The Trinity - Sunday Sermon

 

If you wanted to make up a religion for, say, profit, fun and a seat on a private jet you wouldn't come up with the Trinity; the doctrine's too hard, that God is a trinity of Persons in unity of substance. Not three gods or three aspects of god but one God who is three distinct Persons, each one of which is fully divine. The Athanasian Creed puts it thus:

We worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Essence. For there is one Person of the Father; another of the Son; and another of the Holy Ghost.

 

It goes on to say that unless you believe this you will, without doubt, “perish everlastingly,” which sounds harsh and is doubtless why this Creed's hidden away at the back of the 1979 Prayer Book.  It's just not very polite, especially for modern Anglican sensibilities. But there it is and if we aspire to heaven we'd better worship God as He's revealed Himself to us, as triune. Can we make any sense of this or must we fall into reverent silence in the face of the mystery?

Both, surely, and perhaps the African Doctor St. Augustine comes to our aid. He teaches us that the act of love, human love, necessitates three things, a lover, the beloved and love itself. This, he believes, is analogous to the Trinity, where from all eternity the Father pours out his being to the Son in an act of perfect love. 

The Son returns the Father’s love and gives himself to the Father perfectly. So they are one in essence or substance, yet distinct as persons in their relationship one to another. And from their love, this timeless interplay of perfect being, proceeds the Spirit. The love of God personified, distinct by virtue of his procession.

Benedict XVI describes the relationship with admirable clarity: 

The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are one because God is love and love is an absolute life-giving force; the unity created by love is a unity greater than a purely physical unity. The Father gives everything to the Son; the Son receives everything from the Father with gratitude; and the Holy Spirit is the fruit of this mutual love of the Father and the Son.

 

Per B16, St. John sums it up in three words, "God is love." Reflect on that for more than a moment and silence, to say nothing of fear of the Lord ensues, "Remove your sandals for you are on sacred ground." But we can say this, God, in the Trinity, has revealed himself to us as an infinitely loving communion of persons. So what? So a lot. Consider some of the other options.

What if your higher power is the enigmatic "Life Force," a popular deity in San Francisco, Portland, and Austin, which sounds suspiciously like electricity, doubtless solar. But however green, electricity doesn't love you, it can't, it's not a person. Stick your finger in a light socket and find out.

Again, what if "that than which nothing greater can be conceived" by you is simply the universe, the world writ large. The good Texan soil, the trees, the sun and moon, the stars glittering in the night sky, galaxies cascading out into the icy void of deep space. Such grandeur and all good in itself but here's the thing, the atoms don't care when they're smashed together and obliterate a city. Lake Whitney doesn't shed a tear when you tragically fall off the boat and drown along with your guns. Again, this version of God doesn't love us, it can't, it's not a person. 

So what? So a lot. People become like the gods they worship and an unloving, impersonal god produces unloving disciples; followers of the Life Force become just that, all about force. You'll note that "we just want civil unions" moved to "bake the damn cake!" at warp speed.

The doctrine of the Trinity saves us from this tyranny and the despair which goes with it. God, the ultimate reality, the great I AM, is love and He loves us. He dies for us on the Cross, he reconciles us to the Father, He restores God’s image in us, He adopts us as sons as we rise reborn in the waters of the font, the Spirit anointed Sons of God, beloved by the Father, heirs in Christ of everlasting life.

What can we do but fall down in humble adoration, wonder and praise before the God who loves us and has revealed Himself to us as love, as He who is, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

God bless you all,

LSP

Midweek Message - The Trinity

 

This coming Sunday we celebrate the  Feast of the Trinity, glorifying God who has revealed himself as a trinity of persons in unity of substance; an infinitely loving communion into which we ourselves, in Christ and in the power of the Spirit, have been adopted:

THE disciples who were present at the Supper saw and heard Jesus Christ making eucharist to the Father over the bread and the cup.  They were witnesses of the intercourse between the Eternal Son and his Eternal Father.  Mortal ears and eyes at that moment perceived the movement of speech and love which passes in the heart of the Godhead; human minds entered into that converse of the Divine Persons which is the life and happiness of the Blessed Trinity.  Belief in the Trinity is not a distant speculation; the Trinity is that blessed family into which we are adopted.  God has asked us into his house, he has spread his table before us, he has set out bread and wine.  We are made one body with the Son of God, and in him converse with the Eternal Father, through the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. (Austin Farrer)

 

We are made one body with the Son of God, and in him converse with the Eternal Father, through the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. 

