesus is God, his life with other people expands beyond just those events, to us; to you and me; to every single other human being whom he created; every single one of us is drawn into these very events in Jesus who sustains us through the Spirit who, because he too is God, transforms us into Jesus’s own likeness over time, as we begin to recognize ourselves in the lives of these characters standing before God: Adam and Eve in our sinful desire to plot our own way, our own tower of Babel construction projects; Abraham and Sarah in being called to have courage and persistence in their faith though they cannot see the promise God will fulfill through them in Jesus; Solomon in our hope to be wise rather than merely powerful so we might show others God’s power and not our desire for control; David overcoming the odds, yet falling to his own lust and ambition; Peter and Thomas in our wavering between faith, frustration and fear; the Pharisees in our blindness to God’s work, especially in those with whom we disagree, whom we see as ignorant and blind (oh irony of ironies); Mary in our persistence to hold on when things seem to be going off the rails, to hold on and trust that God will bear us up; Martha in our need to keep things ordered and organized sometimes forgetting that our work is to be guided by God’s end, not our own; Paul in being humbled first by God, then perhaps in response to his recognition that his former zeal to kill all Christians was tied to his sense of inadequacy of physical limitation in speech and bodily strength, a wisend, yet still committed quest to go out and share the mercy and forgiveness we have received even through our continued struggle. 

When we look at Christ, what we see is the only truth that has always been from Adam and Eve, through Abraham, ultimately fulfilled only in Jesus, and so will ever remain when things are brought to completion by the Spirit in Christ before the Father: that life is made and sustained by love. Not the feeling of love, not contingent love. Love, which is the very substance of all beings and so all meaning. Love that encompasses, that gives of itself for others; that forgives, that stretches beyond our friends to those at the margins of life whether foreigner, sick, imprisoned, or enemy. If to see Christ is to see the Father, then the Father’s very being, for which he gives his Son and pours out his Spirit, is love. If God’s own being is the eternal pouring out of self sacrificial love - if self sacrificial love is the very substance of all creation - then you and I are alive to the extent that we manifest this sacrificial love for others in our own lives. Welcome to life sustained by our Triune God. AMEN