Holy Trinity Sunday (C) – Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15
God the Father is Creator. God the Son is Creator. God the Spirit is Creator.
We have this wonderful illustration of God’s creativity in our Old Testament reading today from Proverbs. Wisdom, here, one of God’s attributes, is presented as a separate, personal being; part of God, yes, and yet somehow separate from God, complete in and of itself. God is so vast that he contains multitudes. We get a bunch of these throughout the Old Testament: The Word of God, the Spirit of God, the Name of God, and now, the Wisdom of God. She is portrayed in the likeness of a young woman, yet somehow still older than creation itself. Her role is to be a master craftsman, intimately involved in the creation of the universe. It’s no wonder, perhaps; involved in a building project as vast as the universe, God might prefer not to do it alone. He needs someone to hold plumb line while he marks it out with his divine pencil.
The language here, though, shows that Wisdom is no subordinate, an apprentice journeyman, handing the nails one at a time to the carpenter, making sure the coffee pot is full, doing all the odd jobs no one else wants to take care of. No, she is the architect of all creation. Brilliant, thoughtful, it was her idea to place the angle between successive leaves on a stem at 137.5º so they could catch the most sunlight, and to arrange the spirals around the outside of a pinecone to follow the same sequence as the Fibonacci numbers, to place the very same structures that govern the gravitational pull between galaxies into the pull on the electrons in an atom. They delighted in each other, God and Wisdom, or in a way, God and God’s self. Can you imagine that: God being surprised and delighted at Her own creativity as the rafters of the universe were hung, and the earth was filled with imaginative forms of life?
In the Christian tradition, this Wisdom of God has been seen sometimes as Christ, at other times the Spirit. The exact identification is moot. What matters is that, just like a human artist who sits back and takes great pleasure in her finished artwork, God delights in his own self as he looks on to his creation. Though, to be fair, it’s not quite finished yet, not even after millions of years of existence. Just as at the beginning, when God’s Wisdom stood alongside as companion and co-creator, so too God has created us, and drawn us into a role as creative artists by his side. That’s always how I understand that promise right at the beginning of scripture, telling us that God made all humankind in his own image. If we are made like the creator of all things, we must be creators too. You and I, we live best into the fullness of who God made us to be when we reach into our own creativity. The lie we sometimes tell ourselves, that we are not creative people, could not be further from the truth. We may be out of the habit of being creative, but God has planted creative seeds in all of us, and calls us, urges us to use them by the work of the Spirit living within us. Some are creative in the classical way, rich in the arts of color or word or music or movement. Others have gifts with fabric or yarn, wood or metal. Still others are talented in engineering or construction, business ideas or computer networking. Still more create beauty through relationship-building, or care-giving, or love. And God delights in our creativity, and our artwork is a way we delight in Him. In this way, we are invited into the dance that is already taking place among the Trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit, and we get to participate in the joy of what is Godly. God is Creator. We are creator too.
God the Lover is Liberator. God the Beloved is Liberator. God the Kiss Between Lover and Loved is Liberator.
Paul’s words in all of his letters are often complex and confusing. In this one little snippet from Romans that we have today, there are hardly any words that are difficult; but the weaving of roles and divine work and the way we experience it can make his words a blur. Let’s start at the top: We are justified by faith. It is our faith in Jesus Christ, our trust in God’s promises, that helps us to understand, to know, that God is at work in us. The stories of God’s saving work that we tell are not just good stories; they apply to us! We are their recipients.
Paul continues to talk about grace, given to us through Jesus Christ. Grace is one of those words I heard, and even said, in the context of church, but nobody ever bothered to define for me until I got to seminary. Until then, it was just a good, Christian-y thing. But grace is the word we use to describe the way God’s good news comes to us, for us, in us, as a gift, for free, not because of anything we’ve done, but only because of who God is. The best of us Lutherans, who knows her doctrine well, who can swear up and down that God’s grace comes to us for free, usually still has a little voice in the back of her head that says, “Yes, but, you still have to…” I do, and I constantly work against it! Because you don’t have to. That’s what grace means.
