Dear Friends,
I love reading mysteries. They clear my mind somehow and let me focus afresh on issues and projects that sometimes bog down my spirit. When we moved to Charlottesville, Nan and I both joined a mystery book club that we’ve enjoyed very much. Over the past five years, we’ve been introduced to new authors, even meeting some of them at the Festival of the Book, and we’ve reacquainted ourselves with writers we had read before. It’s been great. Maybe you’ve been in a similar book club? Or indulged on your own just for the fun of it? I can certainly recommend any number of mysteries for pandemic reading…
Re-reading a beloved mystery is completely different from reading it for the first time. If you remember the book, you already know the solution to the mystery: it really was the butler in the pantry with the carving knife! And if you read it for a second or even third time you might find yourself saying “Oh, I see that that clue is crucial to the end of the story, and I missed it the first time.” You can’t help but see the book differently once you know the ending, and in a really good mystery, knowing the ending can sometimes make the book even better.
Reading the Bible is similar. Our faith journey, whether it’s been for a few years or many decades, alters how we understand the divine message that we’re reading. We spend years reading the Bible; we attend Sunday School in our youth and as adults; we hear countless sermons over years of attending worship. Even everyday language contributes to our awareness of the Bible, as we hear conventionally recognized adages like, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” (We even hear it in King James English!) Every exposure to the Bible and our Christian faith shapes our worldview, and as we listen more carefully each time, our understanding of the Bible and our faith is enlarged and expanded.
The Bible never ceases to amaze me. It is ubiquitous; it permeates our literature, our culture, our minds, and our souls. And the more we read it, the more penetrating is our understanding, because, like a re-read mystery, once we know the outcome, we find more and more to unpack in even the most familiar text.
You may find reading Matthew 28:16-20, the reading for today, Trinity Sunday, to be an example of this phenomenon. Before we think more deeply about this passage, please join me and all who are reading with us in a prayer for illumination:
Triune God, by whose grace we have been commissioned as disciples of Jesus Christ, turn our doubts to gladness for your truth. Open us to the authority of Jesus Christ, in whose name we were baptized. Teach us, so that, empowered by the Holy Spirit, we can teach in turn. Enrich our lives so that others around us will be attracted by our witness and drawn to Christ, to join us in humble discipleship. Amen.
So, here we are: Trinity Sunday. And there in verse 19 of today’s reading is what we recognize as the Trinity itself, “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
But was that understood as the Trinity when it was written? No matter how diligently we might look for the word “Trinity” in the Bible, we would not find it. If we were to search for a teaching about the Trinity in Paul’s or Peter’s letters, or better yet, a teaching from Jesus that addresses the notion of the Trinity, again, we wouldn’t find it. Matthew’s understanding of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit did not conceive of a singular essence for the three beings. As we read and re-read the Bible, we may discover hints and clues of who our triune God is, but nowhere do we read of the fullness of the Trinity. Yet our understanding of the Trinity is a crucial, central aspect of our Christian faith; it is our attempt to solve the mystery of who God is.
Over the four centuries after the resurrection of Jesus, the notion of the Trinity as a basic tenet of our faith began to slowly develop. The earliest Christian theologies were simultaneously informed by the strong monotheistic faith we inherited from the Hebrew scriptures and driven by the need to interpret our biblical faith to primarily pantheistic people in the Greco-Roman world. Christ’s divinity was imagined as subordinate to the supreme being because it was hard to explain the idea of a single God that included the risen Lord. Christ was understood as the Word of God, but not quite God in himself. The church, however, continued to ponder and work in a faithful struggle with its ever-growing understanding of God to include the mystery of the risen Christ.
It wasn’t until 215 CE that Tertullian, an early church theologian, first articulated an understanding of the three-in-one God and called it the Trinity. For more than another century after Tertullian, we as the church debated the issue, resolving it formally (though not finally) at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, when Christ was declared to be of “one substance with the Father.”
At Scottsville Presbyterian Church, and at churches of many other denominations, we traditionally share the Nicene Creed during communion worship services. “We believe in one God the Father Almighty…And in one Lord Jesus Christ…And we believe in the Holy Spirit…” This creed comes from the hard, faith-driven and insightful work of the Nicaean Council, which strove to bring clarity and uniformity to this developing understanding of our Christian faith. In the centuries that followed, serious discussion and thought continued, and if you study the creeds, you’ll see how theological thought became ever more sophisticated.
