OUR TRI-UNE GOD
Sermon by Paul R. Powell
St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church, New Orleans
Sunday May 29, 2013
The doctrine of the Trinity may be as difficult as any of the Christian concepts to understand. At times, it has divided Christian from Christian and at other times has brought Christians together. If you believe in the Incarnation, that is, that God actually came to earth as a human in the form of Jesus Christ, then perhaps it isn’t so difficult to believe in the Trinity. Sometimes, I feel more akin to the Unitarians when it comes to theology and at times akin to the Universalists who believe that all will be saved in due season. But that’s a discussion that would take far more time than this sermon will allow.
When I first returned to New Orleans about a dozen years ago and lived in the lower Garden District, I enjoyed going down to the Quarter a couple of times a week and always stopped for coffee at Croissant D’Or located in the building that housed Brocato’s Ice Cream parlor for decades. Brocato’s still exists but moved to Carrollton quite some years ago. Pastry Chef Maurice who had founded Croissant D’Or was terrific and had a good selection of soups and sandwiches in addition to wonderful pastries and reasonable prices. Over a period of time, I met a number of regulars there and enjoyed visiting with them mid-afternoon. It was one of those quintessential New Orleans shops that are rapidly being replaced by more tourist-oriented ones. Sometime just before or after Katrina, I forget, Maurice retired and sold out to another Frenchman, Gerard who was a decent enough chef but changed the menu serving such soups as cream of carrot or tomato basil and almost never gumbo. The pastries were pretty but stayed in the cases way too long and the prices began to edge up gradually. Maurice had always given away left-over pastries. One by one the regulars began to find other shops. Gerard was … well, what can I say, a Frenchman … and there was no convincing him to change his menu or practices. After several years, Gerard sold out to a Vietnamese couple who created a true French-style pastry shop with fabulous pastries but at ridiculous prices and I’ve hardly been back since. My friend Doug and I often talked about how we would change things if we were the owners. It was an easy thing to do on the customer side of the counter!
What does any of this have to do with the Trinity? Maybe nothing, maybe everything. It’s so easy for us Christians to “christianize” the Old Testament. We want our fabulous pastries fresh and at bargain prices. We want things to remain the same while everything else is changing around us. We want to believe that God is “the same yesterday, today and forever.” But does that hold up when we consider the Trinity? Was God the same after Jesus as before? Do we not often claim that Jesus opened a new way for humans to relate to God? And did not Jesus himself claim that he was the way, the truth and the life? We so often talk about Jesus as God but in a way that makes it sound as if they are two different persons. And although we often refer to the Holy Spirit, we seldom live as if God’s Spirit is the driving force of our faith. Is there a way that we can think about the Trinity, the Three-in-One or One-in-Three that remains true to the whole of divine revelation of the God who is the One and Only, and at the same time offer some fresh new ways to understand just who God is? I sure hope so, and here’s my feeble effort in that direction.
I have told this story a time or two, but when I was a young Minister of Music and Education at First Baptist Lynchburg, Virginia, the organist invited me to participate in a prayer group at her home and to attend a prayer camp during the summer. Both were wonderful experiences and Dot was as spiritual a person and as competent an organist as I have ever been around. Incidentally, Dot was the organist there for more than 60 years. Once when I was preaching while the pastor was away, she encouraged me to preach from my heart and not a manuscript, relying on the Holy Spirit both for the preparation and the preaching. So, trusting in Dot as much as in God, I began thinking about what to say but without any effort to formulate those ideas into a cogent, much-lesswritten sermon. It was a scary experience for me and on the appointed Sunday, I approached the pulpit with considerable trepidation, but also relying on God’s Spirit for the preaching. Miraculously, the words flowed forth and it is to this day probably the most definite memory that I have of God’s Spirit working in and through me. The service was on the radio and on Monday morning a lady called me to express her appreciation for the sermon. She had been listening on her car radio and only needed a few minutes to get where she was going but kept driving around until the sermon was finished. She asked for a copy and I didn’t have one, of course, but Dot had recorded it, so I had to transcribe those words which seemed all the more remarkable since I had so little to do with them.
On another occasion at one of our prayer groups, we were sitting in silence waiting in Quaker fashion for God to speak to us. I had rested my head against the back of the chair I was sitting in, staring at the ceiling. Sometime during that experience the shadow of the lamp on the ceiling caught my attention. The wire support for the shade was divided pie-like into three sections, and it occurred to me that this was a perfect picture of the Trinity—one light separated only by the reflection of those three wires. And much as that little boy said about the 23rd Psalm, “The Lord is My Shepherd … and that’s all I need to know,” that reflection etched within my mind and heart that God is indeed “Three in One and One in Three … and that’s all I need to know. Perhaps the term Tri-Unity would be a better one than Trinity.
