Tag: Trinity
1 What If Materialism at Christmastime is Actually a Good Thing?
Disclaimer: If your name is Juanita and you’re presently in charge of my church’s Alternative Giving Program, you can dismiss this as ‘speculative theology.’
Yesterday I made an off-hand observation that in hindsight I think has some theological legs.
Namely, I argued that since Trinity is its own ‘economy’ (economy is a Greek NT term for ‘community’ or ‘household’) of constant gift and exchange, then perhaps the best way for believers in the Trinity to celebrate Christmas is the old fashioned materialist route of giving actual things to those we love.
With a day’s remove, I find myself resonating more with this point.
Which is to say, I’ve grown weary of the Christmas ‘tradition’ of bemoaning the commercialization of the season and criticizing others (usually referring to non-Christians) for being so materialistic about Christmas. I mean, I’ve got my own gripes with Black Friday and Xmas music in late September but is there anything more cliche than complaining about Black Friday and Xmas music in late September?
Specifically, what I think is problematic about decrying the materialism of Xmas is that it implies there’s a deeper ‘spiritual’ truth to Christmas that we’re missing.
But Christians don’t believe in abstract spiritual truths. We believe in Jesus.
And here’s the thing: the Incarnation- what we celebrate at Christmas- is the most materialistic thing of all.
Christmas is when Christians celebrate that God took human (material) flesh and lived a life just like ours amid all the material stuff of everyday life. He made things (carpenter) and presumably gave some of those things to people. He drank wine, ate bread and fish, and partied with sinners. To say nothing of the magi who brought the baby Jesus their resolutions to lead lives of justice and compassion…sike….they brought him stuff. Expensive stuff too.
The incarnation shows us that God is the most materialistic One of all of us because it’s by incarnation that God takes the material stuff of life to get up close and uncomfortably personal to all of us.
Materialism is how God spent the first Christmas so what’s wrong with us passing Christmas the very same way?
Sure enough, at this point, many of the unimaginative and painfully literal among you will point out the gross overabundance with which many of us mark the season and how little that has to do with a Savior born into poverty.
I don’t argue with that. I’m only suggesting that the Heifer Project (gifts you’ll never see given for people you’ll never know) isn’t necessarily the only or even the best way to celebrate the incarnation.
If Jesus is Emmanuel- God with us- then giving sincere material gifts of love and friendship that highlight or accentuate our withness our connection to someone else just might be the most theologically cogent way of marking his birth.
In other words, instead of cows and chickens maybe the most Christian thing to do this Christmas is to give your wife those earrings you know she’s wanted for a long, long time but hasn’t bought herself.
Maybe materialism is exactly what we need to ‘reclaim’ about our understanding of Christmas.
1 Mormonism and Christianity: Is the Viral ‘Behind the Veil’ Video Legit?
Let me repeat again what I’ve said elsewhere. I’ve got several Mormon friends. In some ways, I’ve more in common with them than secular friends of mine. Saying Mormonism is different from Christianity is not to call their faith or character into question.
And I don’t care for whom you vote.
Actually more important than the election, for Christians, is the issue of Christian leaders, like Billy Graham, suddenly changing their views on Mormonism out of political expediency. If Christians want to vote for Romney, they should vote Romney because he’s their preferred candidate. Christians don’t need to revise the Nicene Creed in order to vote for someone whose religion is different than theirs.
Stay with me.
Tony Jones, our Scholar in Residence from this summer, has this post on Mormonism and how it diverges from traditional (as defined by the historic creeds) Christianity. Jones says:
I am not on a witch hunt. I am not anti-Romney. I think there is some historical consensus as to what is considered Christianity, and this ceremony does not accord with that consensus.
Some of my friends say, “If a group says they are Christian, then they are Christian. That’s good enough for me.”
Well, that’s not good enough for me.
The ceremony Jones refers to is this one, from the short doc Behind the Veil. It shows a Mormon baptism ritual for the those who’ve already died. Mormons, after all, baptize in absentia and after the fact.
