Isaiah
6.1-8
Mathew
28.16-20
Romans
8.12-17
3 + 1 = ∞
Trinity Sunday
I
was sitting at the light down at the end of Conant St. a few weeks ago when I
noticed on the car in front of me a clever vanity plate from New
Hampshire. It read, “+ Beyond.” (And
beyond). It took me a moment to figure
it out, and it finally came to me that I was sitting behind a Nissan Infinity, so
what I was looking at was an infinity and
beyond. Since that light takes so
long to change, I took a quick photo of it with my phone and posted it up to
Facebook later, adding it took me a minute to figure out, but I didn’t provide
the solution. It was our own Gail Morris
who came up with it first, asking if the car might belong to spaceman Buzz
Lightyear from the movie “Toy Story;” if you’ve seen the movie, then you’ve
heard Buzz exclaim, just before takeoff, “To infinity and beyond.” It has always struck me as a clever turn of
phrase: I mean, since infinity is, well, infinite, what can possibly be beyond
it?
Infinity. I wonder what would happen if we woke up one
morning – either as individuals or as a church – and found that a rich old
uncle we never knew we had left us an inheritance whose size is simply
unimaginable – infinite, perhaps. That
we had suddenly become possessors of such wealth that we would never have to go
to work to earn any more income for the rest of our days. What would we do with such wealth? Or more to the point, what, if anything,
would we do differently? How would we
employ our newfound windfall? How much
would we invest – although we would already have so much that investing would
be a purely redundant exercise? How much
would we share? If we knew our future
were absolutely secure with no possibility of financial worry, how would that
affect our attitude and behavior and understanding of our present?
The
apostle Paul suggests that this scenario is anything but an impossible
dream. I know you all talked about the
Holy Spirit last Sunday, and were invited to dream dreams and imagine visions
for ourselves as people of faith, and as a church. These are the things God’s Holy Spirit, which
poured down as tongues of flame in a one-of-a-kind baptism, make possible. You called on the power of the Spirit to
bring the dreams and to equip us to achieve them. In our reading this morning from Romans 8,
Paul reveals to us that the dreams and the visions are real. “Everyone who is led by the Spirit is a child
of God… When we cry Abba! Father!, it
is the very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God,
and if children, heirs, heirs to God and joint heirs with Christ.” You and I are the children of God – the
inheritance is already ours, riches beyond imagination, and more durable than
any fungible good. We are not heirs to
the flesh, as Paul insists, but rather heirs to the Spirit. At Pentecost, we the church received the gift
that keeps on giving, the Spirit that brings life and community.
Today,
the Sunday after Pentecost, is considered by the church to be Trinity
Sunday. That is, since we celebrated the
coming of the Spirit last week, today we have the leisure to consider what it
means that God the Creator, Christ the Redeemer and the Holy Spirit of
Pentecost, our community and our strength, work together as one. Actually, the whole notion of the trinity is
something that the church formulated only retroactively. The idea itself only occurs twice in scripture,
one a verse in Hebrews that was clearly shoehorned into the text years after it
was written, and the great commission at the end of Matthew, which is also most
likely a later addition. We’ve already
heard the words twice this morning, once in our New Testament lesson and again at
Nathaniel’s baptism: “Go therefore and
make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of
the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them everything I have taught you. And remember, I am with you always, to the
end of the age.”
Now
I recognize, the Trinity is one of those things most church members don’t lose
a lot of sleep over; in fact, if any sermon topic is guaranteed to cure
insomnia, it is the sermon on the Trinity.
Millions of words have been printed about it, thousands of books have
tried to parse and explain it, and it still remains one of the more inscrutable
yet foundational theories in Christian theology. How can God be God, Jesus be Jesus, the
Spirit be the Spirit, and yet the three are at the same time one and the same yet
unique and different? Kenn Storck, a
retired pastor and sometime poet, admits to the absurdity of the whole idea in
a poem he calls simply “The Holy
Trinity,” part of which reads, “Go ahead: draw your pictures / color your triangles /
Speak of the Three-in-One / And the One-in-Three. / Use the Athanasian Creed
litmus test / of Father / Son / Spirit / But all the while do not trust / the
limit of language / the confinement of metaphor / the simplicity of simile.”
