Sermon Notes for Trinity Sunday 14-

Trinity Sunday 6/15 Gen. 1, Ps. 8, 2 Cor 13:11-13

I realize that many folks dread this Sunday as it is the one time pastors often try to lay out some serious theology. If anything, Presbyterians are a thinking person’s church, at least at its best. we do ourselves no favors in trying to divorce the mind from the heart in matters of religious faith.

I see that we are reaching an agreement for mutual recognition of baptism,as long as we use the trinitarian name between Reformed bodies and the Roman Catholic Church. the Trinitarian understanding can be glue or foundation when other differences are highlighted.

Here goes. Jettison the 3 persons notion as some sort of mystical arithmetic. Think of it more as three ways we engage the divine.Christians rather struggle with a basic Biblical issue how do we speak of God as one and yet we have aspects of God interacting in the Bible. A  key issue for Christians is how to speak of the divinity of Jesus when Jesus prays to God? How can we speak and consider Jesus and divinity today, perhaps especially when we encounter other faiths? Scriptural passages push us into honoring the first commandment and the nature of Jesus and the Spirit.If placed in a different way, the trinity is a constant course correction fo rus. We cannot speak of God solely as Creator, without including the divine work of salvation and sustaining that same creation. God’s work is interrelated, a triple helix that winds around life and live.

It has been said that Presbyterians worship a big God, a God worthy of full adoration and reverence that is due God, not some projection of human desires on to a heavenly screen.As you can tell, i am bascially a musical philistine, stuck in the music of my youth, but I have learned a tiny bit about some classicla material. one of the reasons I so admire the music in this church is that the organ appeals to the majesty of god as opposed to the tiny sounds of an acoustic guitar strumming three chords. Christians worship then a big complex God. If the Trinity seeks to place limitations on God from out side, then it fails. God always explodes our best doctrines. At the same time, it does no one any favors to prattle about a mystery as if that should end inquiry and wonder.

God is consistent with what God does  God’s nature and actions are of a piece and are inter-related.At the same time, we need to be careful that we are trying to express what cannot be expressed, to define the One who is undefinable.   

We neglect the Spirit often, in part, as that element of God does not so easily fit with a picture of the Father and the Son. Our minds create images often to think. Its very presence through time and space, its surprising character may well fit our time better than the Sunday School picrtures that fill our imaginations.So i will work a bit with elements of Spirit of God.The Spirit is present at the birth of creation and the birth of the church.

Let me come at it another way. I John tells us God is love. We can speak of the trinity aws aspects of love. It is not a perfect analogy but I use the same word, love for parents, spouse, and children, but they are certainly different, no? In its way the Trinity is a way of saying Christians encounter God or better God encounters and engages us in three patterns.of love.Name a superlative and attach the name of Trinity to love, or goodness, or kinness, and we touch just a slender fragment of the God to who is to reciev eour worship.