John 16: 12-15
Offered to the congregation at The Presbyterian Churches of Long Hill, NJ
Mel Prestamo, Ruling Elder PCUSA
So, today is Trinity Sunday. Usually, a Pastor will tackle the complexities of the Trinity in their message for their congregation on this Sunday. It is a difficult and complex subject that requires a rather deeper insight into the theology of the Trinity than your run of the mill congregant possesses, and I find it somewhat amusing that the Spirit has led me here today on Trinity Sunday.
When I got the request from Barbara to come and fill a pulpit today, I answered “Yes” before I looked at the Lectionary. I feel when I receive a request for pulpit supply that it is a call of form Spirit and then I usually respond and then look at the lectionary to see what’s on the calendar. When I did it in my preparation for today and saw that it was Trinity Sunday, I kind of looked up at God and said, “You’ve got quite a sense of humor.”
So, at the beginning, let me provide this disclaimer. I have my own idea of how I see and understand the Trinity. I have worked it through from the perspective of, how would I explain it to someone who has no idea of what our faith is, someone with absolutely no knowledge of Christianity, the Judeo-Christian shared heritage, who God is, who the Christ is or who the Holy Spirit is. How would I explain our Triune God to them?
Now some people have told me that it is awesome and insightful. They would ask, can I use that as a lesson plan for my Bible Study. And I would kind of … and say why yes, of course. But others would tell me that it is naïve and childlike and doesn’t do justice to the complexities of the Trinity and the mysteries of our faith. And I would respond, “Well, Yes. But isn’t our ability to understand God both naïve and childlike?” So, from that perspective, it works for me.
So, take what I say to you today with a grain of salt. It is not Reformed doctrine. It is just something that that helps me to understand and know this God that loves you and me.
OK. The Triune God. Theologians use the word peri/cho/re/sis to describe it. It is Greek phrase meaning “going around like in a dance.” Picture it as something like a reel dance. God created the world with gracious goodness. Jesus reveals that love and kindness to us and the Spirit of Truth and Wisdom invites us in to join the dance. Now all of this is exquisite imagery but would someone new to notion of the Christian Trinity be able to understand any of it, or get a sense of who that Triune God is?
The first thing the word, Triune, reveals to us is that we need to be thinking of God, how? As a threesome? As persons [plural] combined into a singular one? Or separately as a Father, Son and Holy Spirit doing their own thing? What would that even mean or look like. How would you begin to explain that to someone hearing it for the first time?
Well, I find understanding by trying to see our Triune God revealed through the ways in which we experience God. Create for yourselves the image of you as a child – one with limited understanding of the world and one with very limited language skills. You see, I feel that our words fail us when we try to understand and explain who God is. Our words are limited in what they can convey. As we heard in Jesus’ closing remarks to his disciples earlier in the reading from John.
12 “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. 13 When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth”
What Jesus was saying here very simply is, we don’t have the capacity to understand the awesomeness of our God all at one time, not then and perhaps not even now. The Spirit will work us through it but only as far as we can go at any one time. And for that reason, rather than trying to explain something that even we have difficulty understanding to a novice, I have defaulted to looking at what we can see, hear and feel with our senses and let that tell us what God reveals about God to us.
I think one of the first ways we can experience the presence of God is by looking at the universe around us and seeing God’s creation. I think, if we begin there, we can understand the concept of God as creator. God the creator is revealed to us in Genesis, the very first Word of scripture spoken to us. We are taught that God created the Earth and everything that is in and around and about us. Now, fortunately, we don’t need a theological proof of that because we can see and bear witness to creation because it is real. It is there for us to see, touch, smell and taste. All we need to do is look out around us and see the diverse complexity of the universe and of life on Earth and the beautiful simplicity and order in the chaos of the universe. Is all of this a cosmic accident or is there some force at work? We can look at the vastness of the universe and shrug our shoulders and say nothing here but us humans, no divine handiwork here. That would leave us in a meaningless void where at the end of our own lives or human existence itself there would be no hope that anything humanity does or creates means anything at all. The hope this belief provides looks forward to nothing more than oblivion.
