Unity of the Trinity

Sermon Notes Trinity Sunday, June 16, 2019 Jesus said to the disciples, "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. A skilled playwright will seldom begin his play with all the main characters on stage. Oftentimes the main character is the very last to appear, after the other characters have prepared the way. We, as the audience, build up our expectations so that when the main character does appear, we applaud his entrance. Jesus does something like that when he has the disciples wait in Jerusalem for the coming of the Holy Spirit. We celebrated that event last week on Pentecost Day. But scripture is not like theatre. When the Holy Spirit appears on the day of Pentecost, we realize he’s been present in the world since the very beginning. He’s been setting the stage, building the scenes, cuing the performers, orchestrating the music. Now we get to hear his voice. Now he becomes a main character. One of the three main characters, actually. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Three main characters who each have their own lines yet speak as One. It would be foolish for us to try and tease apart how Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct from each other. I think we would soon find that to be more than one sermon could bear. Of greater value to us individually and as a church is to see how Father, Son, and Holy Spirit speak as One. It’s only in the context of the Oneness of God that we can begin to understand the three persons of the Holy Trinity. The Oneness of God is the distinguishing attribute that separates the God of Abraham from every other god. Israel lived for and received the benevolence of a God who said to them, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” Deut 6: 4,5. This understanding of God as One is so fundamental to the Hebrew people that they had great difficulty is accepting Jesus as the Son of God. It didn’t fit within their established paradigm of one God to accept a Son of God. Jesus ministry to the Pharisees was largely to get them to see that he and the Father were One. A concept few of them got and which ultimately cost him his life. It was the heresy they could not condone. But it wasn’t just the Pharisees. Jesus’ own disciples struggled over the Oneness issue. Philip asks Jesus to show them the way to the Father. Jesus answers with exasperation that they should know he and the Father are one. After all, he’s been teaching just that to them for 3 years. But if Jesus is anything with his disciples, he is patient. So we hear him saying to them in today’s reading from John, “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.” The coming of the Holy Spirit in the fullness of the Holy Trinity is the missing link to understanding God’s personhood. It will take guidance by the Holy Spirit for the disciples to see the Oneness of God the Father and God the Son. This is as close to a description of the role of the Holy Spirit within the Trinity as we get in the Bible. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth. He interacts with us to guide us in hearing, receiving, and believing the truth. And remember, Jesus is the Truth so there is a direct identity between Jesus and the Holy Spirit. He speaks for the Son. He is trustworthy because he will only speak what he hears. And as he is One with Father and Son, what he hears is what God speaks. He also knows all that God the Father and God the Son knows. That enables him again to speak with the authority of God about what is yet to come, or with the voice of prophecy. As an aside, we search scripture to find the presence of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament. Our reading from Proverbs today identifies the Spirit of Wisdom, and we have come to associate Wisdom with the Holy Spirit. But if we can also see the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Prophecy, as Jesus declares him to be, then his presence is ubiquitous throughout the Old Testament. But to return to the Oneness of the Trinity: I’d like to suggest one reason why this is a foundational belief for our Christian life together. It is only by the Oneness of the Trinity that we can determine the truth of our teaching. The three Persons of God can never speak against themselves. The Son cannot say something that contradicts the Father, nor can the Spirit say something that contradicts the Son or the Father. Such a statement would cleave and rip apart the unity of the Trinity. We could not say with Israel “Our God is One,” if in fact our God is two or three. Yet today that is exactly what some in the church would have us do. They do so under the banner of a “new revelation” of the Holy Spirit. They claim the Holy Spirit is showing the church today a new thing, a new understanding, a new truth if you will, that is in direct contradiction with the truth as handed down in the Word of God. We see it most prominently in the teaching about human sexuality. Homosexuality is no longer a sin, but a condition to be embraced by the church because that is how God made some of us. The new revelation is that the Holy Spirit bends the will of the Father to the will of the culture. If you can find that “understanding” in the Bible, please show it to me. The contradiction is also there behind the new teaching on gender identification. We can change who we are not through the transforming love of Jesus Christ but through the transforming skill of the surgeon or the transforming rhetoric of the mental health counselor. And God’s OK with that because he’s given us free choice. He wants us to be all that we want to be, and he’ll follow us around blessing us for the effort. Again, show me where God does that even once in scripture. Eugene C. Bay put it this way, “The Spirit will come, not with new truth, not with a new revelation, but to glorify Christ (the Son) by taking the message and meaning of Jesus and declaring it, enabling the community to receive and obey it.” 1 Receive and obey, not discard and disobey. We who criticize the misdirected church need to be careful that we do not divide the Holy Trinity by going to the other extreme. If our criticism is not driven by our love, for the world and for the church, we too divide the Trinity against itself. The message and meaning of Jesus is love incarnate. All we do to proclaim Christ to the nations must be done in love, not in self-defense and certainly not in self-righteousness. Our role, vis-s-vis the Holy Trinity, is to seek God’s truth as revealed for the Glory of Christ. Our role is not to impose division within the Trinity by letting sinfulness determine Godliness. Jesus said, "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” Before we put our words in Jesus’ mouth, let’s sit at Jesus’ feet to hear what he has to say. In the Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. 1. Bay, E. C. (2010). Pastoral Perspective on John 16:12–15. In D. L. Bartlett & B. B. Taylor (Eds.), Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year C (Vol. 3, p. 48). Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.