What I am about to propose to you may come as something entirely strange or entirely logical, or more likely heretical, but here goes. Perhaps we are too easily drawn to the mystery of a triune God to relate God to our own existence. If we think of ourselves as mind, body and spirit or somewhat differently as brain, flesh and soul, then maybe we can understand more clearly how it is that God created us “in his own image.” If we think of God as the brain, Jesus as the flesh, and the Holy Spirit as the soul of the Godhead then maybe we can get a grasp on just how we are to understand the Trinity, or more importantly how we as humans reflect God and relate to God. If we conceive of God as flesh, then we are breaking the commandment to make no graven images of God, even if those images are mental. God is not flesh, does not have a body, is not created and exists without any of the limitations of mind, body and soul as we know them. But that does not mean that God is without mind, and in fact may most easily be thought of as the great Mind (capital M) from which all other minds evolve. In some ways, God has created us in order to commune with him mind-to-mind. Only a mind is capable of creating and God has shared that ability with us. And in his most creative capacity God created humans in order to relate to us mind-to-mind and spirit-to-spirit. It is that “body” thing that most confuses us, and here I am being most daring, because I believe that God wanted so much to show us how to be truly human, how to be unified in mind, body and spirit, that he re-created himself as Jesus and came to earth that we might learn from God himself how to truly live as created human beings, and so did God, and in that is our salvation made possible because Jesus lived and died and was resurrected.We could not bear to experience God in his unique being as the One and Only God, but God in human form as Jesus Christ gave us all that we need to know in order to live lives perfectly attuned to ourselves, to one another and to God. So, maybe what I am saying is that when Jesus ascended into heaven, he went back up into the Godhead from whence he came, and that he ceased to exist apart from God, becoming instead one and the same with God; and that we, too, will one day cease to be separate from God and become once again a part of that great Creative Mind which we call God.
What then of the Holy Spirit? On this point, the Bible is far clearer. “God ISspirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” So, we do not need to intellectualize or try to second guess what the Scriptures are telling us. If God is spirit, then we too are spirit in our most basic existence. Spirit is something more than mind and in human terms might be related more to the subconscious than to the conscious. In fact, I believe that there is a level where we commune with God that is neither dependent on rational thinking nor limited by it. Before Jesus ascended into heaven, he reminded his followers that he was going to prepare a place for them that where he dwelled there they would dwell as well. If as I suspect that Jesus has been caught back up into the eternal God and that we someday will be too, then we become a part of “God who is spirit.” Until that time, we as spirits, as souls, relate to God spirit-to-spirit.
You may have a very different understanding of the Trinity than what I have laid out today, and that’s OK. More importantly, we need to be reminded that it is God who created us and created us in his own image; that God re-created himself as Jesus Christ to show us how to be truly human beings in our relationships to one another and to God; and that God has sent his Spirit to be with us now and always, empowering us to live life abundantly with God’s Spirit at our side.
One final bit of understanding, in my opinion, has fallen on hard times, and that is the language we use to speak about God as well as to God. In recent decades there has been a rather strong emphasis on using non-gender language for God, including Jesus. In some ways, I am in agreement with the effort simply because we know in an intellectual sort of way that God is neither male nor female. My objection to inclusive language, although not complete, is that non-gender language so often takes away the “personhood” of God and of Jesus. We can easily assign gender-based references to Jesus because his life on earth was as a male. And Jesus referred to God as “Father.” So, my thinking is that it isn’t wrong to speak of God in male-pattern language, but it isn’t necessary to always speak of God as male. I once remarked in a doctoral seminar composed of several Korean men, one white woman and me that I saw no reason why we should be “exclusively inclusive” when speaking of God or of one another. For a time this was a raging subject at meetings of the Hymn Society but gradually there was a move toward using “expansive” language for God, that is, using many terms both gender-based and not, and I think that is more useful. So, as we think and speak of God the Creator, God the Savior, and God the Holy Spirit whether in Trinitarian or Unitarian terms, let us not turn God into an “it” but use every loving term that we can to say to our Tri-Une God: “You O God are Our God who has created us and saved us and lives among us … and maybe that’s all we need to know. May we all live as closely to God as we dare, and may God lead us forth into the abundant life promised to all who will believe and follow.
AMEN.
1