(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Endangering Your Sanity”, originally shared on May 31, 2023. It was the 266th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
Something is going to happen in churches all
over the world this Sunday that only happens once a year, and it’s going to
endanger our sanity. Today, we’re going to find out what it is.
It’s been said that we only
need two tools.
If it moves and it shouldn’t: duct tape.
If it doesn’t move and it should: WD40. Or, if you’re old school
and you want it to move, or you want it to move faster, and you don’t need
those fancy aerosol cans: 3-In-One oil.
Before we had those fancy gasoline powered lawn mowers or the
eco-friendlier electric ones, we used our muscle-powered manual mowers, and
they moved efficiently with 3-in-one oil!
When
we wanted our bicycles to fly like rockets: 3-in-1 oil. When things got rusty
and wouldn’t move: 3-In-One oil. Hedge clippers, bolts, pruners, bicycle
chains, locks, adjustable wrenches, almost anything that turned and could rust
was made more efficient by 3-in-1 oil.
It’s been made since 1894 and you can still buy it. It’s one of the, if
not the most, masculine smells I know. If you could make a cologne out of it, I
think that you’d have something.
The
container says that it “Frees Rusted Parts”, “Prevents Rust”, and “Lubricates.”
And yet it comes from one 4-oz. container. It’s just one oil: “3-In-One!” Get
it? So, does that make it a good way to describe the Holy Trinity? Well, sort
of. But “No.”
This coming Sunday is Holy Trinity Sunday. It’s the only Sunday in the
Church year whose theme is not an event, but a doctrine. That might sound
pretty dry except for the blood spilled, the churches divided, and the
arguments that have consumed people’s lives trying to define what “the Holy
Trinity” means. So if that still sounds dry, maybe we need a little spiritual
3-In-One oil.
There’s nowhere in the Bible that says, “there is a Trinity”, and yet
the evidence is found from its beginning to its end.
Sometimes all three persons are manifest at
the same place and time, as in Jesus’ baptism. Jesus came out of the water, the
Holy Spirit descended like a dove and rested on him, a voice spoke from heaven,
“This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3:13-17)
There is the doctrine of the Trinity: one God in three persons each of which is
fully God.
So, how many Gods do we believe in? One: The Father, the Son, and the
Holy Spirit.
Wait, that’s three. How can one be three? Or is it, “how can three be
one?”
Sometimes
they are all described and sometimes just one person is present but all are
present in that one.
Is your sanity feeling a bit endangered?
All three persons in the Trinity are in play when Jesus says, in Matthew 28:16-20,
16 Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to
the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. 17 When they saw him, they
worshiped him; but some doubted. 18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All
authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 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, 20 and teaching them to obey everything that I have
commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
If someone were to ask what our true self was, we might say it is our
spirit, or our soul, or our heart, or our personality, but in the time that the
Bible was written it was in a name.
God does not have a name because knowing God’s name would be to know
God’s true self. And that is inconceivable.
Baptizing in the “name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy
Spirit” means to do so in the true self of God.
Does
this make who the Trinity is any clearer? No.
Martin Luther, the 16th century Church reformer, once said, “To try to
deny the Trinity is to endanger your salvation. To try to comprehend the
Trinity is to endanger your sanity.”
Is your sanity feeling a bit endangered yet?
I’d say it’s pretty much impossible to describe the Holy Trinity
without slipping into heresy. The whole idea of heresy brings to mind the bad
old days of torture, war, and hypocrisy, right? Yet it also points to a time
when the truth mattered, when it was literally a matter of life and death, not
just for this world, but for eternity.
The Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed that are central to the
Christian faith, that ended much of the Church’s fighting over doctrine by
setting down the central things that the Bible teaches, are both based on the
structure of the Trinity. The Athanasian Creed, a third creed, is very long and
rarely used in public worship, but it has some of the best language focused on
the meaning of the Holy Trinity.
Remember St. Nicholas, the guy called Santa Claus in many cultures. He
wears a red robe because St. Nicholas was a bishop when the Nicene Creed was
being written. The essence of the Christian faith was being decided and things
got so heated that good old Santa Clause, St. Nicholas, is alleged to have
smacked another bishop, Arius, over his heretical beliefs regarding the
Trinity.
Muslim evangelists in Christian areas sometimes accuse Christians of
believing in three gods, not one.
Our Bible reading from Matthew 28 for today describes one of Jesus’
post-resurrection appearances to his disciples. It says, “When they saw
him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.”
First of all, how could they doubt him. They
had seen him die. They had seen him do miracles! They had seen him dead. They
had seen his side pierced with a spear and the water from the by-then separated
plasma flow out. They had seen his legs broken. They had seen his burial, and
he had appeared to them on the evening of the third day.
Some doubted, yet they worshiped him. How
could that be and what does it tell us about sharing the gospel in an
increasingly secular age? What is the good news we have in a time when people continue
to be personally isolated and estranged and, I believe, are hungry for the transcendent
reality and the real community that God gives through the Church?
