Isaiah 6:1-8, Romans 8:12-17, John 3:1-17

Isaiah 6:1-8

Romans 8:12-17

John 3:1-17

“What’s The Difference”

June 11, 2006 (Trinity Sunday)

GLORY BE TO THE FATHER

AND TO THE SON

AND TO THE HOLY GHOST

AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING

IS NOW AND EVER SHALL BE

WORLD WITHOUT END

AMEN. AMEN.

 

            The beautiful words of The Doxology that we sing every Sunday are not only beautiful — they are filled with praise — and are filled with power.  They are filled with the power of God as we sing our praises to God — one God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

 

            Today is Trinity Sunday – the day when the Church celebrates God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  We actually celebrate this every Sunday as we sing The Doxology  — but today is a time to actually think about what it is we profess as we sing these words — what it really means that we worship one God — who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

 

            What does the doctrine of the Trinity mean?

           

            The doctrine of the Trinity is vital -  – not because it is something to merely know and accept -  – even if we do not understand -  – but the doctrine of the Trinity is vital for us because of what it can tell us about God.

 

              When we look at the doctrine of the Trinity, we begin to learn some things about God.

 

            But – what’s the difference?

            What’s the difference that the doctrine of the Trinity seems to push for?

What’s the difference between God the Father – God the Son – and God the Holy Spirit – and why do we need to think about the difference?

 

            I mean — does the Trinity matter –

does it matter that God is Father – Son – and Holy Spirit –

and if so – what does it mean?

What’s the difference?

 

Well — figuring out the real difference between, say, the radio broadcasts of Amplitude Modulation (or AM)  and Frequency Modulation (FM) might requires a little research.

Defining the Trinity may require a whole new dictionary!

 

So – let’s consider the following situations and see if we can apply the proper term to each:

1. A mosquito lands on your arm and, feeling it alight, you slap it with your hand. Have you committed murder or manslaughter (or, I guess, in this case, bug-slaughter)?

2. You’re traveling in your car on a back road in a southern US state listening to a radio with crackling static in the background on which a song plays that prominently features stringed instruments played with a bow. Are you listening to AM or FM radio, a fiddle or a violin, and is the music bluegrass or country?

Subtle differences, you say? Six and a half-dozen are the same? Not so fast. Let’s see how well you did.

As far as the difference between murder or manslaughter –

If you premeditated your attack on the mosquito, grabbing a fly swatter as a weapon, sneaking up on it and such like, you committed murder.

Reactively slapping the little bugger out of momentary panic is manslaughter.

 And as far as the type of radio station you are listening, the name of the instrument playing it, and the type of music being played:

If you hear static, it’s probably AM radio. As for the instrument playing it –    it’s the same instrument at a symphony or a hoedown, but if it’s playing “The Orange Blossom Special” –  it’s a fiddle. And if you hear more mandolin, fiddle and banjo than guitar, bass and drums, you can call it bluegrass.

Knowing these subtle-yet-important differences is important in some cases. But knowing the difference between God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit is important, also. 

 

Words like Trinity can evoke some serious head-scratching.

Ask the question, “What is the difference between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit?” and you’re likely to get some blank stares.

And why should it matter?

Well — we describe ourselves as monotheistic — we believe in one God.

But we also affirm the deity of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit and a person frequently identified as “God the Father.”

It sounds like three Gods, not one God – doesn’t it?

And if one God, then it would seem that we have — truly — an awesome God at work in the world today who invites us to join Him in the proclamation of the good news:

through Jesus, we have been reconciled to God.

Many have tried over the centuries to explain this concept that the Bible itself doesn’t lay out with clear delineations and definitions (the word trinity doesn’t even appear in the Bible ). Many children learn in Sunday school that the Trinity is like water — H2O — which can be a gas, a solid or a liquid but is still and always H2O at a molecular level — or the egg with its yolk, white and shell — or the executive, judicial and legislative branches of government — St. Patrick’s cloverleaf metaphor. You can probably think of a lot more of these, all trying to explain the concept of being one-in-three and three-in-one.

The mathematical approach is also attractive, the equilateral triangle being the most popular math symbol for the Trinity.

And as one person noted, while 1 + 1 + 1 = 3 doesn’t work to explain the Trinity, 1 x 1 x 1 = 1 works much better.

All these metaphors and explanations, though, fall short and we’re left with little satisfaction by way of explanation. Despite our best efforts at explaining the Trinity, a full understanding seems to elude even those of us who’ve been lifelong churchgoers. Church history itself reveals an eclectic and often violent debate over the metaphysics of the whole thing.

But here’s a thought:

In our desire to define all the terms correctly, maybe we’ve missed the whole idea altogether.