But here’s my question and my pushback-
As is the problem with anything on You Tube, it’s hard to establish the veracity of the content.
This video may be a snapshot into rituals non-Mormons are forbidden from seeing. But in watching it, I noticed that the baptizer is baptizing, like we do, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Which strikes me as odd (getting back to my point about Billy Graham) since Mormons don’t believe in the Trinity.
So, is this video legit and Mormons do baptize in the name of a doctrine they disbelieve?
Or is this illegit and the name of the Trinity betrays its inauthenticity?
1 Married in the Image of God
Marriage counseling isn’t one of my favorite parts of ministry. It’s not that I’m bad at it, I don’t think. I’m a passable counselor. And it’s not that I mind being available to couples during stressful junctures in their marriage.
Mostly its that whenever I find myself offering advice to couples, I can’t help but imagine my own wife listening in, smirking lovingly, knowing full well I’m less than a perfect spouse and hardly one to qualify as an expert.
A while back though I gave a couple advice. I seldom give out and out advice while counseling. I was trained not to advise but to offer active listening, which I know can seem passive to couples starved for something to try and salvage their relationship.
Having no other clue how to help them stop the spiral of resentment and recrimination in which they found themselves trapped, I told them:
‘I know you have every reason to think you’re right and every reason to be angry. I know you don’t he understands how he’s hurt you and you don’t think she’s ever going forgive you and let go. I want you to put that away for a week. Forget about it and instead just focus on loving and serving the other. Whenever the old words and feelings creep up, do something, anything, to pour yourself out and serve the other instead.’
In truth, I was desperate, had no clue how to help them and thought this sounded just Jesusy enough to leave them thinking I’d done my job. I was surprised when they told me the following week that trying to do that had been the best week in their marriage in longer than they could recall.
‘Why is that?’ the husband asked me.
This week for our fall sermon series, Seven Truths that Changed the World: Christianity’s Most Dangerous Ideas, we’re talking about the Imago Dei, the scriptural notion that having made everything good in creation God creates us in God’s image.
The Imago Dei often gets treated vaguely- ‘we’re all children of God’- and left at that; however, Imago Dei cannot be abstracted from Trinity.
Christians often fail to recall that the God in whose image we’re made is three-personed: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Therefore the relationship that marks God’s own life, the love shared between Father, Son and Spirit, is the prototype for the kind of life and love we’re intended to share.
Theologians call it perichoresis. It means ‘mutual self-emptying’ or ‘mutual self-giving.’
When we talk about the Trinity, who God is internally and eternally, we believe God is perichoretic love. God is in God’s own life a community of self-giving, vulnerable love. God is a community, Father, Son and Spirit, where love is eternally given as a gift and nothing is expected in return.
We’ve been made in the image of this three-personed God. Moreover, as Karl Barth argues, we’re not made in God’s image as individuals. Rather it’s Adam and Eve together- their relationship- that comprises the image of a God who is, in himself, relationship.
Back to that couple.
The reason, I think, their vow to put resentments aside for a week and focus on loving and serving the other ‘worked’ is that such loving service best captures who, at their core, they were created to be. This is the image of God in them and that can mean no less than this is what it means to be fully alive. Any lasting healing that might come to their marriage surely must come by this route alone.
0 Creation and the Sinking Ship Fallacy
We’re in a sermon series on the ‘Seven Truths that Changed the Word: Christianity’s Most Dangerous Ideas.’ This weekend’s theme is Creation Ex Nihilo. I seldom reflect too much on creation theology, mostly, I think, because creation theology tends to be abstracted from the particularity of Christ.
But that doesn’t mean creation isn’t an integral part of our faith. It isn’t to say that creation isn’t a part of the Good News. There’s plenty of grist for reflection.
This week I’ve been thinking about those people I encountered on doorsteps and how impoverished their faith-view was because if there’s one thing the Genesis story makes clear about creation: It Really Is Good.
