The Trinity

In tomorrow's Gospel reading Jesus tells his disciples,

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 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. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.

That phrase "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" is perhaps the clearest formulation of the three persons of the Trinity we find in scripture. While we look and find things that point to the Truth of this understanding of God, the word "Trinity" itself is not found in the Bible. And yet, because of this quote from Matthew and some other passages, we would be hard pressed to declare the idea of the Trinity to be unscriptural. I bring this up as tomorrow is Trinity Sunday, the only Sunday of the church year devoted to a doctrine. As I said in my sermon last year, The Mathematics of The Trinity,

A seminary professor of mine asserted that if you can describe The Trinity, clear and distinctly so that anyone can understand it, then you are a heretic. Keep talking and we’ll figure out which kind. This is because our language and our under-standing fall short of being able to describe God.

John Wesley put it this way, “Bring me a worm that can comprehend a man, and then I will show you a man that can comprehend the triune God!” God is more than we can wrap our minds around and that is necessarily so.

Yet, we believe that God reveals God's inner life through nature (general revelation) and through scripture (specific revelation) and that though we can't comprehend fully who God is, we do trust that the outer self God reveals to us is a trustworthy guide to the inner life of God. And as Jesus was a full expression of that, we believe that within the Trinity, dwells all the love and compassion we saw manifest in Jesus. So while we fall short of comprehending God, we do gain much in the exercise of thinking about who God is and how God has acted. For a different take on this, there is the sermon in the archives Three Short Sermons on The Trinity.

peace,
Frank+
The Rev. Frank Logue, Pastor