We eventually came to articulate our belief that God is of one essence, expressed in the three persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But even after centuries of trying to fathom this mysterious concept, it’s difficult to grasp – one single God, but in three persons. It’s like H2O, which can be ice, water, and steam, but always remains H2O in all three forms. It’s like the flames of three candles that provide a single light.
Now, with 17 centuries of our trinitarian faith and discernment informing our vision and providing 20/20 hindsight, it’s difficult to read the Bible without finding hints of this triune God, so familiar to us as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.
Why is this theological history important to us today? For me, it goes back to our gospel reading in Matthew. In verse 18, Christ’s authority is confirmed, and he passes that authority on to his disciples in verse 19, charging them to “make disciples of all nations.” He further strengthens the authority he gives them by charging them to baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This doesn’t address the oneness of God; it focuses instead on the authority of discipleship. Prior to this point, the teacher has always been Jesus, and now Jesus is empowering his disciples – and that includes us – to be teachers of the faith.
The trinity is of great significance to us because it enables us to more fully understand God. The trinity in this pivotal passage of Matthew is what empowers us as followers of Jesus. Both have equal weight and importance for us.
Questions of great significance for our faith are raised in every century. Now, as our lives and technologies, including our ability to reach to the far corners of the earth, evolve ever more rapidly, questions are raised each decade and even oftener. It is our task as faithful Christians to face these challenges directly. And in faith, it is our ongoing challenge to respond as best we can with the guidance that God gives us. We may not always get it right, but our loving God will create new ways to comprehend God’s will for us today. We heard it directly from Jesus. “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20)
In times like these, when we feel the ground beneath us turning to quicksand, it is easy to forget this assurance of the presence – always – of our triune God. We feel so imperiled. We face the randomness of a tiny but lethal virus, the loss of economic security, the lack of justice, the oppressiveness of confinement to our homes, an anxiety that gnaws at our very being. We feel unsafe on so many levels. We’re standing on the edge of a precipice teeming with menaces we can hardly even name. We cannot imagine what the ending of this mystery will be.
The mystery, my dear friends, is unlikely to ever end, because that’s the human condition, but there is certainly a hero here who can give us some closure and move us back from the precipice. I pray that even in the midst of these anxious times, we can perceive the profound depth and eternal, abiding presence of our wonderful, mysterious God in three persons. Creator, Sustainer, Redeemer.
God is our companion, the one who, as the Nicene Creed assures us, “for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man…whose kingdom shall have no end…” I’ve taken some liberties with our beloved creed here, removing most of the details that reflect those early theological arguments at Nicaea to emphasize the basic, foundational notion of God as one substance in three persons that I, and I hope you, find reassuring, especially during these hard days.
May the triune God accompany us all on all our journeys, and may we find in our faith the seeds of our creation; the source of our sustenance; and redemption – deliverance – from the pain and disquiet, the dis-ease, of these mysterious and challenging times. Amen.
Joys and Concerns
For demonstrators from across our nation and around the world who express their call for justice for all people.
For all who suffer from Covid 19 and all whose lives are being upended by this ongoing calamity.
Our Trinity Sunday prayer is adapted from John Bailie’s “A Diary of Private Prayer” Thirteenth Day: Morning, by the Very Rev. John Chalmers of the Church of Scotland. Let us pray together:
Almighty God known as wisdom before the dawn of creation, Lord Jesus Christ – perfect love made flesh, Holy Spirit of God – ever present, O Hidden Source of Life wrapped up in perfect Trinity, we meditate upon the great and gracious plan which you have brought to pass, that women and men like us should look beyond creation to worship you the Creator of all things. In the beginning, You the uncreated moved across the face of the deep and brought out space and time and then material substance: The atom and the molecule and the crystalline form: Then the first germ of life and the long upward striving of all things: that swim and creep and fly: And then the miracle of intelligence and consciousness; The beginning of mystery and the building of the first altar; And then the saying of the first prayer; O hidden love of God, forgive us for those times when we have taken this mystery for granted and forgive us all the more for the times when we thought that we had unraveled the mystery and thought that we knew it all – the how, the where and the why. Almighty God, let us not harbor anything in our hearts that might spoil our fellowship with you or with one another; work with us and within us: Do what you will with us; Make of us what you want of us; Change us as we need changed Use us as your will requires – Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.