Yes, creation is fallen. Yes, the present world as its splayed across the front pages of the Washington Post is far from what God intended with the opening salvo of the Genesis story. Yes, creation is, as Paul writes in Romans 8, groaning while it awaits Christ’s final redemption. And it’s true we’ve turned what God’s given as gift into an object to be used and abused at our pleasure.
Traditionally, Christians- no, Protestants- have been very faithful when it comes to affirming creation’s broken-ness.
So good, in fact, I don’t think we need to dwell on it anymore.
Traditionally, Christians- no, Protestants- have been sinfully terrible at affirming the goodness of God’s creation.
Christians have even neglected the goodness of creation in the name of faithfulness. Far too often Christians have emphasized the ‘spiritual’ at the expense of the material, thinking that true fidelity required a miserly disposition towards the pleasures of this world.
Misreading St. Paul, Christians have regrettably thought faithfulness required a distinction between the spiritual and the material, between the body and the soul, between the spirit and the flesh. Mistakenly looking towards the pie in the sky, Christians just as often have stressed the goodness of the next life at the expense of this life.
The variety and frequency of error notwithstanding, a Christian confession of God as Creator can abide by no division between flesh and spirit, material and soul. When we say God created the heavens and the earth, we remember that God declared our surroundings ‘good.’ God looked upon our earth, our bodies, our felt experience and called it ‘very good.’
Good food is very good. Love for another is very good. A beautiful vista, a deep friendship, a worthwhile endeavor- they’re all very, very good because that’s how God made them.
Christianity isn’t about practicing a sort of split personality syndrome when it comes to our religious versus everyday lives. Christian selflessness doesn’t mean we regard creation with a miserly disdain. An authentic Christianity sees every moment and every object in our lives as graced. Failure to enjoy life and creation is in a very real sense a theological failure.
Christians are so often so focused on the Cross they forget that God deemed our earthly, fleshly lives good enough to take flesh himself in Christ.
The temptation to divide existence into spiritual and material distinctions is a fourth century heresy called Manicheanism, which in St. Augustine’s day saw the created world as inherently corrupt, broken and even evil. The spiritual, heavenly, world precisely because it was not finite was desirable. Thus the goal of the spiritual life was to escape our earthly lives to the spiritual realm.
St. Augustine devoted a large number of years to debating and defeating the Manichees. Even though modern believers still exhibit a propensity to divide the spiritual from the material, Augustine believed the Trinity warned against any such inclination. If God is Trinity and if Creation is the result of God’s gracious, unnecessary self-giving, then to question Creation’s goodness is, in effect, to question the goodness of God.
0 My Grocery Store Freakout
The Way Up is the Way Down- Philippians 2.1-11
It might surprise some of you to hear that, as gentle and considerate as I appear to be, I have a tendency to be contrary.
And while I wouldn’t say that I have a short fuse exactly, I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes I can be cranky, maybe even a little confrontational.
For example-
There was the recent ‘episode’ that has since come to be known in my house as ‘Daddy’s Grocery Store Freakout.’
And before I tell you about ‘Daddy’s Grocery Store Freakout’ I should say first that, as a responsible preacher, I try hard, whenever sharing personal stories, never to present myself in a heroic light.
I try hard to avoid stories in which I appear to be the wise or faithful one. I usually avoid any anecdotes where I’m the good example or where I do the right thing.
You can take that as my disclaimer that ‘Daddy’s Grocery Store Freakout’ is an exception to that rule. In this instance, it’s the other guy who’s the idiot.
A couple of Sundays ago I fell asleep on the sofa watching Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince with the boys. I woke up from my nap to Gabriel staring at me, nose-tip to nose-tip, and saying ‘Daddy, it’s almost time for dinner.’
With just a yawn and a stretch, I headed to the grocery store. As I pushed my shopping cart through the entrance I caught my reflection in the glass.
My bed-head hair was mussed every which way.
My undershirt was covered with tomato sauce stains from lunch that looked a little like blood. My eyes were heavy and bloodshot.
