First Reading: Genesis 1:1-2:4a
1In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. 3And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. 5God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. 6And God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” 7And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. 8And God called the expanse Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day. 9And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. 10God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. 11And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” And it was so. 12The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 13And there was evening and there was morning, the third day. 14And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, 15and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. 16And God made the two great lights — the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night — and the stars. 17And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, 18to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. 20And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.” 21So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” 23And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day. 24And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds — livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so. 25And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 26Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 27So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 28And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” 29And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. 30And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. 31And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
2 1Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. 3So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation. 4aThese are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created …
Psalm 8
1O Lord our Lord, how exalted is your Name in all the world! 2Out of the mouths of infants and children your majesty is praised above the heavens. 3You have set up a stronghold against your adversaries, to quell the enemy and the avenger. 4When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars you have set in their courses, 5What is man that you should be mindful of him? the son of man that you should seek him out? 6You have made him but little lower than the angels; you adorn him with glory and honor; 7You give him mastery over the works of your hands; you put all things under his feet: 8All sheep and oxen, even the wild beasts of the field, 9The birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and whatsoever walks in the paths of the sea. 10O Lord our Lord, how exalted is your name in all the world!
Second Reading: Acts 2:14a, 22-36
14aPeter, standing with the eleven, lifted up his voice and addressed them:
22“Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know — 23this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. 24God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it. 25For David says concerning him, ‘I saw the Lord always before me, for he is at my right hand that I may not be shaken; 26therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue rejoiced; my flesh also will dwell in hope. 27For you will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let your Holy One see corruption. 28You have made known to me the paths of life; you will make me full of gladness with your presence.’ 29Brothers, I may say to you with confidence about the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. 30Being therefore a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants on his throne, 31he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption. 32This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses. 33Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing. 34For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, 35until I make your enemies your footstool.”’ 36Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.”
Gospel: Matthew 28:16-20
16The eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. 17And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted. 18And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
The Holy Trinity
From the very beginning, one of the continuing struggles of the Christian church is our understanding and teachings about God. By the end of the 4th century, there was no less than 35 heretical teachings about God that were denounced by Christian leadership. Gnosticism, one of the earliest heresies, was one that St. John was writing against in the late first century. Gnosticism, in the simplest of terms, teaches that the spirit is good and the flesh is bad and once a person is free from the sinful flesh, the spirit would then be able to be with God. Because of this errant belief, the Gnostics teach that Jesus was never really fully human, He simply inhabited a host and on the cross He left the host body, thus He was never corrupted by the sinful flesh and is simply divine. This of course contradicts our understanding of atonement teaching, that Jesus paid for our sins by dying on the cross. Thus, the church has struggled to maintain a consistent teaching about the Holy Trinity.
During the 4th century AD, Constantine was in power and as a Christian, he began to call councils together to finally root out and condemn these various heresies and officially denounce them. This was also the century when the New Testament list of canonical books was set. Until the end of the 4th century many of the church bodies were still using letters from unverified sources. Works like the Gospel of Thomas, the book of Enoch, and Maccabees 3 and 4. Some of you may recognize these works since they’re included in the Apocrypha found in many Roman Catholic Bibles.
I bring all this up to help you better appreciate not only the struggles that the early church experienced, but to also better appreciate the work of the 4th and 5th century councils that gave us the Athanasian and Nicene Creeds. This is why these creeds are still important to us today. Today is Holy Trinity Sunday, the Sunday the church in the 10th century set aside for us to explore and celebrate the Triune God that we serve, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
For me, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is probably the most difficult doctrine to teach. So let me begin by saying that the doctrine of the Trinity does not attempt to explain God. It only explains, in a very elemental way, what God has revealed to us about Himself thus far. Think of it this way; to describe the tip of the iceberg above the water doesn’t mean we can describe the entire iceberg. Thus we, in our limited understanding, affirm the Trinity, not as an explanation of God, nor as an attempt to show our mastery of God’s mysteries, but simply as a way of describing Him as He has revealed Himself to us in Jesus and in the written word.
Over the centuries we have been given many tools to help us understand this mystery, and it truly is a mystery we will not fully understand until the eschaton, but it’s a doctrine that we still must grapple with until that time. With all that said, how do we understand the God we serve? How do we make sense of the mystery that is the Holy Trinity? As I mentioned a moment ago, we have the work of the 4th and 5th century councils who spent decades struggling with each word contained in the Creeds that we use today. But we also have God’s word and the clues that we find in its pages.