Pastor Will Willimon is a Methodist pastor
who has also been a seminary professor, a university chaplain, the Methodist
equivalent of a bishop and is a fine preacher. He tells the story of a young
woman who was a member of a congregation that he served who made an appointment
to see him during the week. She came by his office and said, “Pastor Willimon,
I just wanted to say that I won’t be coming to church anymore. I’ve been
struggling with my faith for a while, and I just realized that I can’t do it
anymore. I appreciate everything that you and the church members have done for
me, and I didn’t want to just drift away. I just came to say goodbye.”
Pastor Willimon tried to address her
struggles and he encouraged her to continue, but she was having none of it.
And, the next Sunday she was back at worship. And the Sunday after that. And
the Sunday after that.
Finally, Pastor Willimon asked if she could
stop by his office again, and she agreed. Pastor Willimon said, “Aren’t you the
same person who came by and said that she no longer had faith and wouldn’t be
coming to worship anymore?” She smiled and said, “Yes.” “Well then, I’m happy
to see you, but could you tell me what happened?” he said.
“Well,” she answered, “It came to me that
sometimes, if you can’t believe for yourself, you have to be with people who
will believe for you.”
That’s the nature of Christian community.
So, when people tell me that they are having
doubts, I ask them to be consistent in their doubting and to question their doubts
as well. To doubt their doubts.
But how do people first come to believe?
According to The Barna Group, 94% of people
who come to Christ do so before their 18th birthday.
Study after study has shown that 80-85% of
all people who come to Christ do so because of the influence of a friend or a
relative.
Each of us has a story of how we became a
Christian or why we remain a Christian.
How does the doctrine of the Trinity help us be better evangelists for our
faith in Jesus?
We believe in one God. We speak of God the Father, or Creator, God the
Son, or Redeemer, and God the Holy Spirit, or the Sanctifier, the one who makes
us holy. One God in three persons. The Holy Trinity.
How do we illustrate that? A shamrock, a triangle, ice-water in a glass,
one man who is a Father/Husband/Son or one Woman, who is a Mother, wife, and
daughter, are all things I’ve used to point to the Trinity. And here are three
that I haven’t: an egg (shell, white, and yolk), the Sun (star, heat, light),
and the three layers of an apple. Every one of them is inadequate, some border
on heresy, and some cross that border.
I saw a meme that showed a triangle that connected corners named Liquid,
Pitcher, and Ice to each other and to a circle in the middle. It said that
connecting the liquid, the pitcher and the ice doesn’t describe the Trinity. It
describes The Kool-Aid Man. (Oh, yeaaaah!) 😊
Water in a glass can be useful in another
way, however. Is the glass half-empty or half full? Of course, most of us are
going to say half-full, because the psychology of our culture says that’s the
way we are supposed to see it, that people who see it as half-full are more
goal-oriented, optimistic, positive and successful than people who see it as
half-empty. Who wants to be Eyore?
But is there another way that the water in
the glass can be described that is not so either/or?
I would say that the glass is 100% full.
It’s half water and half air, but it’s 100% full. That’s a bit like what the
Trinity is. It’s present. It’s active. But it’s not obvious. It takes a special
way of seeing that is the work of the Trinity itself in the Holy Spirit.
And we are called to share that true presence
with all whom we can reach.
Why is the Holy Trinity important? Well, I think that we would agree
that it’s important both to understand what we believe and to know that the
things we believe are true. Practically speaking, what we believe about the
Trinity in the abstract has a major effect on how we actually relate to God.
For example, sometimes, you’ll hear people say “I love Jesus. He’s so
accepting and forgiving, so non-judgmental. But I have hard time with the God
of the Old Testament. He seems so judgmental, so intolerant, and so punishing.”
The thing about the Trinity is that they are exactly the same. God the
Son is God the Father is God the Holy Spirit is God the Son, and ‘round and
‘round. We believe in one God who is three persons, and each is fully God. How
can God be one and three at the same time?
Is your sanity feeling a bit endangered yet?
God is like 3-In-One oil. When our hearts are hard against God, God will
penetrate our resistance and set us free. When the rust of sin has kept us from
being what we were created to be, God has given God’s self on the cross so that
we have what we were created to have in a living relationship with the one,
true living God and receive the forgiveness that only God can give. When we
need protection from the corrosion of sin, death, and the power of the devil,
and we repent and open our heart to receive God, God abides with us and nothing
will take us away from God.
But God isn’t three oils making one oil, or three purposes accomplished
in the same thing, or three solutions to similar problems. God is One, One in
three persons, each fully God. We know this because it has been revealed to us
through God’s Word.
If we
could understand the reality of God, it wouldn’t be God. All we can know is
what God has revealed to us, and God has revealed God in the Father, the Son,
and the Holy Spirit.
Perhaps the best way to encounter the Holy Trinity
is to live in the name, that is the living reality, of God as Jesus
instructed his followers. To pray, to read your Bible, to worship, to serve
others, to be ready to defend the hope that is within you and sometimes to go
on offense. It is to “go, make disciples, teach, baptize, and remember”. To go
from being an attractional church
to being a missional church, from providing programs to asking people in our
community how we can serve them, from being a hospital for sinners to being paramedics
going out to where the broken people are.
We see all these things and more in the Holy
Trinity.
Is your sanity feeling a bit endangered?
The good news is that of all the options
open to us, God gives us the sanest way to live in the name of the one true
living God, and it is revealed by God’s grace in the name of the Father, and of
the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