I
think there’s an easier way though, and we may have talked of it this way
before. The trinity is simply a picture
of God in relationship. God in relationship. Here’s what I mean. I’m a Dad, right? I have two beautiful daughters, and they have
two wonderful men in their lives – I’m a father-in-law to one of them. I’m also a husband. I’m a son!
I’m fortunate enough to still have both my parents living not-too-far
away. I’m a brother, a nephew, an uncle
many times over. I’m your pastor. I’m your friend. So does this mean there are nine different
Alans for the roles I play? Good Lord, deliver us! No; it simply means I have different
relationships with different people in different circumstances. Now this is, I admit, a degree of
oversimplification, but not too much so.
God is Creator in relationship to Creation, which includes you and me;
Jesus is brother, savior and friend, and provides another avenue, or approach
to God distinct from God’s creating; and the Spirit is that which binds you and
me together as the church, as brothers and sisters, and opens up ways to God
that are unique to the Spirit – I’d say things like prayer, song, meditation,
and the heartfelt joy that comes from loving God and living in community. As Lutheran Theological Seminary President
David Lose writes, “You can’t fully or finally understand God without talking
about relationship – that God is so full of love that there has to be some way
of talking about that love shared in and through profound relationships.”
But
it is not just about God’s relationship with Godself, or God’s relationship
with us, but our relationships with others that is one of the sure marks of the
spirit’s presence and work among us.
And as I looked at the visions and dreams for Second Church that
everyone wrote down on those flame-shaped slips of paper last week, the visions
and dreams inspired by that same spirit of relationship and community, I
noticed something not only unusual, but downright uncharacteristic. I counted forty-seven flames and tongues of
fire that were written on and placed on the board, and of those forty-seven visions
and dreams for Second Church, guess how many had to do with relationship and
community-building and reaching out to the world around us? Sixteen, or a hair over one-third of
them. That is so unlike us! (Then again, only one mentioned God, and only
two mentioned Jesus, but that’s another sermon for another day.) Last Sunday’s reading from Acts 2 describes
how the Spirit brought people together from all around the region – from
Cappadocia and Phrygia and Pamphylia and all those other unpronounceable places
– and made them one body, one community.
It describes how the Holy Spirit of God creates community and
relationship. If it is the love of God
that brings us together – if it is our love for Christ that brings us together
– if it is the love that is breathed into our hearts by God’s Holy Spirit that
brings us together, then everything we do wants to be about sharing that
love. As David Lose put it so simply yet
profoundly, “it is simply impossible to think about love that is not shared.” You and I are the heirs to an incredible
fortune, an embarrassment of riches of love, of compassion, of redemption, an
embarrassment of opportunities to build the same kind of spirit-filled community
that same spirit built in the second chapter of Acts. The over-abundant inheritance of the spirit
releases us from any and all self-imposed or self-inflicted confines, and frees
us to look beyond ourselves with the love that cannot not be shared with those
around us. If the Spirit is present in
this community, this is what the Spirit does.
Knowing
this, how will the things we do and the decisions we make this week reflect the
boundless and irrepressible wealth of love that has been bequeathed to us? How might our relationships with the people
around us be transformed – our family, our friends, our co-workers, the next
stranger we meet? How might this
boundless and irrepressible inheritance of love shape and transform our dreams
and visons for Second Church? And what
kind of risks will be willing to take once we know that we are heirs to a fortune
that is inexhaustible?
The
prophet Isaiah once heard a voice a long long time ago; it was the voice of God,
asking, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And Isaiah said, “Here I am – send me!” The power of the triune God – the three –
coupled with the conviction of even one person of faith – Isaiah, or you, or me
– results in a community-creating, compassionate power of love that is greater
than all our combined abilities and imagination put together. Or, to put it into an equation, three plus
one equals infinity – and beyond.
Let
us pray.
No comments:
Post a Comment