Sermon: Praising a Mystery[1]

Text: Ephesians 4:4-6

8^th Sunday in Ordinary Time (A)

May 25, 2008

Scripture introduction.  Last week was Trinity Sunday, a time for us to pay particular attention to this central doctrine of the church.  You may remember that we had so many other joyous and important things going on in the service that I decided to deal with the subject of the Trinity over the course of two weeks instead of one.  So, I have departed from the texts of the lectionary for today.  One of them, the one from Matthew, I like so much that I will save it for next week.  After that, we will once again be following the lectionary readings, which take us through some of the more important and memorable passages of Genesis and Exodus and on up into Joshua as we complete this church year in November.

Last week I mentioned that the doctrine of the Trinity had its origins in scripture, and we illustrated this with the Great Commission of Matthew 28 and the Trinitarian benediction of 2 Corinthians.  Our second passage this week, from Ephesians 4, is another text that supports the Trinitarian doctrine.  The writer of Ephesians refers to the Lord, which, as we learned last week, was one way that early Christians referred to Jesus Christ.  In this same passage, you will also hear references to the Spirit and to God the Father.  These are mentioned, however, in the context of a strong emphasis on the word “one,” suggesting that all of these are joined in a mysterious unity.  The passage is more poetic than analytic.  Perhaps that’s the best language for expressing the overflowing love that is the Trinity.[2] 

Sermon.  Last week I addressed the reasons why Christians, from the early centuries until the present, have held to the doctrine of the Trinity.  Thinking of God as three in one, and one in three, helped early Christians affirm that Jesus Christ was “God with us”—Emmanuel—without giving up their strongly held belief that there is only one God, as our reading from Ephesians says, “one body and one Spirit, . . . one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.”  This history of the development of the doctrine is fascinating and is an interesting “window” through which to view early church history.[3] 

But my purpose this morning is not to describe the doctrine in any more detail.  As I promised last week after giving its broad outlines, this week I want to preach about some implications of this doctrine for our personal faith and for our lives together as members of Christ’s church.  Of course, because we understand God as Trinity, there is no part of our belief or theology or practice of living that remains untouched by this central doctrine.  However, I will highlight two areas of our faith and life that I think are particularly strengthened by Trinitarian understanding.

The first of these has to do with God’s attitude toward human suffering.[4]  When we are suffering ourselves, do we understand that God is involved, and, if so, then how?  All around us, our friends and fellow church members are battling diseases.  They are good people, and we know intuitively that they are not suffering for any fault of their own.  And consider natural disasters; what about Hurricane Katrina or the cyclone in Myanmar or the earthquake in China.  Each of these resulted in massive human suffering.  Of course, some people chose to live too close to the water.  And maybe there was corruption when the dikes or levees or public buildings were poorly constructed.  But take away all the human causes of the misery, and there still would have been destruction and suffering on massive levels.  When faced with these situations, who among us has not asked the question, “Why, God?”

If God is in control—and we believe that God is in control—then it is hard not to hold God responsible in some way for the human suffering that we experience and that we witness in others.  And this brings on the “why” question.  It is only by faith that we continue to believe in God’s goodness when the hard times come.  And having a Trinitarian understanding of God helps us keep our faith that God has not abandoned us, even in the worst of times.

Here’s what I mean.  Karl Barth, a modern theologian whose writings about the Trinity have been very influential, cautioned us against any idea of God that is not centered in what we know of Jesus Christ.[5]  As Christians, we do not find and understand God by the powers of our own intellect.  Given God’s greatness and mystery, we could never do that.  But we don’t have to find our way to God because God has chosen to come to us—in the person of Jesus Christ.  If we take seriously the Trinitarian understanding that the other two persons of the Trinity are present when one is present, if we hold onto the affirmation that each person of the Trinity is of the same nature, substance, or essence as the other two, then what we see in Jesus is God.  The way Jesus thinks is the way God thinks.  Jesus’ concerns are God’s concerns.  The actions of Jesus show us how God acts. 