Trying to use definitive terms to describe God is a bit like nailing Jell-o to a tree — eventually the thing falls apart. You might as well try to milk a gnat or sneak sunrise past a rooster.
Human language has distinctive limits in trying to define the divine. So rather than carping about the nature of Father, Son and Holy Spirit (or Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier, or whatever terms we’re using these days), maybe we should be focusing on the real essence of the Trinity — the power of relationships.

 

In Isaiah 6, the Prophet does not try to give a concrete description of God – but more a vision of God’s majesty and power.

 

In John 3 Jesus talks about the Spirit of God in beautiful terms
that touch the heart – if not the head.

 

In Romans 8, Paul doesn’t try to line out a systematic theology of how God works. He uses trinitarian terms interchangeably — the Spirit, Father, Christ — but doesn’t try to make it a treatise on metaphysics. Rather, Paul sees God at work in a uniquely relational way. 

              After admonishing his Roman readers in verses 12-13 to discern the difference between living in the flesh (focusing on the self-oriented life) and the Spirit (focusing on the God-oriented life), Paul then shifts the language to relationships —

those who live by the Spirit are adopted by the Father as children of God and co-heirs with Christ, whose glory is realized through suffering (8:14-17).

 

Whatever the Trinity is in being, the purpose of God, the three-in-one/one-in-three, is to bring humans back into relationship with God, rescuing us from having to try to define ourselves through self-destructive pursuits.

             You can approach this passage and others that seem to reference the Trinity in two ways:

either you can try to figure out which Person of God is coming and going and doing what and when, like trying to determine a train schedule.

Or, you can simply focus on the fact that God’s very nature, God’s being, God’s focus, is internally and externally relational.

Our connection with the Trinity is not to be a head trip where we simply meditate and think about the nature of God, but a heartfelt relationship that is made real through the Spirit of God/Spirit of Christ/Holy Spirit “bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (8:16).

That’s a different view of God than you can get from a chart.

I like that scene in the movie Dead Poets Society in which Mr. Keating, an English instructor at an elite preparatory school, asks his students to rip out the "Introduction to Poetry" essay from their literature textbooks. The essayist had instructed students in a method of grading poems on a sliding scale, complete with the use of a grid, thus reducing art for the heart into arithmetic for the head. The students looked around at each other in confusion as their teacher dismissed the essay as rubbish and ordered them to rip these pages from their books. And at their teacher's loud prodding, the students began to rip. Dr. Keating paced the aisle with a trash can and reminded the students that poetry is not algebra, not songs on American Bandstand that can be rated on a scale from 1 to 10, but rather pieces of art that plunge the depths of the heart to stir vigor in men and woo women.

Too much of our time is spent trying to chart God on a grid, to understand instead of experience God — and too little is spent allowing our hearts to feel awe – and experience God. By reducing Christian spirituality to formulas, we deprive our hearts of wonder.

When I think about the complexity of the Trinity, the three-in-one God, my mind cannot understand it — but my heart feels wonder and praise. It is as though my hear, in the midst of its euphoria, is saying to my mind:

“There are things you cannot understand, and you must learn to live with this. Not only must you learn to live with this, you must learn to enjoy this.”

Perhaps we’ve made too much of the distinctive shape of the Trinity, which we see most often depicted as a triangle with three hard sides as mentioned above.

The thing is that triangles are not that common in the natural order of God’s creation.

Think about it — where do you see such hard edges naturally occurring? Rocky mountains jutting upward, maybe some leaf shapes … but not too many other places. You could make the case, then, that triangles are, more often than not, human constructs and that our triangular, pyramid-based diagrams and explanations about God’s nature are just that — human attempts at divine definition.

            So — what about a different shape — an alternative description, a subtle shift of perception?

 

John of Damascus, one of the early church fathers who lived during the late seventh and early eighth centuries, eschewed the normal definitions and calculated reasoning about the Trinity and came up with a wholly different term for the oneness and threeness of God — perichoresis, which loosely translated from Greek means “circle dance.”
              In other words, the Trinity is not primarily defined by the distinctiveness or unity or “substance” of the persons involved, but rather as a circle — a dynamic community defined by love. To see one is to see all — to dance with one is to dance with all, being invited into the circle and into a love relationship where we see God face to face, as children hold hands and dance with loving parents.

           Circles are natural, appearing everywhere from the sun and moon to the earth itself. Makes sense then, that we should be thinking of a circle as the dominant shape to  our understanding of God’s creative and relational nature.

You can’t define a circle by its points.

You can only define it as a whole.

And it’s pretty easy to differentiate a circle from a triangle — easier, say, than trying to figure out the difference between murder and manslaughter.

 

The truth is that we’ll probably never understand the Trinity by trying to define it. Even Paul, one of the most prolific writers and theologians of his day, runs round the idea. The only way we’ll really “get” the Trinity is to join the circle and live into that relationship – to drop the attempt to understand God and begin trying to experience God – to drop the attempts at differentiating between the parts of the Trinity and begin experiencing God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – for ourselves.

 
What a difference that would make!

 

Amen.