June 12, 2022
Hope Lutheran Church
John 16:12-15
Before We Have All the Answers
Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.
Today is Holy Trinity Sunday. On this day we consider and marvel at the nature of God. God has revealed God’s self to us as three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And yet God is still one. God is the great one-in-three and the three-in-one. It’s impossible for us to fully comprehend.
The Episcopal priest and writer Robert Farrar Capon described our limited ability to comprehend the transcendence and mystery of God like this: “When we try to describe God we are like an oyster trying to describe a ballerina.”
God is a trinity of one! It’s beyond our reckoning. The very nature of the divine Trinity confronts us with our human limitation. WE DON’T HAVE ALL THE ANSWERS! In this life, we never will. St. Paul put it this way:
“For now we see as through a mirror, dimly; but then, we’ll see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”
The Trinity oneness of God reminds us of our limitations. God is larger than our minds can contain. This is where we dwell now. We dwell in that time before we shall see face to face. We dwell in the time before we have all the answers. For now we can only marvel at the majesty and the mystery of God.
This Trinity Sunday reminds us of our limits. And this is a gift. Recognizing our limitations gives us permission not to understand everything. In in our unknowing, there is one greater than we are. The wisdom and reality of God is exceedingly more vast and deep than our own capacity. And isn’t that the way you want it? If you completely understood God, if God fully fit within the confines of your mind, then God would be smaller than you, less than you. Is that what you want? What good is a God who is less than you? The oyster becomes greater than the ballerina!
Not knowing, not having all of the answers about God keeps us searching. We remain open and curious, we continue to search the scriptures, we listen in the quiet of prayer, we give thanks for the greatness of God.
When we feel that we’ve mastered something, we close down. We know it all! The same thing happens in our life of faith. When we as the church feel that we’ve “mastered” our understanding of God and how we fit within God’s master plan, then we become dogmatic and brittle, we adopt a superior attitude. We know! We know the heart and will of God! We can speak for God! It’s as if WE are the ones sitting at the right hand of the Father, WE are the ones who will judge the living and the dead!
But that isn’t our place. As my internship supervisor, Orlyn Huwe, liked to say, “Mary, we’re in sales, not management.” It’s been sage advice to me! We recognize that our understanding and wisdom is but a drop in the infinite bucket of our God!
On this Holy Trinity Sunday we reflect and marvel at the greatness of the living God, three-in-one. So let us take a little time to dwell in the wonder of each person of this divine One God. Here, too, we’re lost in wonder, love and praise.
God the Father. God has revealed God’s self as the Father. Now, we might run up against the sharp corners of our limitations if our relationship with our own earthly father has been a challenge. For those who did not have a father present in their lives. Or perhaps the word Father conjures up painful and confusing memories of abuse and harsh judgment.
Calling God “Father” gets mixed up in our human experience. But the point of calling God “Father” as opposed to the more generic “Parent” is to evoke a personal relationship with our creator. Certainly, we each have two biological parents, and in that sense, God could just as easily be understood as “Mother.” The first person of the Trinity has been revealed as Father. It’s associated with that first intimate connection each of us has when we enter this world – that between parent and child.
God has been revealed to us as God the Father. God is the source of our being. All of creation, in its vast diversity, has sprung from the infinite imagination of God. We are created to be in relation with our loving God! One who creates and protects us and cares intimately for us as a loving father.
This vast creation bears witness to the limitless creativity of our God. Methodist pastor Earl Langguth wrote a poem “The Wizard of Awes.” The universe proclaims the awesome greatness of our creator God:
I cannot imagine a hand that could fashion
A galaxy swirling in space,
With spiral arms crowded, and stars and gas clouded,
With vast astronomical grace.
I can’t comprehend and I cannot pretend
To number the galaxies there.
To think they may be like the sands of the sea
Is a number my mind cannot bear!
No hand wrought this wonder, I’m told as I ponder,
So I wait for the tale to unfold.
I know all this occurred by the power of His word;
With awe I such glories behold!
For as great as the universe is, with all its billions of galaxies, yet, this fatherly God knows us each intimately, down to the number of hairs on our heads!
In this realm, before we have all the answers, this we know: We are the children of a loving creator; a heavenly Father holds us dearly and loves us to no end.
Next, let’s consider God the Holy Spirit. Our Trinitarian God has made God’s self known to us as a divine Spirit. This Spirit whispers to us, it urges and even goads us in unexplained ways.
Peter Marshall was a Scottish-American Presbyterian minister. During his career he served as the chaplain of the United States Senate. After he had passed, his widow, Catherine Marshall wrote a biography of her husband entitled "A Man Called Peter." In the book she tells the story of an experience Peter had as a young man in Scotland.
Young Peter was struggling with his sense of call and the purpose for his adult life. One night, Peter found himself walking home. He decided to take a shortcut across the Scottish moor. He was aware that in the middle of the moor there was a large, deserted limestone quarry. But Peter was confident about his bearings and what path to cut.
In the dark of the night, he suddenly heard a voice call his name, “Peter.” There was a sense of urgency in the voice’s tone. Peter replied to the voice, “Yes, who’s there? What do you want?”
There was no answer, so Peter resumed his way. He’d only made a few steps when the voice called to him again, this time with even more urgency, “Peter!”
Peter stopped in his tracks and fell to the ground. He put his hand out in front of him and there was nothing there. He was on the very edge of the quarry’s gaping hole. Just one more step and he would have fallen in.
What was that? We could chalk it up to all sorts of things: spooky imagination in the dark of the night, coincidence, a night bird’s song. But as Peter reflected on what had happened, he knew that God has spoken to him. His life was not supposed to end that night. He had a future destiny before him.
We don’t have all the answers, but in wonder and awe we praise the work of God’s Holy Spirit among us.
And finally, our attention turns to God the Son. What we see revealed through our Lord Jesus Christ is the full depth and breadth and height of God’s eternal love for us. His life is a demonstration of the divine love that will not let us go. There is NO PLACE so remote that the loving and healing reach of God cannot claim us:
“And when I think that God, his Son not sparing
sent him to die, I scarce can take it in!
That on the cross, my burdens gladly bearing,
he bled and died to take away my sin.”
In this realm, we don’t have all the answers. But from what has been revealed to us, we do know the scope of the divine love which claims us. In that great storehouse of never-ending love, we anchor our hope. We continue to look to the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit., We grow in faith in the unfolding mystery and revelation of divine life and love.
