By Rev. David B. Tabo-oy
v16The eleven disciples went to the hill in Galilee where Jesus had told them to go. v17When they saw him, they worshiped him, even though some of them doubted. v18Jesus drew near and said to them, “I have been given all authority in heaven and on earth. v19Go, then, to all peoples everywhere and make them my disciples: baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, v20and teach them to obey everything I have commanded you. And I will be with you always, to the end of the age.” – Matthew 28:16-20 (TEV)
This Sunday is the first after Pentecost in the Church’s liturgical calendar. It is called Trinity Sunday. This is a day that has been celebrated in the Christian church since the 10th century. It is on this occasion that ministers around the world address themselves to the subject of the triune God. More than two millennia after the first Pentecost, the Church continues to worship the Triune God in the power of the Holy Spirit. What this can fully mean is quite beyond our comprehension, imagination, and experience. But what the power of the Holy Spirit can include is the presence of Christ continuing with His faithful people after “His glorious ascension,” as the gospel tells us according to Saint Matthew, fulfilling and bringing to perfection the work He began on earth.
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Trinity Sunday draws our serious attention to the kind of God that we worship and believe. This Christian doctrine of Trinity is perhaps the most difficult to explain in a precise human presentation. The gospels tell us in direct and sometimes experiential ways through the teachings of Jesus among his disciples about God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They tell us the story of salvation: God’s love for the world, God’s gift of his Son, and the opportunity for anyone who believes to be saved. And this is how the Triune God could be easily understood in our limited human understanding. The doctrine of the Trinity does not attempt to explain God. It only explains to us in a very elemental way what God has revealed to us about himself so far. To describe the tip of the iceberg above the water is not to describe the entire iceberg. So we Christians affirm the Trinity, not as an explanation of God, but simply as a way of describing what we know about Him.
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There are two fundamental perspectives we can bring to the Trinity, to the doctrine that one God exists in three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. On the one hand, the Trinity describes the way that we, as Christians, experience God. We know God as God is revealed in the person and life of Jesus — and this revelation happens by and through the Holy Spirit. That is, the Trinity speaks to how we discover and experience who God is. This is the perspective usually offered when talking or preaching about the Trinity.
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But there is more. The doctrine of the Trinity also talks about who God is; it talks about what God is really like inside. This is where the mystics and the theologians sort of run together, and speak perhaps with more poetry and awe than precision. But let’s look for just a minute at what they say about God, borrowing some language from the third century.
Once upon a time, way before the beginning of everything — not at the beginning, but before the beginning — God the Father, who is love and who therefore must love, God the Father speaks his own name- created everything there is; He says his own word. And God the Son is begotten — true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father. The Son is the second person of the Trinity. Later, after the beginning, the Son will become incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and will be born as Jesus of Nazareth. The Son is what happens when the Father expresses Himself, when the Father reaches out in His love. Now, the Son loves the Father, for the Son is the Father’s word, the Father’s self. And the Father loves the Son, totally and without reservation, and so the Father and the Son are bound together in love. Such divine love was ultimately expressed by Jesus Christ, the Son, in his death in the Cross and resurrection from the grave to blot out the sins of the world. Yet, such love continues even today with the promised and coming of the Holy Spirit to sustain us in our faith and works. These are formally expressed in the words of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds of the Christian church.
The idea of the Trinity is not emphatically stated as a doctrine in the scriptures. Yet, by implication, it is stated many times. The early Christians soon discovered that they simply could not speak of God without speaking of the three ways in which he had revealed himself to them. This does not mean that there are three separate Gods. It means that there is one God who has shown himself in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – Creator, Savior, and Sustainer.
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St. Augustine says this about the Trinity: “Now, love is of someone who loves, and something is loved with love. So then there are three: the lover, the beloved, and the love.” This relationship of love, God the Holy Trinity, is the foundation, the bedrock of the universe; it is the heartbeat of all creation. Everything that is begins here, has its purpose and its meaning here, and will find its fulfillment here. Such is the living center of the Christian understanding of God. We insist that God is not a mean old man with a beard; that God is not some unconscious force out of Star Wars; and that God is not that peculiar little committee — two guys and a bird — that we often imagine. Instead, God exists, at His heart, as a relationship of love — one God in three persons, the well-spring of existence.
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The Holy Trinity is not so much who God is but how God loves the creation. He created it; Redeemed it, and is Sustaining it. Tertullian, one of the theologians of the early church, explained the Trinity in a metaphor. God the Father he described as “a deep root, the Son as the shoot that breaks forth into the world, and the Spirit as that which spreads beauty and fragrance.” The Great Commission which is our gospel reading this Trinity Sunday tells us about our portion in sharing about the Triune God – the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.
Let us pray.
Holy God, today we come face to face with you in the incomprehensible mystery of the God who is one, but three. You alone are God, yet we name you as Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. You are three persons, yet undivided. We behold your marvelous works in the majesty and power of creation. Through the created world, we know you as the Father, as creator. We live because of your unfathomable gift, who walked this earth and lived among us, your only Son Jesus Christ. Through his cross and resurrection, we know you are redeemer. We live from day to day, as those released from the grasp of sin, because of your sustaining power conveyed through the Holy Spirit. One in three, three in one: God who is sovereign over the visible and invisible, God who lived among us as Jesus Christ, God who remains with us in the comforting presence of the Holy Spirit; God, we worship you. Our hearts yearn to know you more clearly. Through you, holy Trinity, we encounter mystery; we stand before you in awe and wonder. Trusting in your grace, we are ever in need of your mercy and protection. Amen. (eSermons.com)
