Three in One

Robert E. Hall
Tarrytown United Methodist Church

Trinity Sunday
June 3, 2007

Text: Psalm 8

If you read the first seven psalms, you would think that the psalmists always had bad days. They sing of their enemies doing them wrong, of the distress they feel, of having been humiliated, of sighing, languishing, being weary, terrified, weeping all the time, being pursued and threatened.

But then you arrive at the eighth psalm and hear the rest of the story. Sure enough, life can be a burden and we all know what it’s like to live on the edge. But we also have those moments of assurance that God is and God cares.

“O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”

We look at the glory above or we hear the singing of children (a fascinating combination of mysteries), and we ponder: “What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?”

Mindful of: remembers, focuses attention, has regard.

Cares for: has sympathy for, tending to our needs. We know more scientifically than the psalmists that our little planet is fragile; that we are one among millions; that we really are like a speck of dust in the scheme of things.

Can it be true that the Creator really is mindful and cares personally? I know that the idea of a personal God (as contrasted with a God which is a “force”) is not fashionable in some Christian circles. We are tempted to believe that God cares and is mindful of the BIG Events and problems. As if God could not possibly attend to each created thing.  But I am reminded of Dr. Schubert Ogden’s statement, that, to believe that God is infinite means that God, unlike us, is related to all creatures simultaneously and continuously.

“A LITTLE LOWER THAN GOD!”

The psalmist answers his own question.

The sign that God cares is that God has made us “a little lower than God.”

Of all the creatures, God has allowed us to share the divine “glory and honor!” (In the Great Thanksgiving for Holy Communion, we conclude by praying that “all glory and honor are yours.”)

We are junior creators. Almost like angels! We are given dominion over all things: sheep, and oxen and beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatever is in the deep blue oceans!

Dominion! We are given authority to govern, to organize, to rule.

This sounds like power---and it is. It is the “dominion” that is given human beings at creation, along with the command to be fruitful and multiply. (Genesis 1) God creates humans for this vocation.

But it is always responsibility for, and stewardship of all that lives on the planet! It is dominion under God’s dominion of us!           We are not autonomous, but in relationship with God, the giver of all life. God has made us in God’s image. As God cares for and in mindful of us, so we are called to care for and be mindful of all living things.

God has given us the ability and privilege to preserve, protect, conserve, use, foster, take care of all other created beings with whom we share life on the planet.   (And should we add: the envelope of the atmosphere which surrounds our planet and supplies us with oxygen?)

“God belongs in the heavens; the earth he has given to us.” (Psalm)
 
How can we live up to such a role? For when we consider God’s care and mindfulness, we recognize that there is accountability. There will be a reckoning for our exercise of the power God has placed in our hands!

The intelligence and resourcefulness of human beings is awesome. We stand in awe of the advances in science and technology. The human mind is still the most impressive organism.

And, Lord knows, we also know to mess things up!

Along with our marvelous abilities, we are prone to use our creative powers for short-sighted or destructive ends. We can fool ourselves into thinking that we have no limits; we are forgetful of what we have learned; we forget that we are called to be our brothers and sisters keep; and we can be deaf and blind of the calls of those who will come after us.

Our creative abilities are most surely tested by the persistence of war and genocide; by the growing world-wide disparity between those who have more than enough and those without enough to live; by the needs for diplomacy and cooperation between nations and tribes. In short, by the challenge of “crowding and still being kind.” (Robert Frost?) It seems that are greatest challenges in living up to our God-given roles are in relationships and human community.

We are always tempted to turn in our name tag and join in with our fellow beasts of the field so as to avoid our responsibilities!

So, how can we live up to this gift of dominion that God has given us? God has called us to stewardship of the planet; how can we be responsible for this awesome task.

SURELY IT IS GOD WHO SAVES US….

It is the witness of Scripture that our help comes from the Lord who made the heavens and the earth.

Only God can save us from ourselves---from our own arrogance and pride and sloth. It takes being born again to be brought round to our rightful minds, our truest selves. Only God can restore us to our rightful place as creatures sharing God’s honor and glory. For our weakness is not a lack of knowledge; it is a matter of our souls.

If Psalm Eight is a hymn of our high calling, this high calling also drives us to our Triune God.

This is “Trinity Sunday.” It is a day we set aside in the church year to remind us of which God we believe in, which God we worship and to whom we turn for help.

I know. Talk of the doctrine of the Trinity sounds archaic---something like a discussion of how many angels can dance on the point of a needle!

