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Rez is a community where Jesus welcomes, shapes, and sends disciples for the good of our neighborhood. No matter where you are in life, this is a place for you.
Life Together In The Goodness Of God
Please be seated. So a pretty certain way to know that it is leading up to Trinity Sunday and Yana Osborne is preaching is that I'm going to have to spend about 30 minutes putting books away once I get home today because every book of theology and history and early literature and whatever we call them, it's been pulled out this week and looked at because the Trinity is just the concept of the Trinity, it's just overwhelming. And then in the end, yeah, some bits have been pulled from books and when it really comes down to it, the Trinity is just where we live and move and have our being. So it is the feast of the Holy Trinity. We may not say the words Holy Trinity a lot, rather we use the words that describe what we mean by Holy Trinity. Almighty God, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the Holy Spirit, one God. That formula is part of every colleague we say. We baptize, we baptize in the name of the Holy Trinity, but we don't say Holy Trinity, we say I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. We pronounce God's blessing with the image of the Holy Trinity. Almighty God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit bless, preserve, and keep you. Sometimes it gets pretty technical. In a little while when we gather at the table, Father Sean, as part of the Eucharistic prayer, will say these words. Now hold on to your seats, okay? For with your co-eternal Son and Holy Spirit, you are one God, one Lord, in Trinity of persons and in unity of being, and we celebrate the one and equal glory of you, O Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Those words just warm the heart, don't they? Not really. And right now our children over in chapel will say these simple words, we believe in God above, we believe in Jesus' love, we believe the Spirit too comes to teach us what to do, we believe that we can be kind and gentle, Lord, like thee, and they greet one another. That's a simple poem creed I first learned about 50 years ago when my children began to attend an Episcopal school in chapel, and that simple creed has stuck with me, and now our kids say it over there. Of course, we can't leave out the really big one right after the sermon. We'll jump up, that's right, jump up after hearing Bible and sermon and say the Nicene Creed, we believe in one God, the Father Almighty, we believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, we believe in the Holy Spirit. We hear, read, speak these words so often, so much. It is how we speak about God, God in three persons. The words kind of roll off the tongue. The formula is ingrained, ingrained in our prayers and worship, in our hymns and songs, in our shared life of worship and prayer. Now a lot of what we say, if not most, a lot of what we say, pray and sing together in worship comes straight from the Bible. Even that Episcopal pillar, the Book of Common Prayer, consists mostly of words and actions straight from the Bible, arranged for private personal worship and for public communal worship, all Bible-based, if you will. But now the word, the words, Holy Trinity, or even just the word Trinity doesn't come from the Bible. You can book for it all you want. Sure, the Bible proclaims God, the Father Creator, proclaims Jesus, the Son of God, proclaims the Holy Spirit, just doesn't use their, if you will, household or family name. They are there, but they're not sort of put together under one, right? And while Scripture reveals much about God's work in the creation and among us, actually reveals everything we need to know, we still have questions. We have questions today, and trust me, the early church had questions. Now, let's consider our church's year and our journey so far. Every year in the seasons of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, and Easter, we walk with Jesus. We hear the stories of how Jesus walked this earth, right? We spend six months living into his birth, his baptism, his ministry, his crucifixion and death, and culminating on Easter day, his resurrection. We continue with the seven weeks of Easter ending on Pentecost, and we proclaim new life. We proclaim the new life of Jesus with Jesus. On the day of Pentecost, our walk with sort of spelling out this daily, seasonal, yearly life of Jesus with the coming of the Holy Spirit, Jesus himself intimates that it is and breathes upon the disciples that the Holy Spirit is present to strengthen them in their work of teaching the world who he is, showing the world who he is. And so here we are. We have spent these six months learning what we can learn about Jesus, and now we conclude it all by sort of saying, so we look back at what has been revealed to us. We look back at how God the Father has acted in creation and in the new creation. We look back at what Jesus has taught us, what his incarnation, his becoming human, what his dying and rising again means to us, and we have heard of how the Holy Spirit is present. And so from here on until Advent rolls around again, we will focus on Jesus' teachings, his healings, and his work among the people. But we hear all those stories in light of his whole life, including his death and resurrection, and so it was for the early church. The word about Jesus began to spread. Have you heard what happened in Jerusalem? And you know, I talked to this guy named Peter, and he had, and this friend of mine who lives two streets over Mary Magdalene, she says, word began to spread, and people gathered in worship. In the very beginning, of course, mostly in Jewish communities of faith, the teachings about and the knowing about Jesus was set within the context of the people of Israel's understanding of God's call and presence. But thanks to people like Mary Magdalene and Paul and Peter and Lydia and countless and nameless others, the word spread, and we came to have what we know as church. Now, it's human nature to want to know how things work. We love puzzles. Well, I love puzzles. Putting things together into a whole, how things fit together and how they relate. Perhaps we can imagine the questions asked in the early church, perhaps questions asked at their coffee hour, whatever that was, right? Or when their leaders got together and asked, how are you talking about this? What are you telling people about exactly what the Holy Spirit is? Have you heard this one about Jesus? And so, I mean, we don't know the details of how that all came together. We know that it was directed and inspired by God. But questions like exactly how does this Jesus who is teaching and compassion for people, which I really like, relate to the God of Israel? Is he simply a prophet who had some really good connection with God, sort of like Isaiah or somebody like that? And what's this Holy Spirit thing? How does it all work and fit