And I had what looked like a scar across my face from the zipper of the pillow I’d been sleeping against.
In sum: I looked like a crazy person.
After picking up a few odds and ends, I stood in the produce section staring aimlessly at the bare Sunday shelves and wondering what on earth I could make with just japanese eggplant, jalepenos, and Italian parsley.
And I swear- it’s because I was trying to think of a recipe NOT because I was eavesdropping that I overheard him.
One of the store employees was sitting against the refrigerator, where the cabbage normally goes. Three other, younger, employees were huddled around him.
To protect the identities of the innocent and the idiotic, I won’t go into names or descriptions. I’ll just tell you what I heard.
“My best advice is for you guys to stay completely away from her’ the one leaning against the cabbage section said to the three.
And he nodded with his chin in the direction of ‘her.’
And again, I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop but I couldn’t help it. When he nodded in ‘her’ direction, like gravity was pulling me, I looked over my shoulder to see who the ‘her’ was he had in mind.
‘She’ was near the other side of the store, working a cash register.
‘She’ was a teenager it looked like. She couldn’t have been more than 18.
And ‘she,’ I could tell from the scarf wrapped around her head, was a Muslim.
That’s when I decided to eavesdrop.
‘How do we stay away from her?‘ one of Produce Guy’s three disciples asked.
‘Don’t talk to her. Period.‘ He said without equivocation. ‘Pretend she’s not there. If she says something to you, act like you didn’t hear her. If she needs help with something, tell her you’re busy with something else. If a manager tells you to work with her, say you’re in the middle of something.‘
His three disciples all nodded like receivers watching a quarterback draw up a play.
What I heard shocked me, but I didn’t say anything.
I didn’t say anything until I heard him say: ‘Remember, she worships a false god. That’s a sin, and God doesn’t want you associating with sinners. God hates sinners.‘
Thus began what’s come to be known as ‘Daddy’s Grocery Store Freakout.‘
I left my cart and stepped over to their huddle and said, in love: ‘Excuse me, it sounds to me like you don’t know what the blank you’re talking about and maybe you should just shut your mouth.‘
It was his turn to be shocked.
He stood up from the cabbage section and held up his hands as if to say ‘no harm, no foul‘ and said: ‘There must be a misunderstanding; we were just having a religious conversation.‘
And that’s when I lost it:
‘Misunderstanding? I’ll say. You’re telling these poor idiots that God doesn’t want them helping someone else?
That God wants them to deliberately ignore someone else?
That God wants them to treat someone like they’re not even a person?
You’re telling them that God hates sinners?
And you call yourself a Christian?
You’ve completely lost the plot.
If you really believed in Jesus Christ none of those words would ever come out of your mouth.‘
And that’s when I realized I’d been poking him in the chest with my Japanese eggplant.
He gave me a patronizing smile, like I was the one who didn’t get it.
‘Do you go to church?‘ he asked. ‘Maybe if you went to church you’d understand…‘
‘Yeah, I go to church‘ I said. ‘In fact, I go every Sunday. I’m there all the time. Aldersgate United Methodist Church. We’d love to have you visit us sometime.‘
And that’s when I realized that all the other customers in the produce section were motionless, as though suspended in time, staring in shock at me.
And for a brief, sobering moment I was able to see myself as they must’ve seen me: a man with red, bloodshot eyes, wild hair, and what looked like a scar across his face and blood splatter on his shirt, screaming about God near the cabbages, with an eggplant in his hand.
Don’t let the pretty poetry and lofty language fool you.
This song, which Paul cuts and pastes into his letter here in Philippians chapter 2, it’s meant to shock you.
Because those last few lines of the song:
9 Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
10 so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend…
11 and every tongue confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord.
Those last few lines aren’t original- not to Paul, not to any other Christian, not to anyone in Philippi.
They’re lifted straight from the Old Testament, from Isaiah 45- which, in case you don’t know it, is one of the Bible’s fiercest statements against idolatry, against worshipping any other god but the one with a capital G.
