Zion Lutheran Church, Lake Bronson, MN
Maria Lutheran Church, Kennedy, MN
June 3, 2012
Trinity Sunday
This
is the Sunday when many preachers wimp out, “duck and cover,” sidestep a golden
opportunity to preach and teach God’s triune love for us, God’s three-person-ed
overture to us.
Yup. Today, Trinity Sunday, is when many preachers
pray: “Dear Lord, please let Trinity
Sunday fall on baccalaureate or senior recognition Sunday or even Soil and
Water Stewardship Sunday. Please,
please don’t expect me to get all tangled up in the intricacies of an ancient
doctrine. It’s summer, after all—folks
can just barely stay focused on any
sermon—let alone one on the Trinity.
Next year, God, I promise—Scout’s honor—I’ll take a crack at it!”
Why
do preachers flee, why do they pass up the chance that Trinity Sunday offers
them? I think it’s because the doctrine
of the Trinity seems like a bad math problem—like trying to explain how 1 + 1 +
1 = 1. I suspect that we preachers are flummoxed
by all those strained analogies we’ve heard over the years—you know: “God is like water, which can be solid,
liquid and gas” We get lost in all the
abstract language that highfaluting theologians have passed on to us.
Or
are we simply intimidated by the Holy Trinity?
Do we avoid preaching and teaching this dogma simply because we know we’ll never get it right—we’ll
never, ever do justice to God’s “Godness”—so why even bother?
In
his book Christ Plays in Ten Thousand
Places, Eugene Peterson suggests a way out of the preacher’s dilemma. “Early on,” writes Peterson, “the Christian
community realized that everything about us—our worshiping and learning,
conversing and listening, teaching and preaching, obeying and deciding, working
and playing, eating and sleeping—[everything] takes place in the ‘country’ of
the Trinity, that is, in the presence and among the operations of God the
Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.”[i]
If
the Trinity is a whole “country”—a field of divine action—well then perhaps the
doctrine of the Trinity is
more like a useful roadmap
than a bad math problem. It helps us
avoid blind alleys, detours and thickets.
It guides us on the path, it helps us go where God is leading us.
What
if, what if our teaching and preaching of the three-in-one God were more like
spreading out a roadmap on the hood of our car…getting ready for a journey
through the world, toward God’s future?
What might such a roadmap tell us?
Let
me suggest three possibilities:
I.
First, the
Trinity roadmap helps insure that our God is big enough—his grace
amazing enough.
The
Trinity roadmap keeps us from settling for a too-small God.
This
doctrine prevents us from limiting ourselves to a Father-only God, a kindly
watchmaker who "way back when" wound this world up and then left it
to run on its own....while he dozed off in heaven, like a cosmic grandpa--fast
asleep in his rocking chair.
The
Trinity roadmap refuses to let us settle for a Son-only, hero-God, whose
selfless sacrifice settled our accounts, removed our guilt and left us a model
worthy of our imitation.
The
Trinity roadmap leads us to more than a Spirit-only God, who like an unseen,
invisible force...unlocks doors, deciphers puzzles, reveals secrets, inspires
seekers, enlightens searchers.
The
Trinity roadmap will not let us settle for any single one of these too-small
gods by insisting that we must talk about all three of them if we're going to
talk about any one of them...by insisting that we speak of the Father and
the Son and the Holy Spirit in order to have a big-enough, gracious-enough God on our hands.
Where God is concerned we need to say it
three times before we've said it right--even once!
We
need to talk about God the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth...who
has indeed put this world together like a master craftsman...but who, instead
of leaving it to run on its own, has remained intricately involved with the
Creation from Day One. We must speak of
God the Father almighty, who to rescue us from our waywardness dispatched his
only Son into the world to liberate us.
We need to talk about the Father who sent the Son and in the power of
the Spirit continues to grant new life...and who will one day usher in a New
Creation.
We
need to talk about God the Son...who at the cross has won us back, in order to
restore his Father's creation to its original goodness...so that after rising
from the dead he might continue in the power of his Spirit to be with us day by
day...enlivening us in each moment to walk as his disciples.
We
need to talk about God the Spirit as well...a Spirit who doesn't just reveal
anything or everything to us...but who constantly focuses on and confesses with
our lips what the Father and the Son are up to...the same Spirit who hovered
over the waters at the dawn of time...the same Spirit who makes the Son's story
more than a tragic martyr's tale...the same Spirit who loosens our lips and
frees us to proclaim God's mighty deeds in history.
The
Trinity roadmap helps make sure that our God is big enough and gracious enough...by
wooing us to talk about the Father and the Son and the
Spirit...by insisting that we haven't said a true enough word about God until
we've said that Word three times in three different ways.
II. Second, the Trinity roadmap helps our
worship to be deep enough, our prayers passionate enough, our
spirituality focused enough.
The
Trinity roadmap reminds us that it’s never enough to occasionally tip our hats
to the "Man Upstairs"...that we need more than an occasional encounter
with God in the beauty of nature out on the lake or the back nine...that we
will not be sustained by a cozy "me and sweet Jesus" love
affair...that our private spiritual experiences will take us only so far.
The
Trinity roadmap exposes us to the beauty of creation, but also its brokenness,
its birth-pang longing and groaning for the new creation in Christ the Son that
is already dawning upon us in the power of the Holy Spirit.
The
Trinity roadmap guides to a love for our Savior that is always more than a
private matter...never oblivious to the Father's intention to save everyone...never ignorant of the
Spirit's calling, gathering, enlightening and sanctifying of the whole Christian church on earth.
The
Trinity roadmap insists that our spirituality...however satisfying it might
be...must bring us to a deeper awareness of all that the Father and the Son
have done for us...catching us up in the whole scope of the Spirit's restoring,
reconciling work in the world.
The
doctrine of the Trinity keeps our worship deep enough, our prayers passionate
enough, our spirituality focused enough…always reminding us that we pray to the
Father only in the name of the Son and through the power of the Spirit.
III. Third, the Trinity roadmap points us to a mission
and ministry in the world that is wide enough.
Whatever
it is we may think God is up to...God is always up to more.
Whatever
it is that we hear God calling us to do in partnership with him...it is
always more.
The
Trinity roadmap helps keep us from narrowing mission to the this-worldly work of rescuing the
creation and liberating God's creatures.
In
the same breath, the Trinity roadmap keeps us from narrowing mission and
ministry to the other-worldly
work of saving scattered souls from future hellfire.
So
also, the Trinity roadmap prevents us from defining ministry consumeristically,
as the meeting of our needs, wants or desires.
The
Trinity roadmap attracts us toward a mission and a ministry in the world that
is wide enough...never letting us forget that God so loved the world
that he gave his only-begotten Son that whosoever
believes in him [through the power of the Holy Spirit] shall be saved.
But
enough! I’m starting to repeat myself,
in case you hadn’t noticed. And yet,
after all, isn’t Trinity Sunday a day for repetition?
The
Trinity roadmap, if it reveals nothing else, reminds us that in the “country”
of the Holy Trinity we always need to say things three times before we've said
them even once. As in any good story or
any decent sermon, the “rule of three” applies:
we believe, teach and confess the Holy Trinity to make sure that
· our God is big
enough and gracious enough,
· our worship
deep, passionate and focused enough, and
· our mission and
ministry wide enough and compelling enough to be worthy of the one we invoke as
Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
In
the name of Jesus. Amen.
[i]
Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology
(Eerdmans, 2005), p. 6.
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