312 Three = One, Twice

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Three = One, Twice” originally shared on May 22, 2024. It was the 312^th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   As if contemplating the Holy Trinity isn’t enough to make us question our sanity, we heard news last week that made us question what it means to be human, and it wasn’t A.I. Today, we’re going to find out what it means.

   This coming Sunday will be the Sunday of the Holy Trinity in the vast majority of churches throughout the world.

   Get a good night’s sleep the night before and have a good breakfast because you’re going to need everything you’ve got to describe the indescribable and to fathom the unfathomable. 😊      

   In fact, today, we’re going to consider that three = one, twice!

   But we are going to need some tools.

   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 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.

   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 endangered yet? Fortunately, we are not alone. The Holy Spirit guides us.

   And, we have been given tools. We encounter God in the Word and the Sacraments.

   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, for example. Jesus came out of the water, the Holy Spirit descended like a dove and rested on him, and a voice spoke from heaven, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” 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. Three is One. One is Three.

   Is your sanity feeling a bit endangered?

   All three persons in the Trinity are in play in this coming Sunday’s reading from the gospels, in John 3:1-17.

   We looked at a part of this text, the visit of Nicodemus to Jesus at night (yes, Nic at Night 😊), last March on the fourth Sunday in Lent.

   Jesus speaks to Nicodemus, an important and respected person among the Jewish leadership, about the nature of what is happening in Jesus, and about the need to be born again. Then, Jesus says, in verses 5-8,

5 Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. 6 What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ 8 The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

   How do we enter the Kingdom of God? We can’t. We are reborn children of God by water and the Spirit in baptism. It is God’s gift. Unearned. We enter by God’s grace. We are changed, and we live now as the people of God.

   We can’t control the wind and we can’t see the wind. We can only see its effects on things. We can’t control God and we can’t see God. We can only see God’s effects on us and on others, which others can see as well. This is the work of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit. God.

   Jesus then speaks of coming from heaven, and he obliquely describes the way that he will die.

   Then he says these familiar words, and some that are not so familiar, in verses 16-17,

16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

17 “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

   God, the Father, sends the Son for a purpose. And all, with the Holy Spirit, are one God.

   Is your sanity feeling endangered yet?

   Then, let’s look a little closer to home for the second way that 3 is 1.

   Do people who receive organ transplants take on some of the personality of their donors?

   I saw a news story on TV recently about a study at Colorado University released last January, and then read a few articles online, that suggests that they do.  Weird, huh?

   Studies so far have been statistically insignificant, and more are being called for, but there have been reports, since the first transplants were done, that people who have received a transplant sometimes take on some characteristics of the donor.

   They include changes in tastes in foods, attitudes, religious beliefs, even memories. Weird, huh?

   The study included mostly heart transplant recipients, but it also included other transplant recipients and it found similar results for all transplant recipients.

   If this is true, it would fit with who we are.

   For example, what makes a human being? Historically, we have said that we have a body, a mind, and a spirit. The body is obvious. The mind is different from the brain as it may include our self-consciousness. The soul may be our true humanity, it may also be said to include our self-consciousness and our spirit may be what connects to God.

   These three all interact and affect one another. We have seen that there is a link between our attitude and our health, between our health and our attitude, between our rational mind and our spirit, and so on.

   But the Judeo/Christian Biblical view, as a whole, goes a bit further. That is to say that humans beings are a whole, integrated personality with no part inseparable from the other.

   We don’t have three parts. We are three parts. Three parts in our one person, inseparable. A whole person. Trinitarian, but not the Trinity.

   The thing about the Trinity is that it illustrates our complete inability to know God, except as God has revealed God’s self to us. And even that is indescribable. It’s unfathomable.

   Does our body die and our soul or spirit live forever? No. That’s one reason why we say in our creeds, “I believe in the resurrection of the body.”

   When Jesus says, “Peace be with you”, he is saying “Shalom”, a common, even casual greeting. It can mean “peace”, but it can also mean “wholeness”, wholeness of our selves, wholeness in the relationship with God for which we were created, which we broke, and which was restored for all who believe and are baptized in the name (which means the true nature) of God the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

   That’s the Trinity. We know who we, the people of God, are because we know whose we are, children of the one true living God, given in a living relationship with God, and with one another in God.

   But, how can we know God? Only by what God has revealed to us in the Trinity.

   How can we describe it?

   I’d say it’s pretty much impossible to describe the Holy Trinity in detail without slipping into heresy.

   Now, 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 is 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. How do we answer?

   How do we describe the Trinity? 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/Daughter? They are all things that 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, and 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 its three 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!) 😊

   The Holy Trinity, One God in Three Persons, is present. It’s active. But it’s not that obvious. It takes a special way of seeing that only comes from God.

   Seeing God’s presence is itself the work of the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Holy Trinity.

   Is your sanity feeling endangered yet?

   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.

   And, 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, or three parts of one thing. God is One. God is One in three persons, each fully God. We know this because it has been revealed to us all through God’s Word and we encounter this one God in the Sacraments, Holy Baptism and Holy Communion.

   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 (from Matthew 28:19-20). To go from being an attractional church to being a missional church, to go from providing programs to asking people in our community how we can serve them, to go 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 best way to understand the Trinity is to live in it.

   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.