And what does Paul do with this song from Isaiah?
Paul, a lifelong Jew, who for his entire life at least twice a day would’ve recited in prayer: ‘The Lord our God the Lord is One.’
Paul, a Pharisee, an expert in the Law who you can bet knew that the very first law, the law of all laws, was ‘You shall have no other gods besides me.’
What does Paul do with Isaiah’s song?
He sticks Jesus in the middle of it.
He says that:
Because Jesus knew power and might aren’t things to be grasped at but given up.
Because Jesus emptied himself of heaven.
Because Jesus made himself poor even though he was rich.
Because he exchanged his royal robes for a servant’s towel.
Because Jesus stooped down from eternity and humbled himself.
Because he forgave 70 times 7.
Because he blessed those who cursed him.
Because he went the extra mile for those who cared not for him.
Because he put away the sword and turned the other cheek and loved his enemies.
Because Jesus remained faithful no matter it cost him, no matter where it led him, no matter how it ended.
Because he did that,
God exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name.
And that’s the shock.
Because the name that is above every name…is Yahweh.
The name that is above every name is ‘I am who I am.’
The name that is above every name is the name that was revealed to Moses at the Burning Bush, the name that was too holy to be spoken aloud or written down.
That’s why, in its place, the ancient manuscripts always used the word ‘Kyrios’ instead: ‘Lord.’
The same word Paul attaches to Jesus here in the middle of Isaiah’s song.
It’s meant to shock you- that this God who appeared in a burning bush and spoke in a still, small voice, this God- the one and only God- comes to us fully and in the flesh as Jesus Christ.
It’s intended to shock you- that Mary’s son is as much of God the Father as we could ever hope to see.
I was in the middle of ‘Daddy’s Grocery Store Freakout’ when I realized all the eyes of the produce section were on me, looking like they were waiting for someone- anyone- to taser me and put me back in my straight jacket.
So I looked up and smiled and it must’ve seemed more creepy than conciliatory because just like that all the shoppers scurried away to safety. So did Produce Guy’s three disciples, who went back to work.
But Produce Guy wasn’t ready to let me leave without proving how I was wrong and he wasn’t.
‘You must be one of those Christians who think we all just worship the same god’ he said dismissively.
‘No’ I said, and just like that I was shouting again.
‘You don’t get it. You don’t get it at all. I
believe our God couldn’t be moredifferent.
I believe our God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
That means you can’t say anything about God that you can’t also say about Jesus Christ.
So unless it makes sense to you to say ‘Jesus hates sinners; Jesus doesn’t want you to serve that person; Jesus wants you to treat that person like they’re not a person; unless it makes sense to you to say that about Jesus, then you should just shut your mouth.’
I said, in love.
But he didn’t follow.
He just squinted at me and said: ‘Maybe you should talk this over with your pastor. Maybe he could help you understand.’
‘Yeah, maybe. I’ll ask him about it.’
I’ve been a pastor long enough to know that when it comes to the Trinity, our belief that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, most of you think it’s a hustle.
You think it’s some philosophical shell game that couldn’t have less to do with your everyday life.
But pay attention-
That’s not how Paul speaks of the Trinity here.
Paul’s not interested in philosophy or abstraction.
Paul’s concerned with your mindset. With your attitude. With your love.
The Philippians weren’t locked in any doctrinal disputes or theological debates.
They were just at every day odds with each other.
And so Paul sends them these words about the God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
For Paul, the Trinity isn’t about intellectual games.
For Paul, the Trinity’s more like grammar that governs our God-talk.
Trinity keeps us from saying whatever we like about God, doing whatever we want in the name of God, believing whatever we wish under the umbrella of a generic god.
Trinity is Paul’s way of making sure that we can’t say ‘God’ without also saying ‘Jesus’
I mean, think about it-
Think about how many people you’ve heard, after a natural disaster or a tragic death or the diagnosis of disease, say something like: ‘It’s God’s will.’
