Good Morning. Give me a simple religion. It’s what a lot of people want, and it’s what a lot of people have tried to turn Christianity into through the years. Of course, if someone calls US simple, we are very offended. Yet somehow, we think the God who made us has to be simpler than we are.
I am not sure how many of you know this, but before I decided to go into seminary, when I was in my third year of college, I was a Biology major. I had planned on going into some sort of Biology or Chemistry Graduate Work and had already interviewed for internships in the field. And then I really studied cell biology. I mean really studied it. And it shocked me, because the more I studied it, the more I found it to be impossible, and my atheist teachers, ridiculous.
I realize theology can sometimes be a bit boring, but I can get away with teaching that on Sunday Mornings. I really can’t get away with teaching Biology. But some things in Cell Biology, which if you want to know, I can talk to you about after church, convinced me of just how impossible the cell was. And by impossible, the scientific term is “Irreducibly Complex.” It could never have evolved without the help of a designer guiding it.
The simplest Sunday Morning Illustration I commonly use – Hopefully this has stuck in some of your heads from the past – is a person finding a watch on the beach. No sane person who picked up a watch from the sand and assumes that the metals formed together from the earth to make the springs, the sand was burned enough to make the glass, and a cow died there, and it’s skin just amazingly fit together around the metal to make a nice wristband with perfect holes.
You realize the watch had a designer. And looking at cells, they are almost infinitely more complex and interdependent than a watch is. The universe cries out with its complexity, and it’s incredible and intricate design. Certainly, we can’t expect the Creator to be simpler than His Creation.
A few minutes ago, we said the Creed together. The Creed is a table of contents to the important teachings found in the Bible about God our Creator.
The Creed is full of rather complicated notions. God is Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, the maker of all that is, whether visible or Invisible. The Bible begins in its first chapter by drawing us into the mystery of a God who creates and sustains and who made us in his own image. The truths we learn here are beyond simplicity, beyond the world of facts. They pierce into the mystery of a truth beyond our understanding.
We believe in one God. We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, who is fully Human, but also Fully God. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Life-Giver, and also Fully God, and yet not the Father, nor the Son.
Sunday-by-Sunday we gather together and profess the faith of the church. We embrace a list of concepts that point to a truths which in some senses is beyond words. We read the signposts pointing us in the right direction to God and away from concepts that might harm us and make us less than we were intended to be.
So we affirm what the Scriptures have revealed, that God is One and God is Three. Just as there is Complexity within ourselves, there is complexity in God. There is a difference however, the complexity within God reveals Love, where the complexity within ourselves reveals our sinfulness in this world.
Paul talks about this in Romans 7.
For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.
I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
Our complexity inside, our inner fighting, points us to the Love of God. Love begins in God the Trinity. God the Father Loving the Son, Loving us, and sending the Son to redeem us. God the Son loving the Father, and loving us, redeeming us, and from the Father sending the Holy Spirit to dwell within us.
Father, Son and Spirit are unique and special, and yet they are united. In a sense, we see how God then gives us pictures of this in the Church, and a smaller picture of this in giving marriage. In the Marriage Service, we are told:
The union of husband and wife in heart, body, and mind is intended by God for their mutual joy. Notice the words union and mutual.
Our need to say we are unique, special, autonomous beings and our need to be united in loving relationships with others is evidence that we are made in the image and likeness of God? How we are made, both independent and dependent, shows God’s fingerprints, just like a watch in the desert.
The members of the Trinity reveal this. Each has a distinct role, by nature or personality, and as lovers of all that has been made, seen or unseen, including us all. Amazingly, their personalities create unity as they share together love.
Ok, that’s some stuff to think about. What can I take practically home with me today. Again, St Paul is good for that. In our New Testament text in 2 Corinthians, Paul was encouraging the church to get along together. There was a lot of tension and conflict in the church at Corinth. When there’s a reading from 1st or 2nd Corinthians, it’s either 1 Cor 13 talking about what Love is at a wedding, or it’s Paul scolding them for disunity and not having love for one another.
In the final words of his final letter to them, Paul encourages them to live in peace with one another. Then he ends the letter by referring to the Trinity, the grace of the Lord Jesus, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost. This is one of the few places where the Trinity is mentioned together.
Paul says, when looking at how we should be reflecting Love, the model of harmony in the Godhead should be a pattern for their behavior toward one another. We are different people with different ideas, but we can get along, and when we do get along, we reflect the unity of God. Not just God as he lovingly relates to us, but who God is in love.
That’s the point of being made one in the Body of Christ. We are social people even as God is social. That’s one of the reasons the Trinity is so important for us to reflect on. God exists in perfect harmony and peace. We can get along in love and peace by reflecting his love in unity. We don’t have to understand all the inner workings of the Trinity. But we can let the Model of God as Three in One in Love model how we should be relating to each other.
