Trinity Sunday
God in Action
By Fletcher Davis
In church school one Sunday a little girl was drawing a picture with many colors and much vigor. The teacher watched then asked what it was. She replied, “It’s a picture of God.” The teacher gently corrected, “But no one knows what God looks like.” The girl replied, “They will when I get through!”
How do you picture God? How do you know God? That’s our agenda today. On Christmas we think of the birth of Jesus. On Easter we reflect on his resurrection. On Pentecost, we focus on the Holy Spirit. On Trinity Sunday we look at the big picture of God. It’s the only day of the entire year that the Church sets aside for us to consider a doctrine.
The purpose of doctrine is not to make an immense Truth small enough that it’s easy to grasp, but to stretch our minds until they are big enough to understand Truth far beyond the ordinary. It’s easy to be sentimental and look only at nice stories about Jesus, or to view Christianity just as history, or a cultural enterprise, or an ethical code. It is all those, and much more. So Trinity Sunday invites us to reflect on the larger picture of who God is.
The doctrine of the Trinity tells us something glorious about God. It says that God is our Creator, and God is the Christ, and God is the Holy Spirit – God is all three but still only one God. That seems a bit baffling, doesn’t it?
Well, we might look at it this way. How many people am I? Would you say I am just one person? So would I. But what if I told you that I am a child of my parents. Am I still just one person? Sure. And what if I also told you that I am the husband of my wife? Am I still just one person? Yes? And what if I also told you that I am the father of my children? I am only one person, but I have different roles – child, spouse, parent. To my parents I am a child; to my wife a husband; to children a parent. But still I’m only one person.
The doctrine of the Holy Trinity calls each of those roles a Person. In today’s English we might say a Self. So we say God is only one, but God discloses God to us as three Selves, as Father, as Son, as Spirit.
One of my classmates in seminary, asked to explain the Holy Trinity, rose from his chair and expounded solemnly. “It’s like a house,” he said. “It’s only one house but it has a living room, a bedroom and - a bathroom.” I didn’t want to go there!
St Patrick famously used the shamrock to illustrate the Trinity because like clover it has three leaves in one. Others have used water that we know as ice, liquid and steam, three forms of exactly the same substance. Sunlight has a source, rays and illumination, three expressions of one thing, sunshine. Time has past, present and future, yet all are time. That altar has length, height and depth, yet it’s just one altar. You get the idea. Our one God discloses himself to us in three ways, as Father, Son and Spirit.
Now let’s look at each of those Persons or Selves of the Holy Trinity. When we say we believe in God the Father we are stating our belief that God is the Creator of all that is – not only of the world and all that is in it, but of the planets, the stars and the entire cosmos, of all things, seen and unseen.
Since God always puts part of himself into creation, when we study the wonders of nature we discover more about God the Father. We may be stirred by the power of nature’s forces – light, gravity and volcanoes, for example. We may be drawn to the imagination of a Creator who can imagine living things – orchids and orcas, eagles and earthworms, pandas and pelicans. What a creative Creator!
The second Self of the Holy Trinity is Christ, our Savior. God knows we have a limitation. We can conceive an abstract idea, but we can’t love one. So God entered the world of human history on planet earth in person, as one of us, to help us experience God and love God and be transformed by God’s love. He helped us know God not as a concept but as our loving Father.
The human being that God became when he came among us as a baby in Bethlehem and a man in Galilee and Jerusalem was named Jesus. We know him as Redeemer, Friend, Brother. We call him Christ or Messiah, meaning he is the One who saves or delivers us from the pain and peril of the world, the One who helps us fight temptation and win, the One who delivers us from evil and opens to us the possibility living forever with God.
Since the first half of the Christian Year revolves around Jesus’ life and the second around his teachings, we won’t say more about him this morning. We will find plenty of time for that in months to come.
The third Self of the Trinity is the Holy Spirit. That’s God in action. You know the importance of team spirit in sports. It’s about shared goals (let’s win), concern for one another (fellowship), and drive (enthusiasm). The Holy Spirit gives us all that and more because the Holy Spirit is God in action.
Another way to think of the Holy Spirit is to consider God’s power. It took power to set off the Big Bang that created the universe. That was God in action. It took power to raise Jesus from the dead. It took power to get you here this morning. All those are examples of the power of the Holy Spirit, God in action.
The Holy Spirit is the Self of God who prompts us to want to know more about the Holy Trinity, the Self who gives us the power to do what we ought to do, the Self who offers to guide us in our daily behavior - if we give our permission.
Here’s one more picture of the power of God in action. If I hold a piece of paper in the sunlight, it illuminates the paper. And when I put a magnifying glass between the sun and the paper and focus the sun’s rays in one spot, the paper catches fire. That’s the way the Holy Spirit works in our lives, not literally setting us on fire, but infusing us with God’s energy and light and love, helping us reach out to people in need with a hand of help and a heart of love - God in action through us.
St Augustine of Hippo was one of the most influential men who ever lived and one of the brightest of all the saints. But even he was confused by the doctrine of the Trinity, God as one in three and three in one. So he went for a walk on the beach to think it through. He told this story on himself.
As he walked along, he saw a child pouring a cup of water into a hole in the sand. “What are you doing,” he asked. The child replied, “I’m trying to put the ocean into this hole.” The saint laughed and said, “That’s impossible!” The child answered, “No more impossible than you trying to put God into your mind.”
We may not understand the mystery of the Holy Trinity any better than that, but it helps to remember that God is bigger and more glorious than any of us can ever squeeze into our minds. What we can do is respond to God’s love by loving what God loves - creation, and one another, and God in action among us this very day. For the love of God, let’s do it! Amen.
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