So if we want to understand God’s attitude toward human suffering, we should look to Jesus.  From what is reported in scripture, we know that Jesus was deeply moved by the suffering he encountered.  Often people asked him for healing—either for themselves or others.  I can think of no case when he failed to respond.  When the people were hungry, he provided food.  When the tempest roared, he calmed the waves.  In his sermons he made it clear that everyone was important.  The people whom the world seemed to despise or ignore were the ones he drew closest to.  He stood up for them, even against the political and religious authorities of his world.  And finally, he gave his life for all of us in his own agony of bitter suffering on the Cross. 

When we encounter suffering in our own lives, perhaps we ask the wrong question.  Rather than “Why, God?”, maybe we should be asking “Where, God?  Where are you in the midst of all this suffering?”  Unfortunately, for centuries the theology of the church has suggested that God—particularly God the Father—cannot suffer and thus does not suffer along with us when we suffer.[6]  While Greek philosophy was helpful as the Early Church attempted to formulate the doctrine of the Trinity, Greek thinkers led us down the wrong path when they taught that God was too righteous and pure to be affected by human suffering.[7]  If we only pause to think about it, such a belief goes completely against the witness of the Old Testament, where God is often described as deeply and emotionally involved in human affairs.  According to classical Christian theology, [8] God’s identification with human suffering was located only in the human nature of Jesus Christ; not even the divine nature of Jesus was considered to have suffered.   

Finally, in the 20^th century, theologians began to re-examine the Early Church’s conclusion that God does not suffer.  More and more the doctrine of the Trinity is leading our best thinkers[9] to the conclusion that since Jesus felt compassion for the suffering of humans, we may be confident that all persons of the Trinity likewise feel the pain of our suffering.  Some even have argued that, when a human being is lost to death or disease, God feels not only the pain of that single loss, as we do, but because God knows all the future events that might have happened in that life—all the love and all the accomplishments—God feels the loss more intensely than we ever could.  When human suffering happens, the “why” question leads to doubt, but the “where” question leads to faith.  Because we know the Jesus of scripture, we know that God is always present with us in tragedy and that God shares our grief and pain.  Thus, the doctrine of the Trinity strongly reinforces our faith.

The second point is easier for me to articulate and for us all to understand.  The Trinity is important in our daily lives of faith because it shows us how we are to live.  We know from the Genesis passage we read last week that we were created in God’s image.  We are not God, but there is something about our human essence that corresponds to God’s own nature.  And what does the doctrine of the Trinity tells us about God’s nature?—that relationship is central to who God is.  Relationship is so basic to God that there never was a time when God was not in relationship.  In the essence of God’s own being, God is eternally three persons in communion with one another.  St. Augustine thought of many analogies for the Trinitarian God, but my favorite is that God the Father is the lover, God the Son is the beloved, and God the Holy Spirit is the bond of love between them.  The Father loves the Son, the Son returns the love of the Father, and the Holy Spirit flows back and forth between them.  God exists in a flowing tide of love and relationship that never ends.  That is the God we worship.  That is the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ.    

Now, here’s the point: if relationship and communion are so important in the internal life of God, and if we are made in God’s image, shouldn’t we also be in relationship with God and with one another?  And the church is the place where this happens best.  In the church, we can shed our pretensions of self-sufficiency and simply accept our mutual dependence and our dependence on God.  Just think about it: every time you write a note of encouragement to another person, every time you drop an envelope in the offering plate, every time you welcome a visitor with a warm smile, every time you teach a child in vacation Bible school, every time you lift your heart in prayer for the needs of the world, you are reflecting the inner life of God.  Dare we say it?—you are participating in the life of God.

God is love.  True love expresses itself in relationship and in self-sacrifice for others.  This is what we see in Jesus Christ.  This is what we know to be true of God’s own self.  This is our calling, too, if we are to become who God created us to be.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.