Gospel MATTHEW 28.16-20

Don’t you just love today’s Gospel passage?  The disciples met Jesus up on a Galilean mountain and it was a joyful reunion.  Then Jesus gave them their marching orders – to go out into the world and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit—some of the most familiar verses in the entire New Testament—what we’ve come to call The Great Commission.

And Matthew includes three little words that make it all make sense:

“But some doubted.”

Devout Jews that the disciples were, they would have known, from the time they could talk, the most important prayer in Judaism, the Shema which begins: “Hear, oh Israel, the Lord our God is one God!”  As Jews, the disciples knew this truth about God inside and out.

And yet here they were, gazing at this one they’d experienced as human, like them, but had come to believe, in some undeniable way, was divine.  And there he was, talking about sending them something called “the Spirit.”

Even for those who may not have been as mathematically gifted as Matthew (the former tax collector), it was easy to figure out that totals three, not one.

And so, understandably . . . some doubted.

Today is Trinity Sunday, and on this day in the church’s year we are challenged to consider what can be a very difficult teaching of the church: the Doctrine of the Trinity. You know, that God is three in one, but really one, even though God is also three.

And while preparing this sermon, my hopes for making this easy for us to understand were not buoyed up when I opened the first biblical  commentary and read the opening sentence: “There are some themes for preaching that are both daunting for the preacher and puzzling for the congregation.”

Or, even when I turned to the timeless writings of Church fathers, like Saint Augustine, who wrote in his great, though somewhat cumbersome work, The City of God, these helpful statements: “The Father is God.  The Son is God.  The Holy Spirit is God.  The Son is not the Father.  The Father is not the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit is not the Son.”  And, finally: “There is Only One God.”

And some doubted. And you can see why.

You see, as Episcopalians, like most other Christians, we believe in a three-in-one God, but the word “trinity” does not occur anywhere in holy scripture, and while there are texts that hint at some kind of Trinitarian doctrine, there’s nothing in all of the old and new testaments that defines this essence of God.

It was an early leader of the church named Tertullian, who was one of the first to start using the word “trinity” and describing the formula we’ve come to understand as our best bet for explaining what that means: three persons, one substance.

But did you know that before we all agreed on a Christian doctrine of the Trinity, the first church had to argue.  And argue and argue and argue, for hundreds of years, to even be able to articulate anything even resembling a unified doctrine.

After Tertullian had made his big pronouncement about trinity, everybody got confused.  Nobody could decide what status to assign to Jesus and to the Holy Spirit . . . who came first and who was made out of what? So here’s a quick summary of the good, the bad and the ugly:

The first Ecumenical council of the church was held in 325 AD in Nicea.  The question up for debate was whether or not Jesus was divine or was he human, and in the end the church affirmed Jesus’ divinity and wrote the Nicene Creed, you know: “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth . . . .”

Then, about 50 years later in Constantinople, the gang got together again, this time to talk about the nature of Christ and the person of the Holy Spirit.  Some people were teaching that Jesus was totally divine and not human, but that argument ended at this meeting when Jesus was voted 100% human.  And people were wondering about the relevance and the reality of the Holy Spirit, so the Trinity was defined and affirmed again, you know: three persons, one substance.

And . . . that settled that, until about 50 more years, in 431 AD, when the pendulum swung back and people were concerned that some were taking the “Christ as human” thing too far, forgetting that he was God.  So, they all decided at this meeting, the Council of Ephesus, that Jesus was, in addition to being 100% human, also 100% divine.

Well then, you guessed it, about 20 years later, in 451 AD, they all had to gather again, this time in Chalcedon, to argue about whether Jesus was, in fact, fully divine and fully human, or whether that assertion made him something else altogether. And so it went on and on – more u-turns (that weren’t u-turns) than modern day politicians! These meetings sound humorous to us now, but believe me, they were no joke.  People were kicked out of the church (sometimes quite literally) and labeled heretics. 

Fancy theological words were created to define the essence of the different parts of the Trinity.  Words like homooseious! Here’s a challenge – Why not Look up the meaning of the word homooseious and try to wind it in to your day to day conversation at some point this week!

All of this is one really long way of saying that we do not do a very good job at defining an essential doctrine of our faith: the Trinity.  When we’re not fighting over miniscule shades of grey regarding the essence of God, we’re either shrugging our shoulders in surrender or throwing our hands up in frustration.  We don’t do the Trinity well and as a result . . ., as we heard in our gospel passage some doubted.

And some still doubt.

The Fact of the matter is, we don’t have a nice way of explaining everything, something we can print up in a brochure and pass out for easy reference. In fact, it turns out that we’ve spent all this time trying to define God, to “make God in our own image,” as it were, using a metaphor—the Trinity—that helps a little but certainly doesn’t give us any easy answers. As Christians, we live with the tension of trying in vain to explain something that is, in essence, pure mystery.

On this Trinity Sunday I don’t think it is our job to explain the essence of God, a mystery if ever there was one.  Instead, it’s our job to learn the essence of the one in whose image we are created, and then live with brave abandon into the essence of who we are meant to be.

And who we’re meant to be, according to the little picture of God we can see, the little picture we’ve decided to call “the Trinity,” is a people whose basic character is defined by our relationships with one another. If you think about it, the very essence of the Trinity is the reminder that God is expressed to us in different ways, but each of those ways exists in powerful relationship with the others.

Just think:

God is to us a divine being, holy beyond our understanding, who dictates rules for living and sets expectations far beyond what we could ever achieve. And yet we also know God to be intimately human, a God who has walked a mile in our shoes, who knows the pain of being human, who understands our inability to meet divine standards and who has felt the frustration of grief and failure and brokenness.

And we also know God as the Spirit of new life, breathing into our world and into our lives, offering us possibilities we could never have imagined and sparking new life and energy when rules and expectations of faith begin to weigh us down.

And with all these expressions of God, some that seem more real to us at different times in our lives, we understand the truth that Saint Augustine articulated: There is only one God.  Creator, redeemer, sustainer, a God who relates to our world in many different ways and at the same time is, in essence, the very embodiment of loving relationship.

Characteristics that seem in conflict, instead exist in creative community, divine presence, three in one, offering us the challenge of taking all the beautiful parts of who we are as diverse and multi-faceted expressions of God’s creation, somehow recognising the very essence of God imprinted on each one of us and living with courage into the kind of community God models for us. 

That is living out the image of God, in which each one of us, different as we are, was lovingly made. Each one of us is created with the image of God indelibly imprinted on our  souls, so that, in some miraculous and inexplicable way, the diverse expressions of God that are you and you and you and me all come together to illustrate the mystery, to live together in community as we do our best to display for the world all the possibilities that the divine imprint on all of us could mean.

If we started to live into the mystery of the trinity, then it might just be possible for us to look at each other and see, not all the differences about how we look or speak or see the world, but rather an intricate relationship, a curious community, created in the image of God and living out the possibility for unity, even in our diversity.  Can you imagine? 

Some have their doubts that this could ever really happen.  Some are still doubting – but they have always done so.

And some doubted.

Today, on this Trinity Sunday, we are invited to prove them wrong, to live boldly into the dream of the Trinity, the dream of everything we can be together.  After all, we are, each one of us, created in the very image of God.

Amen.

Fr Simon