Holy Trinity

Holy Trinity 2008

“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”

During the week I thought maybe this Sunday I might take off from going deep. It’s been a tough week on everybody, and I thought a nice relaxing, perhaps uncomplicated message might be in order.

Today is The Holy Trinity. How that for an uncomplicated topic? While the Holy Trinity may seem like a deep concept, I’m determined to make this a nice relaxing message, if it kills me. So here we go.

The greeting that I just gave, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all,” is the first written concept of the Holy Trinity found in the New Testament, in 2 Corinthians. The term Trinity is found nowhere in Scripture. However, when we baptize, which is our main sacrament, or sign we hear the words, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, in the name of the Son, and in the name of the Holy Spirit.” When we embrace new members, what we are doing is simply affirming our Baptism in the name of a Triune God.

Today is The Holy Trinity.

All this Trinitarian language is simply or not simply the Christian effort to identify God. The God who has made us, redeemed us, and sanctified us. We need to know who God is. That is our nature.

The official doctrine of the Trinity reads something like this. Pay attention, because I’m going to test you. Ok are you ready?

That the Being of the one eternal deity there are three eternal and essential distinctions, the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit. Three persons in one substance and one being in three distinct beings. They are coeternal and coequal.

The divine nature is fully undividedly contained. Even through the persons are in the closest possible unity with one another and interpenetrate one another, each has a peculiar character when viewed in relation to the others.

The Father is not begotten but is said to be ingenerate. The Son is begotten eternally and proceeds by filiation. The Spirit proceeds by spiration from both the Father and the Son.

That’s the official doctrine of the Trinity. Did you get all of that?

It took the early church over 400 to come up with this statement. The doctrine of the Spirit almost a thousand, and believe it or not these people were not even Lutheran. This makes no sense to me.

I once heard, “Bring me a person that can comprehend the Trinity and I’ll show you a worm that can comprehend a person.

Well, with a definition like the one I just read, this statement may be true. But this doesn’t have to be the case. I think the Holy Trinity can be explained in a way that is understandable and hopefully can lead one to a closer relationship with God.

I really don’t think it is as complicated as some make it out to be. The Triune God is about Love. Simple as that!

It’s about Love, Love, Love.

Today I want to share with how I view the doctrine of the Trinity and see if it might clear up some of the misconception that this is an unexplainable concept.

When I think of the Holy Trinity I think about God the God, God the God, and finally God the God.

God the God, or God the Father I cannot say a whole lot about. This is God who is way beyond my knowledge and way beyond my rational thinking, but I still know that I am in the presence of this God, because of the feeling I have of being overwhelmed by awe. A kind of presence or feeling that just will not let go, an experience of the Almighty that gives me goose bumps.

It is God that I see when I stand on the shores of Ocean Isle and watch the waves pound the coast. It is God I feel when I watched the birth of my three children. It is God that grasps me when I wake up to twelve inches of freshly fallen snow, and the same God that makes me smile when I see the first flower burst through the cold ground of early spring.

God the God is what Martin Luther calls a mystery. This is God who shakes me makes me say WOW! How can these things be?

This is God we read about in the Old Testament. God the Creator. God the God, creator of all there is, all there was, all there every will be.

This is God the Judge that we read about in the story of Noah and the Ark, the tower of Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah. This is God the Liberator who delivers the Israelites from bondage in Egypt. This is God the Lawgiver at Mount Sinai. This is God the Father.