Grace United Methodist Church
Corpus Christi, TX
pastorwillrice@gmail.com
Mark 1:9-11
I don’t want you to worry. In seminary, pastors are highly trained for all situations. Our professors know what challenges we will face in the local church. They know that once a year, on the church calendar, we will face the challenge of Trinity Sunday. They know that we will be faced with that day where we will have to explain how it is that God is three AND one and why that is important. When this subject comes up in seminary, it is one of the few times that the answer is very clear and non-nuanced. On Trinity Sunday, it is suggested by the giants of theological and pastoral wisdom at the seminary… you know, you might want to write this down in case you some day have a preacher in your family that doesn’t go to such a fine institution as the one I went to. On Trinity Sunday, you are to, without a doubt, without any fear or trepidation, find a guest preacher. It can be the Bishop, the District Superintendent, a friend from school, it doesn’t matter.
Most people have heard of the Trinity, but let me clarify what I am talking about. The Doctrine of the Trinity says, (this according to the Articles of Religion of the
There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body or parts, of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the maker and preserver of all things, both visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there are three persons, of one substance, power and eternity—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.[1]
That is a bit to swallow, let me spell it out a little more clearly.
- God eternally exists as three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
- Each person is fully God
- There is one God
Clear as mud. I find that people tend to fall into about five camps about the Trinity.
Camp One – They just get it, no explanation necessary
Camp Two – They think they get it, but don’t really
Camp Three – They don’t get it and don’t care
Camp Four – They don’t get it and they really wish they did
Camp Five – They realize it is not really about getting it
I am sure a bunch of you have read it and a bunch more have it sitting around the house. A few years back, Stephen Hawking, one of the most brilliant minds of our times wrote a book, A Brief History of Time. In the book, he did a pretty wonderful job of explaining things like space time, black holes, wormholes and basic astrophysics to people with little brains like mine. There was one part, thought that drove me nuts. If any of you here this morning are astrophysicists, please excuse me for a moment while tromp all over your field.
Hawking says that “everything in the known universe, including light and gravity, can be described in terms of particles.”[2] All of these particles have a property called spin, something that tells us what they look like from different directions (if you could actually see them, they are pretty small.) A particle of spin 0 is like a dot; it looks the same no matter how you turn it. A particle of spin one is like the ace of spades playing card, it only looks the same if you turn in all the way around 360 degrees. A particle of spin 2 is like the queen of hearts, if you spin it just half way around, it looks the same. Now, all of that makes sense, at least at a theoretical level. However, there are particles said to a have a spin of ½. For them to look the same as when you started, you would have to turn them two complete revolutions.[3] Not just one time around like my ace of spades, but around again.
I don’t have a picture for that because that, to my tiny little brain doesn’t even make sense. I just can conceive of an object that wouldn’t look the same if you turned it completely around, that would take an entire extra revolution to look the same as when you started.
I love reading stuff like Stephen Hawkins’s work because it reminds me that there are limits to my own understanding. There are limits to the number of dimensions that I can think of. I don’t even understand the building blocks of matter and energy, how am I supposed to hold any sort of monopoly on understanding of the one that created everything?
It is easy to forget that everything that we use to try and understand God is simply a model. A model is not the thing itself, it is a theory or an object used to try and understand and study something far more complicated. God warned us all about how far to take models.
Exodus 20:4-6:
4You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 5You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God.
The Reverend Charles Royden, the Vicar at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in
Think about today’s passage again for a moment:
9In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the
Right in this passage you have Jesus, the Son, the Father speaking from heaven, and the Holy Spirit, the three persons of the Trinity in the same scene.
Back in my small high school, when we did musicals, occasionally someone would have to play two different parts, which worked fine, but the two characters could never be in the same scene.
Throughout the years, pastors and theologians have come up with a number of ways to help people understand the Trinity. Legend has it that Saint Patrick, who really is the Patron Saint of Ireland, not a Hallmark invention, used the shamrock, a type of clover. The clover seems to have three parts, but they are all really part of the same leaf. There are a number of limitations to this including the fact that a clover, can come apart. God is one.[4]
Another common explanation is water. There are three forms, ice, water and steam. There is a small problem with that, water can’t be all three things at once.
An explanation that I have always liked is that of a woman’s ability to be mother to her child, wife to her husband and sister to her brother. It is wonderful, except that this sort of thinking was condemned as the heresy of Modalism in the 3rd century. The heresy of this view is that it contends that God just appears as three different persons and isn’t really three different persons while at the same time being one.