Reflect on the glory and power of that,

LSP

Trinity

We celebrate the Feast of the Holy Trinity tomorrow and contemplate the revealed life of God as Father, Son and Spirit. A trinity of persons in unity of substance. I like this reflection from Fr. Crouse:

To know God as absolute Being, absolute Knowledge, and absolute Love, [Father, Son, Spirit] is to be spiritually reborn: it is to know ourselves as encompassed and upheld by Providential care, and thus it is to see our own lives in a new spiritual perspective. It is to lose ourselves in the worship of a goodness and a glory infinitely beyond ourselves, infinitely beyond all earthly things, infinitely beyond all worldly pretensions and pettiness. It is to see our troubles, our frustrations, our disappointments, our ambitions and achievements, all in a new spiritual perspective, "high and lifted up" -- a radically different perspective, the perspective of eternity. 

But perhaps we ask, with Nicodemus, "Is this really possible? Is this really practical? Can a man be born when he is old? How can these things be?" Nicodemus was a sensible man, no doubt: a Pharisee, a leader of the Jews, and he couldn't let go of his supposedly sensible, practical perspective. Jesus warned him, and Jesus warns us: unless you are spiritually reborn, you have no part in God's kingdom. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." It is what we worship that makes us what we are.

It is what we worship that makes us what we are. There's wisdom in that, to say nothing of the Holy and Undivided Trinity.

God bless,

LSP

Listen Up, Heathen, It's The Trinity

If, like Mohammad, you decided to make up a religion for profit, power and gain, you wouldn't come up with the Trinity. Three Persons, one God isn't the kind a thing a huckster would pitch to his mug punters, it's too difficult. And therein lies one of the arguments for the revealed truth of Christianity. That said, how can we make sense of it? Frank Sheed, in Theology and Sanity, explains Thomas Aquinas' reasoning with clarity.

Starting from the infinite knowledge of God, Sheed makes the point that such knowledge must have a commensurate object that is also infinite. God's knowledge must therefore be self-knowledge and this concept or idea is the Son or Word. He advises the "beginner" to study the following "minutely":

An idea is, so far as we can make it so, the mental double or image of the object we are contemplating; it expresses as much of that object as we can manage to get into it. Because of the limitation of our powers, the idea we form is never the perfect double or image, never totally expresses the object, in plain words is never totally adequate. But if God does, as we know from Himself that He does, generate an idea of Himself, this idea must be totally adequate, in no way less than the Being of which it is the Idea, lacking nothing that that Being has. 

The Idea must contain all the perfection of the Being of which it is the Idea. There can be nothing in the Thinker that is not in His Thought of Himself, otherwise the Thinker would be thinking of Himself inadequately, which is impossible for the Infinite.

Thus the Idea, the Word that God generates, is Infinite, Eternal, Living, a Person, equal in all things to Him Who generates It. Someone as He is, conscious of Himself as He is, God as He is.

So we see the Son, begotten from the infinite knowledge of the Father and as with knowledge, likewise with love. Father and Son combine in an infinite act of love which produces a perfect state of "Lovingness" which has all that they have.

To a point the two "processions" are parallel. The First Person knows Himself; His act of knowing Himself produces an Idea, a Word; and this Idea, this Word, the perfect Image of Himself, is the Second Person. The First Person and the Second combine in an act of love of one another, love of the glory of the Godhead which is their own; and just as the act of knowing produces an Idea within the Divine Nature, the act of loving produces a state of Lovingness within the Divine Nature.

Into this Lovingness, Father and Son pour all that They have and all that They are, with no diminution, nothing held back. Thus this Lovingness within the Godhead is utterly equal to the Father and the Son, for They have poured Their all into it. There is nothing They have which Their Lovingness does not have. Thus Their Lovingness too is Infinite, Eternal, Living, Someone, a Person, God. 

Observe that here again we are still within the Divine Nature. For love is wholly within the nature of the lover.

But this love wholly contains the divine Nature, because God puts the whole of Himself into love.

Complicated? No, it's not so much that as so simple it's not easy, but whoever said life would be? Thank you, Frank Sheed, for explaining the Angelic Doctor so clearly. 

You can read the whole thing here.

God bless,

LSP