Trinity

      So this Sunday is Trinity Sunday, the day when we celebrate the most confusing, complicated, maddening, and inexplicable mystery of all Christianity, the doctrine of the Trinity!

      On the one hand, it’s pretty simple: we experience God in three pretty much distinct ways, but we believe as well that there is only one God.  Thus the line in the hymn, “God in three persons, blessed Trinity.”  And we often enough refer to “the Triune God.”  We’re pretty clear on what we believe: God is one in three, three in one.

      But the problem arises when we try to explain just how that all works!  To quote so many relationships, “It’s complicated.”  The classic theological explanation worked out by the Council of Nicea is based on Greek and Roman philosophical categories about persona and essence.  God is of one essence, but shows three personas, sort of like there is one me but I have three (or more!) faces or roles I show to the world: minister, husband, father of two.  So God is a unity in God’s self, but experienced by humans in three large ways, classically phrased as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit by the Nicene Creed, but also as Creator, Christ, and Spirit, or God of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and of the Church.  Sunday school teachers like to use a triangle as a simple illustration; there is one triangle but it has three sides. 

      A post-modern take on the Trinity picks up how God is a community in God’s self, the three different aspects completing the whole and communicating within the whole.  This emphasizes the relational nature of God and of the church being deeply based in relationships.  God yearns for communion, which is why humans yearn for community.  This theology is very satisfying to many fleeing the doctrinal description of the Trinity for something more heartfelt.  And in a good way, like any relationship, “it’s complicated.”

      Further complicating Trinity Sunday here at First Congregational is our own congregational history.  FCCI was founded in the 1830s by people who rather resisted affiliation with denominations that were strongly directive.  Then in the 1950s we moved up to Cayuga Heights from downtown in an era of genuinely Liberal theology crossed with high levels of intellectualism crossed with upper-middle-class social and community values.  Additionally, there were several leaders of the congregation at the time who were uncomfortable with traditional language about the divinity of Jesus, described in some of our history as “leaning toward Unitarian” beliefs.  More specifically, some people have (or had) trouble with the full divinity of Jesus, one corner of that Trinity thing.  It doesn’t remove you from being Christian, for one can follow the teachings and example of Jesus of Nazareth and yet not agree that Jesus is equally “God” and thus subscribe to the full theological construct in the textbooks.  Even on Trinity Sunday!

      The good news is that our UCC traditions— and FCCI’s own perspective— don’t insist on conformity to particular doctrines.  Being more relational and welcoming, we don’t force people to believe (or even give lip service to!) an official formulation of theological principles.  We are perfectly fine with, “I’m not sure I believe all that, but I feel safe and welcomed and loved by these people around me and by something bigger and more loving than all of us, God, I guess.”  Since the first week I was in Ithaca, members have told me how much they value that “nobody tells you what to believe.”  People can find their own way and participate on their own terms.  So often is about not how you “think” but how you feel in this church.  That works!

      After all, even back when people much more scholarly than me were hashing out how we could experience God’s love and life-giving grace in three distinct ways while also believing that God is One, the ancients always came back to calling it the “mystery of the Trinity,” for humans can never actually explain God’s very being.  In our best moments, we realize we’re trying to describe the unknowable.  But we are sure that the unknowable God knows us and loves us, and that’s what is most important.  “Holy, Holy, Holy, God in three persons, blessed Trinity.”

                                                                    In Christ,
                                                                         
                                                                    David
            
                             

Texts For Sunday Worship:

      From the Hebrew Bible            Isaiah 6:1-8
      From the Epistles                     Romans 8:12-17
      From the Gospels                    John 3:1-17

Pentecost

      The Christian Church celebrates this Sunday as Pentecost, which marks as the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples in the upper room in Jerusalem following Jesus’ departure into heaven on Ascension Day and fifty days after Easter (hence the “pente!”).

      Some denominations, such as the Assemblies of God and Pentecostals key into this moment of the Spirit moving through the disciples as central to our being and calling as the Church.  Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions celebrate it with solemn liturgy.  But until the 80s mainline Protestants were pretty blah about it, even though it is right on the hinge of history, the pivot point of God’s interaction with the world transitioning from Jesus to the Church, the corner of the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles written by Luke.  It is theologically and historically important.

      The Greek word “Pneuma” is used almost 400 times in the New Testament.  It is a kind of cosmic pun: pneuma means wind, breath, spirit.  It comes from the simple human observation that breath is the indicator of life, and when you die you stop breathing.  The non-visible force of you exhaling moves a leaf like the wind does, so that all seemed to prehistorical people to be the animating principle of life.  You can’t see wind, breath, or life-force, but you can tell they are there.

      On the desk in my office there is a trio of Lego figures from The Brick Testament lined up as The Trinity, the first of a white-robed Ancient of Days, the second a bearded young man, and the third a little Casper-like Holy Ghost.  English (long ago) used “ghost” as the thing that makes us alive, and “he gave up the ghost and died” is an old phrase.  So when identifying the swirling animating force inhabiting Jesus’s body and then the newborn Church, the phrase was “The Holy Ghost,” as we sing in the traditional doxology.  So the ancients used one word for the interrelated concepts.  Unless we are being technical, we still do, although sometimes preachers and theologians have tried to reimagine God’s Spirit as life force, life energy, the energy of being, or other more non-religiousy analogs for generations unaccustomed to the Biblical language. The animating force of human life is the “spirit;” likewise the animating force of the Church is the Holy Spirit.

      The Gospel of John goes deepest on the Holy Spirit, keying in on how what made Jesus the Word of God, his animating holy principle, was given to the church.  John is very clear: for the church to receive that holy life-giving principle, Jesus had to leave, and then send the Holy Spirit down to them for them to breath in and give them life and wisdom and power and Christ’s spirit living within them (us).  A modern metaphor would be giving someone artificial respiration, the helper breathing life-giving oxygen into the recipient.  Just like the delivery room cliché of doctor spanking a newborn who suddenly cries and starts breathing and “comes alive,” Jesus breathes the Spirit of Truth down from heaven in a spectacular jump-start for the newborn church.  This is why we often say that Pentecost is the birthday of the Christian Church.  (And despite the recent Pew religion research, we are still kicking!)

      So I invite one and all (and hope you invite one and all of your family and friends and neighbors and coworkers and….) to put on your brightest red clothes (the traditional church color of the holy holiday), gather in the big room, and breathe deeply of the Holy Spirit, Pentecost 2015, and get a big lungful of oxygen and a big soulfull of Holy Spirit!

                                                                                  In Christ,
                                                                                    
                                                                                  David


Texts For Sunday Worship:

      From the Acts of the Apostles                     Acts 2:1-21
      From the Gospels                                       John 15:26-27, 16:4-15
      The Gospel in Languages of the World      John 1:1-5