Studying the Trinity for a while is somewhat like looking at the work of M.C. Escher for too long.
With as perplexing as the Trinity is, you may wonder why we still talk about it. A lot of pastors and churches have lumped talk of the Trinity in with other “antiquated” “outdated” now irrelevant church stuff. Church growth experts tell us that we if want to reach a new generation of Christians we need to scrap all the stuff like this and preach sermons on relevant topics like “Lose Weight the Gospel Way” “40 Days and 40 Nights to Debt Free Living” or “Praying Your Way to a Promotion.”
I do not think we ought to toss out the doctrine of the Trinity. But, let me be clear, the point is not doctrinal correctness… the point is relationship! The point is transformation! In describing the Trinity, we are trying, in vain, to explain what we know about something greater than our knowing. We are faced with an impossible task, but one we must undertake.
Close you eyes for a moment – I want you to think about distance. It is about five miles from where you are sitting to my house is
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Our God is so beyond comprehension, that our words fail us, but if we stop trying, we can miss out on the true blessing of a God so radically abundant that our frail little models fall very short.
Although the model of the Trinity is limited, without it, we also may limit our own understanding. Without some discussion of trinity, we risk, placing all of our “theological eggs in one basket.”[6]
In our God we have God the creator, who made all this, everything we can imagine and more, a God that is powerful, all-knowing, ever present.
Our God, is an awesome God,
he reigns from heaven above,
with wisdom power and love
our God is an awesome God.
or
God of wonders, beyond our galaxy
You are holy, holy
The universe declares Your majesty
You are holy, holy
But, if this is all we consider, our God seems distant, removed, completely shrouded in mystery. If we worship only God, the creator, we risk having a faith that is sterile, completely theoretical as we hurl praise at a distant world maker hoping that some amount of grace might be thrown back. Our God is one God, three in one who is very real to us in Jesus Christ and who lives and breathes in us in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Our God is Jesus Christ, a very human being who laughed and wept, who ate and slept, who was born and died. In Jesus God knows our pain, can relate to life on this Earth. In Jesus we can connect to God in a very personal way.
And he walks with me and he talks with me
and he tells me I am his own.
And the love we share as we tarry there,
none other has ever known.
Or
My Jesus, My Savior, Lord there is none like you!
All of my days, I long to praise, the wonders of your mighty love
My comfort, my shelter, tower of refuge and strength,
Let every breath, all that I am, never cease to worship you!
But if we take Jesus without God the creator, where is the power, where is the mystery? If we worship only Jesus the Son, we may have a faith that is just too human, too limited, too practical. Our God is also a God of power, the God with the power to create and the Holy Spirit, empowering us in ministry.
Our God is the Holy Spirit, a very real presence in our world, empowering us and the church to do the work of ministry and live as God’s people. Without it, our faith could be distant, in the skies with our creator or stuck in the past with the historical person of Jesus.
Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.
Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.
Melt me, mold me, fill me, use me.
Spirit of living God, fall afresh on me.
We are the church of the Triune God! We are a church that invites people to experience the awe and wonder of a God that created and is creating billions of galaxies, stars of unimaginable brightness, planets of rock and planets of gas, great mountain peaks and deep lush valleys. Giant towering trees and beautiful fragile flowers of so many varieties that we could never see them all.
We are a church that knows the abundant love of that God through the very human Jesus Christ, God! who stepped from the throne to live among God’s beloved children, healing them and walking with them and telling them that they are loved. This same God in Jesus Christ said “I love you so much, there is nothing you can do to change that. You can even nail me to a cross!”
We are a church that doesn’t just see God in the heavens or of Jesus in our history but God alive and living and working in us, making us the church, sending us out to share the news that the God of all creation loves us and that in Jesus Christ that God overcame death itself, brought us into relationship with God and taught us to love our neighbor as our selves. In the one Triune God we have a God of transformation above us, around us, within us working to draw us into relationship with God and working to change the world!
We have a God so absolutely amazing all we can say is, “well it’s kind of like this: you know how water and ice and steam are really all just water?”
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
[1] “The Articles of Religion of the
[2] Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, The Updated and Expanded Tenth Anniversary Edition, (New York: Bantam Books, 1988, 1996) 68
[3] Ibid, 69
[4] Rev. Will Rice, “The Trinity, Who Really Cares Anyway?” Preached at The Rock United
[5] Bill Bryson, *A Short History of Nearly Everything, (Broadway Books, 2003) 18
[6] Mary W. Anderson, “So Explain It To Me”, The Christian Century,
