Dear
Emanuel Members and Friends –
“So
then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according
to the flesh— for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by
the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who
are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a
spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of
adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness
with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs
of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we
may also be glorified with him. I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” Romans 8:12-27
May 27, the last Sunday in May, is Trinity Sunday,
when we lift up the doctrine of the Trinity – God existing as Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit. There are also
gender-neutral ways of expressing the persons of the Trinity – Creator,
Redeemer, Sustainer, or as some have expressed it, Earth-Maker, Pain-Bearer,
Life-Giver. The doctrine of the Trinity
– one God existing in three Persons – is a distinctive belief held among
Christians, as Jews and Muslims share our belief in one God, but do not believe
in the divinity of Christ or in the Spirit as a person distinct from the
Father. And it has to be said that the
doctrine of the Trinity is a human creation.
The word “Trinity” appears nowhere in Scripture, though the persons of
the Trinity are named in Matthew 28:19, in which Jesus instructs the disciples
to “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, and teaching them to obey
everything that I have commanded you.”
The doctrine of the Trinity is an attempt to understand this passage, as
well as passages such as the one from Paul’s letter to the Romans above (which
we will read over two Sundays, May 20 and 27), which speak of Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit in divine terms, and yet all as one God.
The Trinity has been understood in various ways. St. Patrick famously is said to have used the
three-leaf clover to express how something can be three and yet one at the same
time. Others have spoken of water which
exists as ice, running water, and steam.
The Athanasian Creed, dating from roughly 500 AD, goes on and on – and
on some more - in exhaustive (and exhausting) detail about how belief in one
God in three persons does not constitute a belief in three separate Gods, and
also about the relationship between the three Persons. (For those possessing both curiosity and endurance,
the Athanasian Creed is easily found online, for example at this link: https://www.ccel.org/creeds/athanasian.creed.html. As you read, keep some aspirin nearby.) Some
see the Trinity as speaking of one God with three functions, similar to the
ice/running water/steam analogy previously mentioned, while others see this as
a kind of “Trinity-lite”, overly simplified interpretation of the doctrine.
We may be tempted to put the doctrine of the Trinity
on the shelf to gather dust, viewing it as a relic from a bygone era in which
the church fathers attempted to define the undefinable, a human attempt to confine
the God of the universe within a neatly-wrapped theological package. We may well question what possible relevance this
doctrine may have in our lives. What’s
at stake in claiming this doctrine as our own?
The doctrine of one God existing in three persons
places relationship and community at the heart of God’s nature
and being. Put another way, the persons
of the Trinity exist in relationship with one another, as a kind of community
of three persons existing as one divine unity, and so relationship and
community is at the core of God’s identity. If we think about it, we may see this in the
familiar Scriptural statement that “God is love”. (How can God be love unless God has something
or someone to love?) A technical term that has been used to describe the relationship
between the persons of the Trinity is perichoresis
– which could be pictured as a sort of divine circle dance of mutual
self-giving love, in which, through the work of Jesus Christ, we are invited to
participate. Some of this comes through in Jesus’ high priestly prayer that his
disciples would be one, in which he prays, “The glory that you have
given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them
and you in me, that they may become completely one.” (John 17:22-23) And as we participate, the spirit of fear with in us
is replaced with what Paul calls the spirit of adoption, an unshakeable sense
of God’s love for us as his children. If
relationship is at the heart of God’s nature – and if we are created in God’s
image – then we are similarly called to live in relationship, and the ability
to live in relationship with God and others is at the heart of what it means to
be human.
We see this mutually self-giving relationship in the
passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans above. Paul writes that when we cry “Abba! Father!”
or when we pray, it is the Spirit crying or praying within us. So it is God the Spirit within us praying,
and it is God the Father hearing the prayer – and it is Christ, God the Son, through
whose work we are able to pray to the Father and with whom we will be joint
heirs of God’s goodness.
This all sounds very heady, very ethereal – but it
goes to the nature of who we are as human beings. Our culture calls us to isolation and
competition, to place ourselves and perhaps our immediate family at the center
of our world, to view everyone and everything else around us as potential
threats and competitors, and to view persons and things at a distance from us with
indifference. From this perspective, we
may fume for hours about a traffic jam or transit delay that makes us late for
an appointment, while giving only a passing thought (if that) to a natural
disaster across the country that brings death to hundreds and injury for
thousands, or to a war halfway around the globe that brings destruction to
millions. But as Christians, if
relationship and community are at the core of God’s identity, and if we are
created in God’s image, then we cannot relate to others in this self-centered
way. Instead, we come to see our connectedness to neighbors
down the block, across the country, and around the globe.
Paul also wrote of the connection between us and
creation, in that both we and creation are groaning inwardly from what Paul
called “bondage” and “labor pains”. This
is Paul’s acknowledgement that we live in a broken, sinful world, and that we
ourselves live with brokenness and incompleteness, in bondage to sin. Certainly
our lack of care for the environment has brought pain to the creation, and
climate change could be seen as a part of creation’s groaning for deliverance
from our abuse. But Paul’s description
of “labor pains” gives us hope that the pain of today is part of God’s work of giving
birth to a better tomorrow. In the
meantime, may we look to God in faith, and look to one another not only as companions
on life’s journey, but as midwives helping to give birth to the future to which
God calls us.
See you in church –
Pastor Dave
No comments:
Post a Comment