together? Now, gradually, formulations, explanations began to be produced. Paul was one of the first. We heard this morning Hadley Reed from 2nd Corinthians where there is talk in that very final benediction of love, of communion. But it's Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And it didn't take many years, but some decades anyway, to move from this sort of general talk. I mean, Paul would say, well, Jesus, you know, is the Son of God. Paul had gotten that. But he keeps talking about the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit. He understands very early on that the one God of Israel has now, in Paul's own day, been revealed in three different, we might say ways, but persons, as God the Creator and Father, as God the Son, Jesus the Son of God, as God the Creator and Father, as God the Son, Jesus, and as Holy Spirit empowering and working among people. Paul insists, and we have to remember, he didn't like pull out the Gospels or the prayer book to teach this or tell people to read it. He insists in his writing to the various congregations he had founded that there is one God, and he explores with them how that one God acts and works. And in the years after Paul, the writers of the Gospel accounts come to a deeper understanding and sets, if you will, what we would call the record straight. You know, with divine inspiration, they expand upon the story of Jesus, setting his earthly life directly into the story of Israel and the God of Israel. They each do it their own way. From Mark's simple beginning, you know, the Gospel according to Mark begins so simply with Jesus' baptism. And then to the elaborate introduction we all know and love from John, you know, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and we understand from reading all of John's Gospels that that Word is Jesus. But us human beings want to understand even more. We want to know how it works. That quest is probably never satisfied. And for the next several centuries of the Church's life, a hearty, shall we say, a hearty debate occurred, centered on many things about even what books are going to be included in Scripture, but certainly also around how these revelations in Scripture reveal how God works. When we dig into the question of the Trinity, absolutely every person we now label church father, patristic writer, all of those has something to say. Every bishop and leader, all those we call the fathers of the Church, had their theory about how God works and specifically what role Father, Son, and Holy Spirit plays and how they relate to one another. Each revelation sort of taking its own twist, interpretation. For 400 years, at least, it was a hot debate. And on some level, not quite as openly, it continues today. And certain attributes and understandings could be given about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but what really went on when they closed the door? What happened behind closed doors? How are they really acting with each other? If there are three persons, what are the family dynamics of the Holy Spirit, Jesus, and God? Do they get along all the time? Do they agree on what's going to happen? People came up with crazy ideas of how this stuff worked, and they asked questions about it. Theories abounded. Debates, writings, even whole books. Councils, decrees, practices, skirmishes, and wars were fought over this. How exactly does God work? Different interpretations of Scripture, of various current secular philosophies. We have to remember that early Christianity was very much exposed to the Greeks, right? And the experience were all brought to the fight. Some were accepted, some rejected. It was a mess. We might compare it to the way we talk about the founders of this nation and what they really meant when the words of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights were put down. Lots of disagreements around that today, 250 years later. Emotions and even violence continue to swirl around the intentions and interpretations of these documents. I'd say some of that is a big mess as well. But that's probably one of the closest ways we can think about what was going on in those early centuries. We know, of course, that eventually some councils were made and, you know, politics played into it. And by 325, the Council of Nicaea, with leaders of the day, pretty much put together that we're going to say, there's God, God is Father, God is Son, and the two are co-together. It's like two beings, but one God. And that was pretty settled. And then the Holy Spirit, which is what there's still some debate about what we should say. Did the Holy Spirit proceed out of the Father and the Son? Or was the Holy Spirit sort of co-equal from the beginning? You can look at all sorts of images and see what people's thinking went through. And then the reality is we settled. One of the biggest arguments of our Western, certainly our Christian Western history, has been about this. And we settled it to some extent, even though some splits, you know, still exist around it, but we got it done. Now, some, but trust me, you could still decide that you want to write a book about the Holy Trinity and how the figures of the Trinity work, and you could come up with new material. I believe it. It has been said, and I believe it, wiser people, greater minds than mine, have said that the Holy Trinity, the workings of God, is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived into. We cannot know all there is to know about God. That would, like, upset the whole created order. We're not God, you see. However, it does seem wrong to talk about the Trinity and not at least mention St. Augustine, who wrote more than anybody else and who wrote sort of after the Nicene Council, but before some of the others. Literally volumes and volumes of church theology, including a thick volume on the Trinity. I try to read a little bit of it every year, but I won't finish. But one thing he says I love, and it kind of upsets the whole vision of Trinity like this, which he's a huge proponent of, but he says, God is an infinite circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. God is an infinite circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. That statement to me captures the immensity of what we're talking about. Now, my own vision of the Trinity is that of a dance. A dance where the one we call Father, Creator, and the one we call Son, God's own Son, our Redeemer, and the Holy Spirit, the one who sustains us, join hands in a circle whose circumference is immense, indescribable, and they dance. They live their life in a dance, and we are all of creation inside that circle. And we can choose to listen for the rhythm of God's love for us, of God's power to transform us into being more God-like anytime. And we can join the dance, and it is the best thing that we can have in life, to join the dance of the most holy Trinity and know that in doing so, we are participating with and living in the very life of God. How much better can it get? Thanks be to God. Amen.