Don’t Preach the Entire Gospel in One Sermon
My preaching professor, Lincoln Gallaway, once advised me, when my class sermon was too long, that I should not try to preach the entire gospel in a single sermon, and perhaps I should save some of it for the following week. Some of you may be thinking that I should have followed that advice more often. I am in jeopardy of shifting into my old ways again because I will be talking about the Trinity this week. It is a huge topic that really cannot be fully explained in a volume of books, let alone a sermon, but here we go.
The Trinity is Unique
We Christians have a unique understanding of God. While there are some popular spiritual teachers out there who like to say that all religions are essentially talking about the same God and gloss over the differences, we know that there is no other religion that describes God as one being who is actually a relationship between three equal, distinct persons: Father, Son, and Spirit.
Keeping it Simple
It isn’t easy to describe this in detail without drifting into some heretical (or unorthodox) ideas. There is infinitely more about God we don’t know than what little we know. We can carefully use handy illustrations that give us glimpses of what we mean by a God who is three in one, but they are woefully inadequate.
Therefore, the most important idea to take away from our concept of the Trinity is that God is all about relationships. God is in relationship with Father, Son, and Spirit; God is in relationship with us, and we with God and each other. GOD IS LOVE. 1 John 4:8 states, “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.”
God is love.
When we say that “God is love,” what does this mean? In English, the word love can have many meanings: you may love ice cream, your spouse, and your children, and these loves are obviously different. We also love our spouses differently throughout our relationship. At the beginning of our relationship, we are filled with romantic feelings that are mostly based on ideal notions of our beloved. Over time, as we get to know the person we marry, we begin to sacrifice little bits of ourselves (our selfish wills, our annoying habits) and offer them to draw closer to each other. Our romantic love becomes friendship and then agape – a love without conditions that freely gives to our beloved and holds nothing back.
We become lifelong companions.
Lover, Beloved, Love
We need three things in a relationship for love:
1) a lover, the originator of love
2) the beloved, the person who will receive the gift.
3) And love, or rather, the act of love.
St. Augustine uses these concepts to define the Trinity. The Father is the origin of love. The Son is the object of the love, and the Holy Spirit is the gift of love shared between them.
God is Loving Relationship
God is this loving relationship, and we experience this love through Jesus: the Son in the divine relationship who came to live among us and love us. When we look at Jesus, we see who God is. Jesus, the incarnate Son, the object of God’s love in the divine trinity relationship, shared that love with humanity during his life among us, and He continues to share that love through the Holy Spirit.
Love is Needed for Wellbeing Slide 2
Theologian Thomas Jay Oord explains: To love is to act intentionally, in response to God and others, to promote overall wellbeing. Therefore, the Holy Trinity reminds us that we are all interrelated, that no individual is an island, and that, as followers of the Christian faith, we believe that we can lead the way in repairing the damage in our society. This last week, I believe that I saw someone model how God’s love could help us heal after a tragedy like the shooting in Uvalde, TX.
Matthew McConaughey
Last week, actor Matthew McConaughey gave a moving testimony at a presidential press briefing. You have probably seen it, but if you haven’t, I highly recommend that you watch a video of his complete comments. In his speech, McConaughey emphasized the humanity of the victims. He and his wife, Camila, had spent the previous week consoling and talking with family members of the victims of the senseless shooting in Uvalde last week. McConaughey felt moved to do this because he was a native son of Uvalde, TX, and he felt connected to these people, and they welcomed his affection. He chose not to talk about the horrible deeds of that deranged young man who burst into that classroom armed for war. McConaughey alluded to the devasting impact of that attack by discussing the trauma the funeral home workers experienced as they prepared these young victims for burial. But he spent most of his time sharing the stories he obtained from the devastated families: stories about the lives, dreams, and aspirations of their loved ones, the wonderful children and teachers whose lives were snuffed out too soon.