Or we can wonder at the awesomeness of the universe and see the works of the hands of a creator God. We can see the stars and the trees, hear the thunder and the birds as they sing sweetly in the trees. We can see God’s power through the universe on display. We can be witnesses to all of this and know that there is a creator God. This can be no accident. Even if you are an evolutionist thinking that everything goes back to a big Bang, as I believe, God still had to be at the center of that Bang. Things just don’t boom in the universe without something to make them go boom. That is one of the chaotic laws that order the universe. So, when we look at creation around us and all of its beauties and even its own ability to go on and recreate, we can bear witness that there must be a creator God of some kind at the center of it all.
Here’s another thing we can know about God the Creator. If we believe we were created in the image of God, then human beings have the ability to be creators and bring forth new life. If we believe we were created in God’s image, then that is a reflection of the creator God. We have within ourselves the creative genius and the ability to be creators and discover the great truths of the universe. This is a reflection of the creator God.
Another truth about this Creator God is that it created humans [male and female] in its image. [Genesis 1: 26-27]. If that is true, then can the converse be true as well – that the God whose image we reflect is both male and female. Or is it easier to convey that God has no gender, that our deity exists as both sides of creation act – sowing, conceiving and giving birth.
Further when we care for creation in our acts of stewardship, we reflect the image of the God that loves all things. So, we can see with our own eyes the proof of the Creator God in the creation God has planted us in. It is here all around us.
Next is the “Word”, the Son, the Christ, Jesus. Jesus is the Word of God spoken to us. Jesus is how we hear God speaking to us. The Gospel writer John tells us, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… All things came into being through him.” John tells us that at Creation, the Word was there and through the Word of God, creation was spoken into existence. The Word [the Christ] is the voice of God speaking to us.
The Word of God is present all through the Scripture speaking to us and revealing God’s truth to us. The Word, the Christ, Jesus is how we hear the voice of God. If we use our ears to listen, we can hear the Word speak to us.
For that reason, I believe that Jesus is the prism through which we need to view and understand all of Scripture. On our own, humanity doesn’t have the capacity to understand who and what God is. It is the Christ, the Word of God speaking throughout all of Scripture that reveals who God is to us. He told us stories about God so that we could know the Father/Mother of Creation. In Luke 15, Jesus uses the parables of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, and the two Lost Sons, to reveal to us some awesome insights into who the Father/Mother of Creation is and how far that God will go in acting out God’s love for us. Without the teachings and voice of the Son/Jesus to interpret who God is for us, the image of the God we read of in the Hebrew Scriptures can at times seem distorted.
Jesus calls God Father, not so much because God has a male personage but more to convey that Jesus experiences a special relationship of love within God. That is something special Jesus knows about God and that he wants us to know about God. Our God is not a remote uninvolved deity that cannot be known to us. The Word, Jesus, the Son, provides for us a vantage point into knowing who the Father is. We cannot know the Father except through the Christ, that is the Word of God speaking to us. Therefore, when we go back to read the Old Testament Scripture stories it is vitally important that we do it through the prism of the Christ listening to the Word for those visions and ever-exciting glimpses into the nature of God seen through the eyes of the Son who knows the Father. The Word is how we hear God speaking to us and how God is revealed to us.
Thus far, we see God through the reality of God’s creation and we hear God speaking to us through the Word, the Christ, the Son as recorded in the Gospels of Jesus Christ who interprets all of Hebrew Scriptures for us.
Now what of the Spirit? How do we experience the Spirit? It can be harder to sense the Spirit because if you don’t see God in Creation, if you don’t hear the voice of God through the Word, it can be harder to sense the Spirit in your life. It can be harder but not impossible; because if you sense a yearning to ask questions about God, if you have an urging that draws you in to find answers, that would be the Spirit at work in your lives. It is the Spirit that plants the seed that yearns for answers. It is the Spirit that urges you to draw you closer to the Flame.
