This week, we’re going to look at a rather tricky subject, one that has confounded preachers and parishioners alike over the last few millennia - and it is “the Trinity”.
Do you remember the well-known hymn “God in three persons, blessed Trinity”? Now you may think preachers are always talking about God. In my experience most preachers actually talk a lot about “what God wants of us”. If they're good preachers, they’ll also talk about “what God’s done for us” and is still doing. That, after all, is the Gospel. But they don't talk very much about “who God is”. Talking about God - by which I mean not just referring to God, but actually trying to say who God is - well that’s one of those points where language usually fails us. Some of you may have had an experience of wanting to say something really significant - like telling someone how important they are to you, or how deeply sorry you are - and all your usual words come nowhere near to what you’re really wanting to say. The only words you find seem terribly inadequate, but you have to use them, because not saying anything would be worse. You say what you can and hope that the words point to what you really can't say. We really DO need to talk about God, because we live in a society which has largely forgotten what the word 'God' actually means. People tend to think of God as some mythical figure somewhere up in the sky. We can’t depend on the word 'God' meaning anything remotely like the God we know through Jesus Christ. So, we have to talk about who God is. At the same time, we know that words can’t sum God up, or pin God down. It's important to talk about God. It's also important, when we talk about God, to realise that God is infinitely more than anything we can say. There are several Christian ways of trying to say who God is. The words that say the most about God are those we use in the creeds, when we say “We believe in God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.” God is all Three and the Three are one God - “Trinity”. If that says the most about God, it’s also the most difficult concept to understand. Another way to say it is the simple statement that “God is love”. The statement comes from the New Testament and it's one of the most important things the Bible says. You might think that this is really all we need to say about God – that he is love. The trouble is: what does “love” mean? We can use that word in all kinds of ways. For example “I love ice cream”, when we really just mean that we “like” it. We say we “love” people, but love can be a destructive obsession, love can be self-indulgent sentimentality and love can be vaguely wishing someone well. Love can be all kinds of things, or sometimes nothing at all. That’s not the sort of love God is. “God is love” is only going to mean something if we can spell out what God's love means. We start to describe God by telling the story of his love for the world. That's the way the Bible spells out what it means to say that God is love. It tells us about God's love in the best way of talking about love: it tells us about God's love in practice. The Bible tells us how God created the world out of love, and how he continues to love the world he created. It tells how even when we reject God's love and spoil God's world with evil, God still keeps on loving us and doing all he can to rescue us from evil. That's the Old Testament story of God's involvement with the people of Israel. It's the story that comes to a climax with Jesus, when God, in his love for us, sent his Son to be one of us. To live a human life with us and die for us. It's the story that continues with God's loving presence with the Holy Spirit - in the church and in our lives. The story of God's love for the world goes on - and we're part of it. The story tells us who God is because we see what kind of “love” God is. God is selfless love. He doesn't just sit up in heaven and wish us well. He gets involved with us because of his love for us. He gives himself for us in costly self-sacrifice - in the suffering that Jesus endured ending ultimately in his death on the cross - all this for us! God gives himself to us when he gives us his Holy Spirit, as the gift of himself, present with us in our lives. “God is love” means that God gives himself - for us and to us. That is God's nature. There's also something else to notice about that story of God's love for the world. We can only tell that story by talking about God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.When we see God's love in action, we see not only God as a Father who cares for us - like a parent loving his children. He cares for us, nurtures us, watches over us, directs us in his love. We also see God as a Son - who loves us by coming alongside us in the person of Jesus, as our human brother, one of us, living and dying for us, in loving solidarity with us. And we also see God as a Spirit - who comes into our very being, who loves us, as it were, from the inside. It’s only because God IS Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that God can love us in the way he does. So, we really need all these ways of talking about God when we say that God is love. We need to tell the story of God's love for the world: what God's love is in practice. Then we also need to say: God is Father, Son and Spirit.God loves us as a Father, as a brother, and as a comforter. When we find the doctrine of the Trinity difficult and puzzling, we should ask ourselves: how could we tell the story differently? We need to take one further step, which is the most difficult. I've been talking about God's love for us. But if God is love, God's love must be more than his love for us. God is love in his very being, quite apart from us. Even before we existed, even before God created the world, he was already love. God didn't start loving when he loved his creation. God's love for us is the overflowing of the love that God is eternally. And that can be so because, again, God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God's being is the love between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. An illustration may help, though it's no more than an illustration. Think of a very loving family, one in which people are devoted to each other. Not the sort of family whose love is a closed circle, excluding other people, but rather the sort of family that is always befriending other people. The family's own love is constantly being shared with others. Other people are welcomed into the home and made to feel they're part of the family. In conclusion, it seems to me that there are two mistakes people commonly make about the idea of the Trinity, which I hope you’ll now be able to see. One is that the doctrine of the Trinity is some sort of rarefied theological speculation, the kind of thing theologians amuse themselves with in their studies, but nothing to do with real Christian life. On the contrary, the doctrine of the Trinity is what we must believe if we really grasp that amazing truth of the Gospel: that God himself, in his love, has really come into our world as Jesus Christ and that God himself, in his love, has really come into our own experience as the Holy Spirit. It’s not enough to just accept God’s love for ourselves - we have to take God’s love out into the world and help others understand more about why we believe in this Trinitarian God. It’s an ongoing process and not something we should selfishly keep close to us. I encourage you go out there and share the love that God has for ALL his people. For our benediction, please read 2 Cor 13:13 Amen. Stay warm this winter………….Pastor Rick
1 Comment
Peter Andrews
5/6/2020 05:50:09 pm
Thanks Pastor Rick - a thoughtful and very helpful message
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