A Sermon by Pastor Tom Lacey . . .
three isn’t a crowd
Proverbs 8, 1-4, 22-31, Preached at Congregational Church of Boca Raton, May 30, 2010
Three accountants and three engineer friends are traveling by train to a conference. The accountants buy three tickets, but the engineers only buy one. “How are three people going to travel on only one ticket?” one accountant asks. “Watch and you'll see,” says an engineer. They all board the train. The accountants take their seats, but the three engineers cram into a restroom and closed the door behind them. The train departed the station and soon the conductor came through the car asking for tickets. He knocked on the restroom door and said, “Ticket, please.” The door opened a crack and a single arm emerges with a ticket in hand. The conductor took it and moved on. The accountants agree that this is a rather clever idea so after the conference, they decide to duplicate the engineers' feat. They buy only one ticket, but are astonished when the engineers buy no ticket at all! “How are you going to travel without a ticket?” the accountants ask. “Watch and you'll see,” reply the engineers. When they board the train, the accountants crammed into a restroom with their ticket while the three engineers did the same in a nearby restroom. After the train departed the station, one of the engineers left the restroom and walked over to the restroom where the accountants were hiding. He knocked on the door and said, “Ticket, please.”
It is sometimes said that Trinity Sunday is the only Sunday in the church year devoted to a doctrine. This observation isn't exactly correct because the Trinity is not really a doctrine as much as it is a description of God: "God in three person, blessed Trinity," we sing. "Trinity" is the name of the God we know, insofar as we can know God, as Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit or Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit.
Some religions say we have it all wrong with our one God is really three stuff and yet this three God is still only one. God is one, and that's it, they say. In the Hebrew Scriptures we read a little while ago, wisdom is personified into Wisdom, with a capital W. But not only does Wisdom become a "she," she becomes in verse 30 a master worker beside God who is creating. Many Christian scholars have seen this as an allusion to Christ, who was begotten by God, not made as all creatures are, as our Nicene Creed states. And in John's Gospel we read, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.... Through him all things were made." Proverbs 8 says, "The Lord created me at the beginning of his work." It is of some debate as to whether or not Proverbs 8 "created" means made and therefore a creature, or begotten in the sense of the Nicene Creed. We will never know for sure, but I vote for the latter one because it seems theologically inappropriate to imply that God would ever had to create, as a creature, Wisdom, therefore asserting that there was ever a time in which God didn't possess this trait. Wisdom or the Word is God and was God and has created God's creation.
The primary difference between Trinity Sunday and the rest of the year is that on this day we focus on God's being rather than on God's doing; on who God is rather than on what God has done. On this day we turn from the "sacred story" to the sacred itself. During the rest of the year most of our biblical readings are narrative: they tell a story, whether as history, or myth, or parable. On Trinity Sunday, we have instead encountered an assertion of a relationship within the Godhead. How precisely the relationship between the three work of course isn't exactly known, but remains forever a mystery.
Now, in theology, unlike the situation in detective stories, a mystery isn't a puzzle we can figure out if we are given enough clues. We have some idea of their identities, but then again we still make the assertion there are not three different gods but still and only one, which sort of reminds me of the young medical student who spent his summer vacation working in the delicatessen section in a large supermarket during the daytime. At night he worked as an orderly at the local community hospital. Both jobs involved his wearing a white smock. One evening he was instructed to wheel a woman from her room down into surgery. He entered the patient's room and said, "Mrs. Johnson, I have come to take you to surgery." The woman, who was already frightened turned to her husband and said, "Harry, don't let him take me. It's the butcher!"
Here's the thing about Trinity Sunday: Trinity Sunday tells the full story of God, in very shorthand form. As Christian thinker and writer Madeleine L'engle has said, "God, making; Christ, awaking; the Holy Spirit, blessing." Trinity Sunday should therefore tell the full story of our Christian lives. Let me give you an example of what I mean. The Rev. James Bingham remembers, "When I went to Virginia Military Institute for college, I began to meet people who were unlike those that I grew up with. They weren't pious and they weren't especially pure but they were lively and alive. And a lot of them seemed to be searching for a way to be connected to something beyond themselves. One of these was a young man named Jonathan Daniels. Now Jonathan wasn't a pious saint by any stretch of the imagination. He was funny and fun. He had an inquiring mind and was in love with life. And there was in him a sense of looking for something more.
