220 3-In-One Oil

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “3-In-One Oil”, originally shared on June 8, 2022. It was the 220^th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   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?” Today, we’re going to find out.

   Some say 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.

   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, the only Sunday in the Church year named for a doctrine. That might sound pretty dry except for the blood spilled, the churches divided, and the arguments that have spent people’s lives defining what “the Holy Trinity” means. So if it 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 the beginning to the 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) The doctrine of the Trinity: one God in three persons each of which is fully God.

   And somethings just one is present, and something they are all described.

   All three persons in the Trinity are in play when Jesus says, in John 16:12-15,

¹² “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. ¹³ When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. ¹⁴ He will glorify me because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. ¹⁵ All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

   Yet, does this make who the Trinity is any clearer?

   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.”

   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 and the Nicene Creeds 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. What the essence of the Christian faith was 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.

   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.

   For example, saying that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are not three persons of the Trinity, but are different parts of God, each equaling one third: that’s Partialism

   Saying that the Trinity is three separate individuals: that’s Tritheism

   Saying that we believe in one God who reveals his self in three different ways, like Father in the OT, Son in the Gospels, and Spirit in the Epistles: that’s Modalism

   Saying that God the Father always existed, but that Jesus and the Holy Spirit were created by God and therefore are less than fully God: that’s Arianism

   Remember those lines about Jesus in the Nicene Creed that say, “eternally begotten of the Father” and “begotten, not made”? Or the one about the Holy Spirit that says, “proceeds from the Father and the Son” (note: “and the Son” was added later)? Those were all written against Arius, the namesake of Arianism. That issue split the Church in two in the year 1,000, creating the Roman Catholics in the west and the Orthodox Churches in the east.

   I saw a meme that showed a triangle connecting the 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!)

   Why is this 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 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?

   I would say that anything that we claim that we have figured out about God is probably not true. All we can know is what is revealed to us by God. We can’t understand God any more than a loaf of bread can understand the baker, or an engine can understand the mechanical engineer.

   If anyone says they fully understand God, that god is probably not the God of the Bible. That is a god they have invented for themselves, not the Creator of all the exists, the redeemer of my soul, and the one whose presence within me and within us makes me and us holy!

   How many of us love a mystery? One of the things we like about mysteries is solving them, or not being able to solve them and then being shown the answer at the end of the movie or of the story and then working out the clues that were there all along.

   The Trinity is a mystery, but not in the sense that we can solve it, or that anyone can show us the answer, or that the clues are hidden but are there for all who can recognize them. The Trinity is a mystery in the sense that it cannot be understood except as it is revealed to us by God.

   Do you believe in God? You give your testimony every time you read or recite one of the creeds in a worship service. The word “creed” comes from the Latin word “credo”, which means “I believe”. Those creeds are Trinitarian, they are the core of the Christian faith from which we grow. They are what the Church believes. Not what your denomination believes, but what the entire Christian church believes is central to what it means to be a Christian.

   It’s not always easy to describe what we believe to others. It’s like we’re speaking from one world to another. But we have to try. So, I’m going to give us all an assignment this week. All I ask is that we all use the name “Jesus” in a sentence this week in some normal conversation outside the church. That’s it. Just use the word “Jesus” in a conversation this week and see what the person we are speaking with understands about what we mean when we say “Jesus”. And most people understand something about Jesus.

   Trying to understand the Trinity is like trying to understand what it means that God created everything out of nothing. And when I say “nothing”, I don’t mean empty space. I mean nothing. No space. No time. Nothing. Try to picture nothing. If you’re like me, you are probably picturing empty space. Try picturing no space. What was it like before God created something and then everything?  It’s a mystery to us.

   It’s like the answer to the mystery of human existence that all of Job’s friends tried to explain to him. In the end what Job learns is what he learns from God, that God is God and he’s not.

   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 uses God’s self up on the cross so that we have what we were created to have in a living relationship with the one, true living God. When We open our heart to receive God, God abides there 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, and God is all, in all. We know this because it has been revealed to us through the Holy Spirit in God’s Word.

   How many Gods do we believe in? 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. Manifest in three persons, One God. The Holy Trinity.