Community Church Sermons

Trinity Sunday – May 26, 2002

"Three Gifts That Can Change The World”

2 Corinthians 13:11-14

 

Today is one of those multiple-personality kind of Sundays. It is Memorial Day Sunday. And it is  Children’s Sunday here in our church. And liturgically speaking, today is the first Sunday after Pentecost. And, if you come from a denominational background steeped in the Reformed tradition, you know that today is also celebrated as Trinity Sunday.

 

So I can’t think of a better setting for preaching about the Trinity! After all, when we Christians say we believe in one God – who exists as Father, Son and Holy Spirit – people look at us like we’re friends with Bob Wylie, that lovable but very mentally unstable hero of the movie “What About Bob?” And one of my favorite lines from that movie is when Bob says, “I went to my psychiatrist and said, ‘Doc, I’m feeling kind of schizophrenic” and the doctor said “Well, that makes FOUR OF US!”

 

St. Augustine – one of the great intellects of the Western world - once tried to explain the Trinity by making seven statements about the triune God – the Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God…the Son is not the Father, the Father is not the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is not the Son…and then the seventh statement: There is only one God.

 

Then, over the next decade, Augustine wrote 15 books trying to explain what he meant by those seven statements! Bob Wylie had nothing on Augustine!

 

Well, I’m hoping that today we can clear up the mystery of the Holy Trinity in about – oh - ten minutes. And I want to do it in such a way that we can include some thoughts about Memorial Day, Children’s Sunday, and the First Sunday after Pentecost, too! So fasten your seatbelts…and pray for me!

 

If I were to try to describe the idea of the Trinity to you, I don’t think I’d use highly technical theological language. Remember the rather strangled words of the Nicene Creed trying to describe the relationship of Jesus to the Godhead? According to the Creed, he is:

 

“…the only begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made…etc.”

 

You remember that, don’t you?

 

Well, being a simple person, I much prefer to think of the Trinity in a simpler way. For me, St. Paul expresses it best in Second Corinthians 13:

 

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

 

It seems to me that the idea of the Holy Trinity stems from the utter inability of we human beings to fully express and describe how truly wonderful God is! One word just doesn’t do it! One thought doesn’t capture it! One idea doesn’t express it! Perhaps this is why the Bible contains sixty-six books to describe God, and not just the book of Genesis! Perhaps this is why there are four Gospels to tell us about Jesus instead of just one! Perhaps this is why we give the Holy Spirit not just one Sunday of Pentecost in the church calendar, but nearly thirty Sundays! How can you fully describe or define the indescribable and indefinable nature of God?

 

Well, you can’t. All you can do is open your heart and life to daily glimpses of God’s glory, and make sure you don’t get so obsessed with one that you exclude all the others. This is what it means to grow spiritually, you know – to have your understanding and your experience of God constantly expanding!!! So Paul offers us three little gifts that can lead us into this beautiful effusiveness of God, and that can change our lives and our world!

 

First, the grace of Jesus Christ.

 

Paul knew firsthand about grace. Grace is God’s wonderful desire and talent for finding people even before they want or know they need to be found – for loving people even before they want to be loved and even when they don’t deserve to be loved – for believing in people even before we believe in Him – for making promises to us even before we are righteous! That’s grace!

 

Saul didn’t believe in Jesus. Saul hated Jesus. Saul lived a life of assaulting Jesus and everything about Jesus as he rounded up Jesus’ followers and had them thrown into prison and put to death.

 

You would think Jesus would stay as far away from Saul as possible! You’d think Jesus would conspire with the angels in heaven to do away with Saul! But he didn’t! Jesus met him on the road to Damascus while Saul was heading off on another anti-Jesus campaign. Jesus appeared as a bright light and a voice, and Saul was so startled by it, he fell off his horse! And Jesus didn’t use the occasion to tell Saul about what a dirty, rotten scoundrel he was. No, Jesus used the moment to call Saul to a higher purpose! And sinner Saul started on the journey to becoming the apostle Paul! Jesus touched Saul’s life with grace long before Saul even had an inkling that he would one day become St. Paul.

 

How are you with the people in your life? Do you reach out for them before they’re ready to reach out for you, or afterwards? Do you take the initiative in lifting them to their promise, or do you leave them in their sin and failure? If you’re like me, you’re probably pretty judgmental with others. Pretty impatient. Pretty quick to write folks off. Pretty predisposed to seeing people in terms of their sin and weaknesses.

 

But just like there’s more to God than can be described in a single word, there’s more to people than what meets the eye.  And to be able to perceive that “more” about others, and appeal to it in love, is what it means to live with the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.

 

In the movie Ironweed there’s a scene in which the characters played by Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep stumble across an old Eskimo woman lying in the snow, presumably drunk. A bit inebriated themselves, the two debate what they should do about her.

 

“Is she drunk or a bum?” asks Nicholson. “Just a bum. Been one all her life,” says Streep.

 

“And before that?”

 

“She was a whore in Alaska.”

 

“Well, she wasn’t a whore ALL her life. Before that?”

 

“I dunno. Just a little kid, I guess.”

 

“Well,” Nicholson says, “a little kid’s something. It’s not a bum, and it’s not a whore. It’s something. Let’s take her in.”

 

And they do.

 

And that’s grace. Where society might see only a bum and a whore, grace saw a little kid – a person made in the image of God no matter how defaced that image may have become.

