Sermon: “And It Was Good”

Text: Genesis 1:1-2:4a

Trinity Sunday (A)

May 18, 2008

Scripture introduction.  Our second reading this morning is the very familiar creation story from the first chapter of the book of Genesis.  Ancient Hebrew cosmology began with the belief that before creation, there was nothing but a watery chaos, as Genesis says, with “darkness covering the face of the deep.”  They believed that initially these chaotic waters covered the land and, because rain comes down from the heavens, that there also must be a source of water up in the sky.  Since the sky was filled with air, however, they understood that the heavenly waters must be located above the air.  And this led to the belief that above the sky was a large dome that held the heavenly waters back.  That idea has some appeal: if we stand upon the flat earth, the sky around us does look like the bottom of a large inverted bowl.  The ancient Hebrews believed that the sun, moon, and stars traveled on a path somewhere on or near this dome, which would have touched the flat earth at its farthest reaches.  Since before creation water was everywhere, they believed that it must also be located under the earth.  Sometimes that water would come to the surface, as springs and lakes and oceans. 

Other ancient near eastern cultures understood God’s act of creation to be an evenly matched battle between God and the forces of chaos, which were personified as a great sea monster.  As the ancient Hebrews tell the story, however, there is never a doubt that God is in control.  The world—even the watery chaos—is simply the raw material for God’s good creation.

Sermon.  In the calendar of the church year, today is Trinity Sunday, a day when we emphasize our understanding of God as one, and also three.  It’s a very difficult assignment for preachers because in ten or fifteen minutes we are to address this doctrine, the development of which took four hundred years in the Early Church.[1]  It’s particularly difficult this morning because we have so many other good things going on in our service—recognition of Sunday school teachers, confirmation, baptism, and the reception of new members.  So I have decided to do something that for me is unusual.  I’ll begin the sermon this week by outlining the doctrine of the Trinity.  Then, next week I’ll complete it with some reflections about how the doctrine applies to our lives of faith.

The New Testament clearly suggests the outline of the doctrine.  One of the best examples is our first reading this morning—the Great Commission from Matthew’s gospel—in which Jesus commands his followers to baptize new disciples “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”[2]  Another is the benediction found at the end of Paul’s second letter to the Corinthian church, which will be our benediction this morning: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”[3] 

Both of these examples mention Jesus and the Father and the Holy Spirit in one breath and by doing so suggest that these three operate together and to some degree are to be identified with one another.  We could add to these, passages such as the one in John’s gospel, where Jesus taught that he and God (whom he called “Father”) were one.[4]  Also in that gospel, Jesus described the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Truth that comes from the Father and who will bear witness to Jesus.[5]  Probably the earliest creed of the Church was the affirmation, “Jesus is Lord.”[6]  Early Christians, many of whom were Jewish, would have understood the word “Lord” as a reference to God.  Thus, by saying, “Jesus is Lord,” they were actually saying, “Jesus is God.” 

However, once we accept these and other biblical statements suggesting the outlines of the doctrine of the Trinity, there still is a lot to understand and explain.  For example, since Jesus was divine, then did that require his Jewish followers—and the rest of us—to give up one of the most central teachings of the Old Testament, namely, that there is only one God?  What about the Ten Commandments: “you shall have no other gods before me”?  Unless Jesus were to be understood as a second god, and we do not believe this, somehow Christians had to develop an explanation of how Jesus Christ is God, but without compromising God’s essential unity.  There were some in the Early Church who felt that because Jesus was God, they had to give up the Old Testament and the God who is described in it, replacing that God with Jesus Christ.  After some bitter disputes, this argument was rejected by the majority of Christians.  Others took the opposite approach, maintaining that Jesus was a “divine being” but not fully God.  This view, too, was rejected by the Church.

What eventually emerged after centuries of debate was the doctrine of the Trinity, in which the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were understood to be three separate persons within God’s essential unity.  In reaching this conclusion Christian theologians relied upon Scripture, but also upon certain insights of Greek philosophy.  For example, the second person of the Trinity, the Son, was also called the “Logos,” the living word of God.  In Greek philosophy, “logos” was understood to be the principal of rational thought that held the entire universe together.  Early Christians combined this Greek idea of logos together with Old Testament understandings of God’s word and wisdom. 

The result was an extraordinarily powerful series of conclusions.  Because God could never be separated from God’s Spirit and God’s Word, all three were part of each other and always existed together.  A common misunderstanding of the doctrine of the Trinity is that God the Father does the creating, God the Son does the redeeming, and God the Holy Spirit does the sustaining.  The doctrine of the Trinity actually means exactly the opposite: that no single person of the Trinity ever acts alone, but always in partnership and communion with the other two. 

When Jesus of Nazareth was born to Mary in the Bethlehem manger, the second person of the Trinity—the Word, the Logos, the Son of God—became a human being.  The prologue to John’s gospel, the words we read every Christmas Eve, are our basis for this conclusion:  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  All things came into being through him . . . .”  That Word was Light and Life, and on that first Christmas “the Word became flesh and lived among us.”  For Christians Jesus was God’s living word, God’s instruction and law, God’s living Torah.  That was Jesus of Nazareth, who remained bodily in the world until his Ascension to the Father, which we celebrated several Sundays ago.  Exactly how the second person of the Trinity became human will remain a mystery.  The Apostle Paul, perhaps quoting a hymn of the Early Church, described it in his letter to the church at Philippi as an emptying process—God humbling himself so that God could become a human being.[7]  Summing this up, the Early Church would later say that Jesus Christ had two natures, being fully human as well as being fully God.

This doctrine of the Trinity was not limited to the New Testament; it also helped Christians interpret and use the Old Testament.  In our second reading this morning, God created the world.  This began when a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.  In Hebrew, the word for “wind” is the same as the word for “spirit.”  Thus, we might just as well translate, “and the Spirit of God swept over the face of the waters.”  Early Christians would have pointed out that in these opening verses of the Bible, we already have two persons of the Trinity—God the Father and God the Holy Spirit.  And what happened next?  Creation occurred when God spoke: “Let there be light. . . . Let there be a dome. . . . Let the waters be gathered together. . . .”  Creation happened through the Word of God—the Early Christians would have said the “logos,” the rational principal, the wisdom of God.  This is what is echoed in the first verses of John’s Gospel, which I read a moment ago: “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.”  Thus, according to early Christians, from the very beginning God was Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Even the Old Testament proclaimed a Trinitarian God. 

In light of our time constraints this morning, I’ll stop here and will consider next week some practical implications of this doctrine.