Trinity means that for that to be a true statement you have to be able to remove ‘God’ and replace it with ‘Jesus.’
Trinity means that it’s not a true statement unless you’re able to say:
‘My mom’s cancer was Jesus’ will.’
‘Hurricane Katrina was Jesus’ will.’
‘9/11 was Jesus’ will.’
For Paul, Trinity functions not as a philosophical concept but as a grammatical rule. Trinity binds us to the character and story of Jesus.
We can’t say or think or act like God hates ‘sinners’ because we know Jesus didn’t.
We can’t say or think or act like God doesn’t care about the poor because we know Jesus did.
We can’t say or think or act as if God is against our enemies because we know Jesus loved them.
We can’t scratch our heads and wonder if we need to forgive that person in our lives because know what Jesus said about it.
And the doctrine of the Trinity refuses to let you forget that his words aren’t the words of any ordinary human teacher.
Teachers can be dismissed.
But his words are 100%, 3-in-1, the Word of God.
When Jesus says to the woman about to be stoned for adultery ‘I don’t condemn you’ that’s God speaking.
And when Jesus offers living water to the woman at the well, who has about 5 too many men in her life, that’s God’s grace.
And when Jesus says to Zaccheus, a villain and a traitor and a sinner, ‘Tonight I’m eating at your house’ Trinity makes sure we remember that that’s an invitation stamped with the seal of heaven.
For Paul, the fact that this God couldn’t be more different- it couldn’t be more practical.
I don’t freak out on people all that often.
But that’s not to say that I don’t run into people every day whose behavior doesn’t square with their beliefs, whose opinions are dearer to them than the mind of Christ, who are so set in their ways they refuse to conform to the Way.
And so if you want to make me less cranky.
If you want to make your pastor happy.
If you want to make my joy complete.
Give don’t grasp.
Serve don’t single out.
Don’t puff yourselves up with conceit.
Don’t fill yourselves up with ambition.
Don’t act out of selfishness.
Empty yourselves of the need to be right.
Regard anyone as better than yourself.
Pour yourselves out overtime for others.
Stay faithful to the Son’s words because that Son’s the fullness of the Father, and his name is inseparable from the name that is above every name.
And if that’s true then the way up in this world is by stooping down.
0 What If Islam Wasn’t The Only Religion Defined In Terms Of Submission?
Through the years I’ve had friends and close acquaintances who are Muslim. As a prison chaplain I worked alongside a Muslim Imam. In every instance, I’ve always noticed how I actually have MORE in common with them than I do with many of my cultural (non-practicing) Christian friends. Given how radically secular our culture and my generation is how could it be anything but? In college, for example, the only other people I knew who prayed besides myself did so to Allah.
As many of you know, Islam is defined literally as ‘submission’ to God’s will and teaching. The closet Mennonite in me, which is to say the Methodist in me, has always admired the Muslims’ notion of submission. After all, most Christians define Christianity as what? Beliefs…faith in…Jesus as Savior? That’s part of it certainly but I’ve always been uncomfortable with how so many Christians define their faith in a way that conveniently sidesteps or makes optional the actual teachings and example of Christ.
I’ve been thinking this week about the doctrines of incarnation and trinity for the Sunday sermon and I’ve been struck once again how those beliefs work to secure Jesus’ place in the God-head. In other words, the one who gave the sermon on mount wasn’t merely an historical teacher whose words can be dismissed or ignored. He’s God. The sermon on the mount is, literally, the word of God.
So that’s why I’m thinking about submission. I’m wondering what the Church would look like, what the world would look like, if Christians understood THEIR religion as submission to the teachings of Jesus.