In our Old Testament reading for today we have the best place to begin, Genesis 1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters” (vs. 1). Now if we were to stop here, many would say, but I read about God the Father and God the Spirit, but the writer of Genesis never mentions God the Son. And if we were to stop here, we would be left confused. But you and I know that this isn’t the whole of the story.
Remember I mentioned that St. John was battling heresies in the first century as well. This means we know where to go to get the answer to this seeming incomplete passage. In the prologue to St. John’s gospel we read, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (vss. 1-5). We then need to drop down to verse 14, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only begotten Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
To completely understand what John is saying here we need to look at it in the original language. Here in verse 14, we need to take special note of the Greek term monogenēs, translated as “only begotten,” which emphasizes that Jesus is uniquely of the Father’s essence, not a created being. It’s from these passages that we can understand why the writers of the Creeds wrote the first and second articles in the manner they did. In the Nicene Creed we confess, “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father; through him all things were made.” It’s also important to note that the ancient Hebrew people didn’t understand, nor did they apparently struggle with, the doctrine of the Trinity.
Even today in Judaism they still quote the Shema or “hear”, which is the Hebrew word that begins the most important prayer in Judaism. It’s found in Deuteronomy 6:4, which begins with the command to “Hear.” The whole Shema prayer, which includes verses 4-9, is spoken daily in the Jewish tradition: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”
Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. These are important words for us to struggle with as we explore the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. So, as we read the book of Genesis and the gospel of John, we must also acknowledge the one God who reveals Himself to us in three persons. We must also concede that the understanding of the Trinity is not emphatically stated as a doctrine in the scriptures. Yet, by implication, it’s stated many times.
The early Christians soon discovered that they simply could not speak of God without speaking of the three ways in which He had revealed Himself to them. Now let me be absolutely clear: this doesn’t mean that there are three Gods. Remember the words of the Shema, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.” We worship one God who has revealed Himself in three ways: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Again, looking at the words given to us in the Bible and in the Creeds, let’s acknowledge what God has revealed to us.
First, we confess that “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.” The issue isn’t whether we believe that there is a God, surveys indicate that ninety-six percent of all Americans believe in the existence of a God in some form or another. The real question is what kind of a God? And this speculation, independent of God’s word and the church writings, has been the basis for many heresies.
As I mentioned earlier, heresies have existed from the beginning of the Christian church. In more recent times people like Thomas Jefferson believed that God was like a big cosmic watchmaker. That God created the universe and wound it up and then let it go. According to Mr. Jefferson, the world is now in the process of simply letting itself run down. God has completely detached Himself from His creation. Others, like the philosopher Nitche, say that there indeed once was a God, but that He is now dead. They say that the God of the universe so completely poured Himself into the person of Jesus Christ that when Jesus died on the cross God himself died. These views are, of course, foreign to sound Christian teaching. Each time we recite the Creeds, we affirm that the same God who molded the universe, also cares about what happens in our life. We boldly proclaim that He is indeed actively and mysteriously involved in helping to shape the events of our life.
Additionally, the fact that we refer to the first person of the Trinity as Father says something about what God is like. In fact, Jesus went so far as to refer to God not only as Father but as Abba, which is the Hebrew word meaning Daddy. You and I have been given permission to call, and call upon, the creator of all things, seen and unseen, as Daddy. As children, many of us probably used that word. Then, by the time we went to high school and college and became more sophisticated, we dropped that word and started using the word father. But you and I have been given the opportunity to call God the Father, Daddy. I wonder, if we could only think of God as that loving daddy who waits patiently for us while we foolishly wonder off to the far countries in our life and do our own thing, then, when we have come to ourselves, we can remember that He is there to meet us at the door and joyfully take us back in. This can, of course, be taken too far and we can become so complacent that we forget that we’re to both fear and love God.
Yes, we need to acknowledge that God is like a loving Father, but we also need to acknowledge that He is omnipotent, the holy other, the righteous, and the all-powerful, judge. These are all traits of the Triune God, and we must indeed learn to think of Him in these terms. But if our Christian understanding of the nature of God is to be correct, then we must also learn to think of God as our kind, sympathetic, understanding, gentle, compassionate, and a loving Father. This is why St. Paul reminded us, “For you did not receive a spirit of slavery that returns you to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Romans 8:15).