Alithia
He shared how 10-year-old Alithia wanted to be an artist. McConaughey held up one of her drawings given to him by her family to share at the press conference, and he explained that the drawing was of the artist and her friend who had passed away earlier from illness: her friend was pictured in heaven, and Alithia was on Earth drawing a picture of her friend in heaven. Sort of like Rembrandt painting himself into painting, or Velazquez who painited himself painting the 17th Century Spanish Royal Family. Alithia’s parents explained to McConaughey that they had never spoken to Alithia about heaven before, yet Alithia knew that heaven is a place of grace and fulfilled relationships.
Ellen
Ten-year-old Ellen had been practicing a Bible verse she was supposed to recite the following evening in the Wednesday night church service at her Baptist church.
The passage was Deuteronomy 6:5: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all our soul, and with all your strength.” She never got to share that verse at her church.
Finding Meaning in the Tragedy
The families wanted their loved one’s dreams to remain alive in our responses to their tragic deaths. In the end, McConaughey called for some common-sense solutions that people from both sides of the political divide can agree to support: gun laws that keep powerful weapons out of the hands of bad or disturbed individuals: raising the age of gun ownership to 21, waiting periods until criminal background checks are performed, red-flag laws, enhanced school safety, policies that promote strong families, but he also called for measures that address the spiritual crisis in this country. He called for our leaders to step forward to finally do what is right. McConaughey urged all people to stop seeing everything from partisan lenses. He did not vilify anyone but called on everyone to do what is right for our community.
McConaughey said that we are not as divided as we are told we are. We need to envision a more hopeful future for children like those killed in Uvalde by living the values that not only provide the basis for our democratic political system but give us the ability to live together in peace and prosperity.
Our Responsibilities to these Victims
In his talk, McConaughey did not reveal a political preference. He also did not speak directly about religion, but his talk was infused with religion and a Christian understanding of our connection to one another as God’s children. Together we are more powerful than those bent on doing evil, and the dreams of these victims will live on through our response to the suffering they endured.
God is Relational
On Trinity Sunday, we celebrate a God that is not distant. God is near us, as near as our next breath. All three persons of the Godhead, Father, Son, and Spirit, relate with us, and we respond by remaining connected in a sacred circle of love: love among the three members of the Godhead is shared with us and returned by us.
Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer
The concept of the Trinity is our best attempt to describe a God who is at once: creator of the universe, redeemer of a world lost in sin, and a sustainer of our broken, precious lives. It is impossible to define this God with words, but deep in our hearts, we long to find how our lives and souls connect to the ultimate meaning of the universe. We want to be loved completely and unreservedly. Psalm 8, part of which we recited in our Call to Worship, probes this question, “what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God and crowned them with glory and honor.” (Psalm 8:4-5)
The Spirit Guides Us in Love
We love because God first loved us. Jesus modeled this love for us, and he instructed us to, “love our neighbor as ourself.” (Matthew 22:39) It is impossible to do this alone; we live out this love in the church, and God left us with the Holy Spirit, who will guide and help us.
In our Gospel reading today, Jesus said, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.”
The Greatest Commandment Slide 6
Jesus fused Deuteronomy 6:5, the scripture passage that little Ellen never got a chance to read at her church, with part of Leviticus 19:18 to come up with the greatest commandment:
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets”’ (Matthew 22:37-40)
The Bell Tolls for Thee
In our cynical times, these powerful words of love seem obscured by the nihilism, violence, exploitation, and immorality that are saturating our culture. It takes someone like Matthew McConaughey, or you, or me, to step forward and declare that the suffering of any person moves us because God is moved by their suffering.
The Trinity describes a God that created, redeemed, and sustains all things, and we who were created in God’s image are called to respond in kind. Rev. John Donne, wrote the poem, No Man Is an Island, 400 years ago, while he was home convalescing from a long illness and heard the toll of a funeral bell while he was lying in bed. He finished his poem with this stanza.
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
Let us all remember this Trinity Sunday that our God who is one being in a relationship between three persons extends that relationship to us, and therefore each death, each broken heart, diminishes us, and each act of love empowers us. Amen.