 

May this grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you as you go and live this week.

 

And also the love of God. That’s the second part of this Trinitarian benediction.

 

I was standing in line at Wal-Mart the other day, and started playing one of my favorite games. A row or two over to my left there was a mother with a great big shopping cart full of stuff. And sitting in the little fold down seat of the carriage was a little dark-haired baby boy. The mother looked anxious, very preoccupied with a list she had in one hand and what appeared to be a box of coupons in the other. When it got to be her turn at the register, she was still going over that list, counting those coupons, and unloading all that stuff all at once. She was not having fun!

 

But her little boy and I were having a great time! I’d noticed him looking at me, all curious like – as if he’d never seen anything as funny as me in his short little life. I returned that look, and then I winked. And it was as if I’d given him a gift! A big smile spread across his face, and after a bit, he put his hand in front of one of his eyes as if to try to wink, too. Well, that started us off on a big peek-a-boo contest which went on for several minutes until his mother pulled the cart over to the front of the register and stood between the two of us. But he was not to be denied. Before you knew it, he had maneuvered himself out of the seat, and into his mother’s arms. And as I watched, there came his little face peeking up over her shoulder.

 

Peek-a-boo!

 

And so we carried on until he and his mother left the store.

 

What an amazing gift I received that day. Along with that little guy’s mother, and my wife Sandy, and the busy Wal-Mart cashiers, and all the people in the store, I was sort of lost in the drudgery and boredom of the day.

 

Until that little kid touched me with his gift. And do you know what the gift was? It was his pure love of life! It was his delight in the excitement of the world! It was his joy over the smallest, seemingly least significant things of life!

 

Sometimes, when we talk about God’s love, we think of it as some gesture of goodwill toward humanity. The world is a rotten place, and people are pretty awful too, but because God cares about us, He makes a way for us, albeit reluctantly. And if you follow some of our theologians today, the way is only open for the time being and you’d darn well better find it before it’s too late and God slams the door in your face! That’s God’s love.

 

But that’s not what the Bible means when it speaks of God’s love. That’s our own sinful love that we’re putting on God when we think that way. God’s love is far different! The Bible tells us its patient and kind. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. In fact the Bible tells us God’s love never ends – that if you were to strip the world of everything in it, there would be one thing still remaining. God’s love.

 

And what God’s love is is a relentless, effusive, passionate delight in all that God has created – animal, vegetable and mineral!

 

Now, many of you love golf! Sometimes. So maybe that’s not a good example. And all of us love our spouses. Although often we don’t like them, and they don’t like us! So let’s not go there either. Maybe it would be better to say that many of us love our grandchildren. And now that Sandy and I are numbered among the grandparents, we can understand what that means. Ryan’s pictures are everywhere. All our disposable income goes to buying little things for Ryan. Every day at about five o’clock, Sandy says, “I think I’ll give Ryan a call.”

 

We are literally enamored by our little grandson who started out at just three pounds, but is up over ten pounds now, and is the most beautiful, smartest, most talented grandbaby ever born – except for yours, of course! I guess we could accept ties

 

Well, if you can understand that degree of sheer delight in a grandchild, or anything else for that matter, then you are getting close to appreciating what the Bible means by the love of God. God is hopelessly and passionately in love with you and me and them and us! God rejoices in the wonders of the world, and the marvels of nature, and the excitement of human endeavor, and the hope of the future! God is joyfully optimistic about this world of ours, and everything He envisions for it is born out of that sense of optimism. Yes, there will be a day when good overcomes evil once and for all! Yes, there will come a time when people sit down together in peace. Yes, there will come the moment when hunger is eradicated, and poverty is eliminated, and racism is exterminated. God dreams those loving dreams and invites us to dream them too!

 

And to live with the love of God is to live in that optimistic, passionate spirit that sees hope and joy EVERYWHERE – even in a funny-looking guy a couple of rows over at Wal-Mart – and then spreading that love around like that little boy did for me!

 

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God be with you.

 

And then the third gift of this Trinity of life. May you also have the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.

 

There was no doubt in the early church what the coming of the Holy Spirit meant. It was the sign that the Gentiles are included in the grace of Jesus and the love of God. In other words, the Spirit is the sign that those who are far away from God still belong to God. And the Spirit is God’s power to work through your life in enfolding everyone in the redemptive love of Christ.

 

This, of course, is the mission of our church. We are not here to build a denomination, or to accumulate saints, but to embrace sinners in the grace of Jesus, and the love of God. To receive the gift of the fellowship of the Holy Spirit is to have at work in your life a power and a spirit that is able to cross boundaries, to break down barriers, and to build bridges to each other and to those who have not yet discovered the beauty of the family of God.

 

“May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, BE WITH YOU!”

 

What does all this have to do with Children’s Day? Parents: these are the three gifts that you must nurture in the lives of your children. They will become whole people, and the world will be made a better place when these three gifts are planted in their lives.

 

What does all this have to do with Memorial Day? Those who gave us the freedom in which we live gave us the opportunity to be people of grace, of love, and of community. The free land in which we live has been bequeathed to us by those who “more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life.”

 

And what does all this have to do with the Trinity?

 

Dear friends, the Trinity is not an abstract theological idea to be believed.

 

The Trinity is a way of life to be lived!

 

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all!