0 We are Who We are because God is What God Does
We’re in the midst of a sermon series on ‘The Seven Truths that Changed the World: Christianity’s Most Dangerous Ideas.’ The ideas outlined in the book are like a greatest hits of what Christians believe; the book itself, however, is far from a hit. It, pardon me, sucks. Having said that, up next is the Christian belief- perhaps the most peculiar of all- that God once took flesh and walked the earth. So this weekend we’ll be talking about those big churchy concepts ‘incarnation’ and ‘trinity.’ And so that’s what’s on mind this week.
On one level the language of the Nicene Creed is beautiful and poetic: ‘…light from light, true God from God…’
On the other hand, jargon like essence and person are, in fact, antiquated philosophical concepts. Were the creed being hammered out in 2011 instead of 381 the Church would no doubt use different language. Nonetheless it’s critical (and life-giving) to appreciate exactly what the Creed is attempting to express.
By Trinity the creed wants to convey that God is not the God of the philosophers and civil religions (absolute power etc.). God is sovereign, costly love that liberates and reconciles. God’s love for the world in Christ and now at work in the Spirit is not accidental, temporary, secondary or incidental to God’s identity. There is no darker side to God’s character that is different from what we learn in the story of Jesus Christ. God just is self-giving, self-expending, other-affirming, community-building love. The exchange of love we see on the Cross, the declaration of delight we hear in Jesus’ baptism, the self-emptying we find in the incarnation at Christmas IS who God is and always has been.
In previous posts, I hit hard the point that who we are as creatures are persons who’ve been made to love, desire and worship God. To be human is to love, I argued, not believe or think.
We are these sorts of creatures because this is the sort of God who have in the Trinity.
Here’s a dusty, impressive word to add, one that comes straight from this Sunday’s scripture, Philippians 2: Perichoresis
It’s means ‘mutual self-emptying’ or ‘mutual self-giving.’ When we talk about the immanent Trinity, who God is internally and eternally, we believe God is perichoretic love.
By saying God is three persons, what we mean is that God is in God’s own life a community of self-giving, vulnerable love. God is a community, Father, Son and Spirit, where love is eternally given as a gift and nothing is expected in return. This is why God pouring himself out into Jesus’ flesh and emptying himself of power on the Cross isn’t a seismic shift in God’s identity. God doesn’t change with Jesus. It’s who God has always been.
Remember, we’ve been made in the image of this three-personed God. So who God is has implications for who we are, or, at least, how we should understand ourselves as we were intended to be.
A few therefores:
By Trinity the Church confesses that God’s fundamental identity is personal love shared in relationship.
Therefore, to be human is to love in relationship. In a sense, every call to worship in a church service is a call to return to or discover our humanity. You can’t be human, and you certainly can’t worship this God, without loving relationships in your life.
God’s life is one of deep, profound, joyous communion.
Therefore, we embody God’s life and connect to it not as individuals but as a community. If the God who says ‘Let us make humankind in our image’ is a Trinity, then we comprise God’s image not as individuals but as a human community. It’s all of us together that make up God’s image. This is why the most ancient iconography for the Trinity is not three circles or triangles but the portrayal from Genesis 18 of the three strangers feasting together at a table. The community feast as image of God’s immanent life.
God’s life is unchanging but is dynamic in that its a constant exchange of self-giving love (This is why the Spirit is often described as the exchange of the Father and Son’s love).
Therefore-
The reason so many feel alive and connected to God during experiences of sacrificial, self-giving love (the service, mission-trip high people often refer to) is because this is who God is and who we’ve been fashioned after.
God’s life is one in which difference (Father, Son and Spirit) exists in peace and harmony.
Therefore at the heart of creation, at the root of all things, is not chaos or violence but an original peace. Annie Dillard, the nature essayist, made famous the line that creation ‘is red in tooth and claw.’ Trinity reminds and stretches Christians to look upon a seemingly ambivalent and violent world and see a still deeper harmony and peace.
Because God is within God’s own life a community of difference and peace, peace among God’s creatures is not a hopeless ‘ideal’ but a part of the very fabric of creation.
We are creatures made to love one another because the Creator himself is a community of mutual, self-giving love; a community where difference and peace exist in infinite joy.