Now there are moments when we can sense the Spirit of God?
Let me give you a personal example. When I sit down to prepare these messages for the congregations that I visit, I can tell you that I am an empty vessel. What I mean by that is, I can’t just sit down and expound upon some text from Scripture and write a message for you on my own. When I try to do that, I wind up with a lot of horse manure. Those are my thoughts but with no Spirit in them. When however, I turn to God in prayer and ask that the Spirit guide me the results are quite different. I put the onus on the Spirit. I look to God and say, “OK, you have called me here, what would you have me say. Put the words in my mouth.” That’s my simple prayer. And I believe that God responds by sending the Spirit to fill and use me. I believe that God uses the Spirit to put the Word in my mouth. I don’t want to sound pompous or give the impression that I believe that I am a prophet. No. It is only to convey to you that without God’s Spirit in me, I am nothing.
It is the Spirit that swells up within us to make our bodies tingle with a rush and fervor that opens a keyhole so that we can get a glimpse of God’s revelation of Truth and then know and understand more about God each time it does.
If you sat in on a Session meeting or a Deacons meeting when you were discussing some thorny issue that didn’t seem to have a resolution and but stopped to take the time to listen and pray about a solution and then somehow one would emerge from the midst of the discussion, that is the Spirit guiding you along the way as Jesus’ had promised.
The Holy Spirit of God, who Jesus refers to as the Spirit of Truth, is God’s on-going revelation constantly being reveled to us, constantly taking what little we know and understand about God and expanding our capacity to understand. Jesus called the Spirit a Counselor, and an Advocate and it is all of these things but it also a Revealer. It reveals the awesome power of God. Where others see chaos, we can, with the help of the Spirit, we see a creator God. When others get blerrie eyed wading through unintelligible Biblical text, the Spirit of Truth guides us to be able to hear the Word of God. Then the Spirit emboldens us to step out and create ministries of service to bring Jesus’ Gospels of Good News to our communities.
Last week was Pentecost. There we saw how the Spirit took a rag-tag group of illiterate fishermen and led them to become teachers explaining the Truth about Jesus, who he was and how it was he was the fulfillment of prophesy and how Scripture was revealed and fulfilled through him. The Spirit came as a violent wind and infused the disciples with a fiery Spirit that appeared as tongues of fire over their heads and led them out in a Festival gathering to teach the Jews about Jesus. And when they were accused of being drunkards, Peter stepped forward and began to quote Scripture from Joel about how all the signs prophesized by the Joel had come to pass on the Cross and through Jesus’ triumph over death and sin.
How is that? How is it that this fisherman who barely understood who Jesus was fifty days prior could step out and begin to quote from Scripture. Peter was speaking the Word of God through the power of the Spirit within him. And here is the thing, the Book Joel was just a prophesy before that. But now through the prism of the Christ, the Holy Spirit of Truth revealed what before then the people did not see. The prophesy of the signs in the sky, when the Sun went black, the signs on the Earth, when the curtain in the Temple split in half at the moment of the Christ’s death on the Cross. These things had happened. But the people didn’t see them but now the Spirit of Truth was revealing what it all meant, that the Last Days when God’s Kingdom would come to Earth had begun.
We can witness all of these things. They are all there before us to see and hear and feel. The Creator God, the Word of God that speaks to us and the Spirit of God that moves within us to help us to understand and believe and to be witnesses. The Triune God can be a hard to explain mystery that we studder and stumble over, but it can be easier to see and hear and feel its presence. It can be as simple as seeing the evidence of what the Creator Father/Mother has done, hearing the Word as God speaking to us, and following the lead that the Spirit of Truth provides so that the Triune God is revealed to us.
CHARGE: My friends, Jesus is the Word of God that reveals our almighty and awesome God to us. My charge to you this week is to open your eyes to see God’s glory, open your ears to hear God’s Word speaking to you, open your hearts to feel the presence of God’s Spirit within you. Let all of these things guide you on your way during the days and weeks to come.