Though I find the whole history of the formulation of the trinity in the fourth century fascinating myself, this is not the occasion for weighing in on that subject. (And do I hear sighs of relief!)

But our belief in the Triune God is practically helpful and necessary as well. The reason is expressed by John Calvin this way: “Unless we grasp God as triune, only the bare and empty name of God flits about in our brains, to the exclusion of the true God.” (Quoted in Wainwright and in Kimmel, below)

Our belief in the Triune God gives substance to the God whom the psalmist says is mindful of us and cares for us. We do not believe in a “To Whom It May Concern God.” It is the One God known to us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The church was “driven” to this understanding by

“….The experience of salvation: The gift received from God the Father through Christ the Son in the Holy Spirit, (has) called forth the grateful response of faith offered in the Holy Spirit, through Christ to the Father.” (Geoffrey Wainwright, “The Doctrine of the Trinity: Where the Church Stands or Falls,” in Interpretation, April, 1991) The Trinity was not some finer point of theology dreamed up by scholars and bishops with time on their hands.

Or, as another has written: “The Christian God has a history, and just as the identity of every human being is defined by the life he or she lives, so the identity of our God is defined by his history with us.

“God is the Father who grieves for the death of his Jesus at Calvary.

“God is the Son who prefers the company of harlots and tax collectors to that of religious professionals.

“God is the Spirit poured out on the church on the day pf Pentecost who will bring us into the kingdom of the Father and Son.” (Alvin Kimmel, Jr., The God Who Likes His Name,” in Interpretation, April, 1991)

The doctrine of the Triune One saves us from cheating ourselves by leaving out a part of God’s history with us, aspects of God’s nature.

Some want to worship only the Father; others seem want to speak only of Jesus; then there are those for whom all talk of God is talk of the work of the Spirit.

But the Father’s nature is revealed in the Son; and the nature of the Holy Spirit cannot be reduced to mere enthusiasm; the spirit of God must be seen through the lens of the agape love known in the life of Jesus. As for Jesus, he was not only a very virtuous human who lived and died. For we know him as the incarnation of the Word of God which was present with God at creation, the one “in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.”

Why not call to mind God in God’s fullness when we pray and worship and praise and lament?

Are there other ways of naming God? Of course there are. But the God who is mindful of us and cares for us; the God who has given us such creative powers, is the God whom we have come to know, with the saints of the ages, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This God has created us, redeemed us and now is bringing God’s reign to fulfillment. To give our lives in loving service to this God is abundant life. It is life as it was intended to be lived.

ABBA, FATHER

We may say: When we use the word “Father” to describe God, are we saying that God is male? Of course not! This was never the intent of Jesus when he taught us to pray the Lord’s Prayer. It would have been the last thing on the mind of a Jewish rabbi, for whom the very name of God was too holy to say. “Abba” or “Father” expresses the intimate relationship that Jesus has with God.

Is God like a father? Well, by analogy, yes. Or God is like a Shepherd, or a Light, or Living Water, or like a monarch, or like a Most High Deity, or like a Judge, or like a Mother ----all useful and biblical metaphors for God.

 I am sensitive to the fact that “Father” is a hard word for some to use in praying to God, because of painful memories. (“Mother” may also be.) We are free to pray to God by other names. God knows who we are addressing, by any of the many words we can use---or none at all.  

The important point is that we are praying to the one whom Jesus addressed, the God whom Jesus knew by the intimate name, “Abba.” In other words, it is a name which has a treasured history, and a profound place in the story of our redemption.

Time does not permit us to deal with all of the members of the trinity today. But hear this. The God we worship, pray to and stand in awe of (as in Psalm 8), is the One who has and continues to come to us by the distinguishable but inseparable persons we know as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

I have been helped  in my understanding of the trinity by this quote from a source now lost to me: “In Christ we have God with us, and in the Holy Spirit we have God in [and among] us, without God ever ceasing to be over us.”

All theology worth remembering ends and begins in prayer. So as we, with the Psalmist, look at the heavens and wonder that God is mindful of us, and that God truly cares for us---and that God has called us to responsible stewardship under his Lordship---we may want to pray for God in God’s fullness to be present with us:

         “Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth:
             Set up your kingdom in our midst.

         Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God:
              Have mercy on me, a sinner.

         Holy Spirit, breath of the living God:   
              Renew me and all the world.”

(N.T. Wright, “The Prayer of the Trinity,” originally published in New Tasks for a Renewed Church, 1992; available on line from ntwrightpage.com)

For further reading:

Creed by Luke Timothy Johnson
Christian Doctrine by J.S Whale
Questions of Faith by Peter Berger