After graduation Jonathan decided to go to seminary and study. But these were the 60s and this country was embroiled in the great debate over civil rights. Tension and turmoil filled our lives. Violence had become common. Jonathan decided that he needed to be connected with what he saw as the spirit of God moving in human history, and he decided that he needed to link his life to what he perceived as God's moving in a new way in the world.
And so he left his studies and went to the South to work in a quiet meaningful way to demonstrate what he believed the people who believed in God needed to do. And so he went not to be a protester but to work in an interracial daycare center for children. In the South, at that time in our history, an inter-racial daycare center was a clear symbol of what many feared and even hated. And so one evening after leaving work, Jonathan was killed by shotgun blasts in the middle of the main street.
Jonathan had connected his life to God's purpose. No longer would his life simply point to himself but it would serve as a light to show what God was and is doing. He had come to see that simply being good was not the point but that he was called to lead a life that points to God.
Here was a young man who lived the trinitarian Christian life. He enjoyed the Creator's gift of life; he believed in Christ enough to become a minister; and he was moved by the Holy Spirit to do something to transform our world according to God's will. He didn't just accept God's gift of life; he didn't just believe Jesus was his Savior and Lord; he let the Spirit lead him forward. True Trinitarian Christian faith in God takes all three, with the most difficult being trusting in God the Spirit. Do more than believe. Walk in the Spirit. Complete your faith.
In 1968, at the Ecumenical Council of Churches Meeting at Uppsala, Metropolitan Ignatios of Latakia spoke these words: "Without the Holy Spirit, God is far away, Christ stays in the past, the gospel is a dead letter, the church is simply an organization, authority, a matter of domination, mission, a matter of propaganda, the liturgy, no more than an evocation, Christian living, a slave morality. But in the Holy Spirit: The cosmos is resurrected and groans with the birth pangs of the kingdom; the risen Christ is there; the gospel is the power of life; the Church shows forth life of the Trinity; authority is a liberating service; mission is a Pentecost; the liturgy is both memorial and anticipation; human action is deified."
Enjoying creation and life isn't so hard; believing Jesus is the gracious glue that sticks us to God the Father isn't so difficult either. The rubber hits the road when it comes to the third member of the Trinity. And the truth is that we hear a great deal about the Holy Spirit today. He is no longer the neglected member of the Trinity. Many people claim rather spectacular manifestations of the Holy Spirit, with speaking in tongues, prophecy, healing. But here's the thing: the first fruit of the Spirit is not power, but love. Love is the Holy Spirit.
I like the cartoon that pictures a preacher at the pulpit and a deacon sitting behind him with a grumpy expression on his face. The preacher says, "So until next Sunday, remember that God loves you, I love you and Brother Al here is working on it." Brother Al is missing the Spirit.
The great 13th century theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote that Love is the proper name of the Holy Spirit, just as Word is the proper name of the Son. That really says a lot about our religion. What it says is if you are in any doubt, choose love. If you can't decide, choose love. If you have trouble understanding, choose love. You can never go wrong if you love instead of hate. You can never offend God if you love instead of discriminate. You won't go against Scripture if you love instead of denunciate. Rules are good and commandments just, revelations from heaven are important and belief is essential, but there is only one thing that is truly divine, only one thing that is forever inerrant, perfect, and unchanging, only one thing that is necessary, and that's Love. As Paul wrote so long ago, "So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love."
In his Trinity Sunday sermon, James A. Harnish of
This whole Trinity thing, this whole God in three and three in one matters a lot in one sense. It's who we believe God really is. But in another sense, it doesn't matter at all because our God says love and love alone is what matters.
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