Certainly, there are harsher images of God in the Old and New Testaments, even in the Gospels themselves. But the love of God is the major emphasis, which runs throughout the Bible. St. John said it plainly in his 1st Epistle, “And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them” (4:16). “God is love” is a central truth in the Bible, emphasizing His sacrificial, unconditional, and everlasting love for humanity.
It’s a perfect love that has been bestowed on us in spite of what we’ve done; a love given that cannot be earned; a love that came despite our resistance; a love that healed when sickness pervaded our soul; a love that, to this day, reconciles, forgives, and restores. The prophet Jeremiah recorded the true message of the extent of God’s love when he heard God say, “I have loved you with an everlasting love.”
One final thought; it’s incorrect to think that when Jesus came to earth God somehow changed. The fact is, God is unchanging. God told Malachi plainly, “For I am the Lord, I change not” (3:6). God’s divine purpose has always been one of redemption and love. There was nothing wrong with the law that God gave to Moses and the Jews. What was wrong is our turning it into an end in itself. The very reason of creation itself is that God is a God of overflowing love. The result of that love was life itself.
Second, in the Creeds we affirm a belief in God the Son, Jesus Christ. We say that God took on human form, He came and lived among us, suffered the same trials that we suffered, experienced the same feelings that we experienced. Jesus is fully human and fully divine. Jesus is not God the Father or God the Holy Spirit. Jesus is God, incarnate. There is a difference. Jesus never drew attention to Himself but always pointed to God.
Soren Kiekegard, the Danish theologian of another century tells a story of a prince who wanted to find a maiden suitable to be his queen. One day while running an errand for his father in the local village, he passed through a poor section. As he glanced out the windows of the carriage his eyes fell upon a beautiful peasant maiden. During the ensuing days he often passed by the young lady and soon fell in love. But he had a problem. How would he seek her hand?
He could order her to marry him. But even a prince wants his bride to marry him freely and voluntarily and not through coercion. He could put on his most splendid uniform and drive up to her front door in a carriage drawn by six horses. But if he did this, he would never be certain that the maiden loved him or was simply overwhelmed with all the splendor. The prince came up with another solution. He would give up his robes, move into the village, entering not with a crown but in the garb of a peasant. He lived among the people, shared their interests and concerns, and talked their language. In time the maiden grew to love him for who he was and loved him because he had first loved her. This simple story illustrates what we Christians mean by the incarnation.
God the Son set aside His divinity and came to live, among us. And this assures us for two reasons: One, it shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that God is with us, that He is on our side, and that He loves us. Second, it gives us a firsthand view of what the mind of God is all about. When people ask what God is like, we as Christians can point to the person of Jesus Christ. God Himself is incomprehensible. But in Jesus, this unknowable God makes Himself known. We get a glimpse of His glory. In the person of Jesus, we’re told that the mysterious Other, who created all that is seen and unseen, is willing to go all the way, even to a cross, so that a single person may be redeemed. That’s what God is like. That’s the God we say we believe in when we say we believe in Jesus Christ.
Finally, in the Creeds we affirm a belief in the Holy Spirit. And who is the Holy Spirit? In the Korean Creed they proclaim, “We believe in the Holy Spirit, God present with us for guidance, for comfort, and for strength,” The Modern Affirmation words it this way, “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the divine presence in our lives, whereby we are kept in perpetual remembrance of the truth of Christ and find strength and help in time of need.” Jesus promised it this way, “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever” (John 14:16). Jesus asked the Father to send us the Holy Spirit to “live with [us] and will be in [us]” (vs. 17). The Holy Spirit is the presence of the Living God. That’s what the Holy Spirit brings to our lives. God is with us and in us.
Someone once asked Mrs. Albert Einstein if she understood her husband’s theory of relativity. “No,” she said, “but I know my husband.” We cannot begin to fathom the incomprehensible mystery that is God, but that doesn’t mean that we cannot know God. When God chose to make Himself known to us, He did so in the person of Jesus Christ who said “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). And because Jesus prayed for the Father to send us a Comforter, God sent us His Holy Spirit so that He can be with us and in us. Yes, our Triune God is a mystery that we will not be able to fully comprehend until Jesus returns. Until then, Jesus has shown us the Father and has sent the Spirit to be with us and in us. Blessed be the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen