S3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com



Trinity Sunday Year CLast week I talked a little about mystery. In the context of our Christian faith, a mystery is something revealed to our understanding, but never completely understood.Today is Trinity Sunday. The Trinitarian nature of God has to be one of the biggest mysteries of our faith. “One in three and three in one”; sounds like the 3 musketeers to me, and while there is nothing heretical about it; it’s a riddle that only begins to encompass the fullness of the Trinity.God is a mystery, beyond our understanding, but that doesn’t mean God’s nature is a riddle for us to solve. God’s nature is something for us to experience.In the age to come, and in heaven, we’ll still have new things to learn about God and God will always have new things to teach us. Even after spending eternity in the presence of God, we will never say to God; “You’re repeating yourself; we’ve heard all that before.” God will surprise us to all eternity.If we can’t fully know God’s nature; why don’t I just end my sermon now?....I’ll go on, not just because I wrote more and I don’t want to let my time go to waste, but because we have signs all around us about God’s nature, to more fully inform us about God’s nature.In John’s Gospel we’ve talked about Jesus’ miracles being called signs that point us to Jesus’ nature. Since Jesus’ nature in part of God’s triune nature, Jesus’ signs point us to God’s nature.John also calls Jesus, the Word of God. As Episcopalians we believe that Scripture is God’s perfect inspired revelation to us, written in our imperfect and inadequate human language. Scripture can inform us us about God’s nature, but imperfectly, not because God’s word is imperfect, but because our language is imperfect.We can learn about the nature of the Trinity from scripture, but Episcopalians believe we can also learn to know God more fully from the traditions of our faith and our own personal experience. The early disciples experienced the Trinity as they spent time with Christ and developed a deeper relationship with Him. First they experienced Jesus as a wise teacher, a Rabbi, who was pointing them to the one true God, that the Jewish people believed in.Secondly, as they came to know Jesus, they began to see that He had a special relationship with God, they didn’t fully understand it, but they knew something was different and special about this man who they came to see as more than just human.Finally, after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension, the first disciples could no longer see Jesus face to face, but they felt the presence of the Holy Spirit and came to the realization that the Spirit, that was informing, energizing, and motivating them, was the Spirit that subsists with God and Christ.Over time, the early disciples experience informed them more deeply about the triune nature of God. First God as a singularity. Then God and Christ as being joined and knowing Christ face to face, and finally they experienced the Holy Spirit working among themselves and realized this was God in their presence. The early disciples experienced God’s nature in 3 ways.Richard of St. Victor, a 12th century monk, to paraphrase said; For God to be good God can be one. For God to be loving, there must be 2. God can be love, as a singularity, but to be loving, there must be an object to love. Love is always about relationship. But Richard believed that for God to be Joy and Happiness, God must be 3. The love of the 2 must be shared with another to both bring joy and to magnify the love. Today, we have scripture and our experience to inform us about God’s nature. Today Jesus tells us; “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” If we believe, look and listen we can see the Holy Spirit at work among us everywhere.We know God as our transcendent creator, we know God in the person of Christ, and we know God who resides in all of us, the Holy Spirit. We know God 3 ways.In fact, I believe that the whole universe points us to God’s nature, one in three and three in one. The pattern of the Trinity is the pattern of the universe. The Trinity is the template for all of God’s creation.Science points us to God’s nature. Science is a sign, for those who believe, that points to Gods nature. Both physics and ecology point us to the interconnectedness of the universe. Everything is connected, everything is in relationship with the rest of God’s creation. Everything is based on relationship.One example of science pointing us to the importance of relationship and the triune nature of the universe is our understanding of matter. Science tells us all matter is made of 3 basic particles, (even though we don’t see these as the elemental particles of the universe anymore), electrons, protons and neutrons are still seen as the basic building blocks of all the matter in the universe.Imagine all the molecules that make up my body. Science tells us, there is so much space between the particles that make up a wall and my body, that I should be able to walk through any wall and none of my particles would touch a particle of the wall. But we know that’s not the way things work. There’s something about the relationship of the particles, that make up all matter, that makes them more than the sum of their parts. The power in the molecule isn’t in the 3 primary particles, but in the relationship between the particles.I believe on the next few years there will be so much scientific evidence about the triune nature of the universe, we will give up our current binary world view of cause and effect and right and wrong. We will develop a triune understanding of the universe. When that happens, we will no longer live in a world of right or wrong, black and white, but in a world where the answer depends not only on the question, but on the relationship between the questioner, the object of the question, and the answer. Not 2 but 3 factors.When the world begins to see God’s triune nature painted over all of creation, even those who don’t believe in a higher power, will come closer to seeing God’s reality coming to fulfillment in the world. Although many people may not notice it or admit it, this new world view will bring people closer to understanding not just the true nature of the universe, but the true nature of God too. And I believe this new paradigm will bring all of God’s creation closer to our Creator’s ultimate vision for us. Amen ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download