And then Paul talks about hope. Hope is pretty straightforward. It’s that part of us that knows God has given us this grace before, and trusts that he will give it to us again. That God’s saving work in our lives isn’t over, but it continues. Even in the midst of our suffering, the worst moments in our lives, we have hope. No matter what we do, God will not let us go.
Faith, grace, hope, and ultimately love, are the processes whereby God continually makes us whole, freeing us from the power of the sins we’ve already accomplished and the sin that is yet to come, liberating us from our hurts and brokenness to live as fully as possible into the rich, joyful lives God wants for us. In Paul’s language, it is Jesus who brings us grace, and the Father’s glory that forms the foundation of our hope, and the Spirit who breathes love into us. The whole of God takes part in this liberating work.
And our role? If grace really means we don’t have to do anything to be freed in Jesus Christ, what is our role? It isn’t to free ourselves; God has already done that. Instead, we are sent to liberate others. God has entrusted us with this wonderful Good News, and has called us to proclaim it to the world. That’s why we as Lutheran Christians should be active in evangelism, by the way. Not to save people or protect them from the fires of Hell. God has already taken care of that. No, it’s to help people see that they’ve already been freed by God from the things they think are weighing them down. Our goal isn’t to convince people of some new belief they don’t currently have; just to help them look around them and see reality. In this way, we are invited into the dance that is already taking place among the Trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit, and we get to participate in the freedom of what is Godly. God is Liberator. We are liberator too.
God our Foundation is Holiness. God our Companion is Holiness. God our Inspiration is Holiness.
If you’re paying close attention, you might suspect that I plan to take a look at the Gospel reading from John now. The problem, though, is that where Paul’s writings are difficult, John can be practically incomprehensible. That’s nowhere more true than in the part of John we’ve been reading these last few weeks, what scholars call Jesus’ “Farewell Discourse.” Jesus gathers his disciples for the Last Supper, but instead of getting an account of the bread and the cup, like we do in the other three gospels, Jesus first washes his disciples feet, and then after dinner, he begins to talk to them. His language is thick, and heady, and poetic. And except for drawing some generalities, you can’t really understand a piece of it without reading the whole thing, chapters 13 through 17 all together as one large sermon. See, John, when he tells the Jesus story, isn’t so concerned with explaining what happened. Instead he wants to take us on a journey with Jesus. And so here, our goal shouldn’t be to understand what Jesus is saying about the Father and the Spirit and the relationship between the three. Instead, it should be to experience something about God in these words; to be drawn deep into the mystical union of the Father with the Son with the Spirit. If you’re trying to think rationally about Jesus’ words, you’ve got it wrong. Instead, close your eyes, and let Jesus’ words wash over you. “He will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears. All that he has is mine, and he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”
Jesus’ words in this part of John’s Gospel may be difficult and confusing, but one thing everyone who hears them agrees upon is that they are beautiful. The experience of these words is the beginning of the experience of the deep-down, inner relationship of God. It’s a relationship the Church Fathers in the first few centuries of Christianity coined a word to describe: “Perichoresis,” which literally means to move, or dance, around. This is what God is, a sort of dance, the three characters of the Trinity moving around within the Godhead in a beautiful whirling dervish of divinity. Jesus is using practically nonsensical language, the only language available to describe the God who transcends any human description, to give us a glimpse into the dancing love that exists within God, God who is so identified with love that he cannot exist but in a plurality so that there can be an object of his love.
Except Jesus doesn’t just give us a glimpse. Listen to some of these words: “I still have many things to say to you. When the Spirit comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will declare it to you.” Jesus is not just talking about God. He is talking about us. He is reaching out to us, who are not God, and inviting us mere mortals to take part in that dance. By becoming human, by living like us, by dying like us, Jesus who is holy invests us with a measure of holiness, and asks us to be his dance partner. We are invited into the dance that is already taking place among the Trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit, and we get to participate in the beauty of what is Godly. God is Holiness. We are holiness too.
We’re curious about who God is for himself. But God, as he reveals himself to us, is more interested in showing us who God is for us. When we see God as Trinity, we are seeing something about God’s attitude toward us. God invites us to be both recipients of and participants in his work of creativity, liberation, sanctification, redemption, sustenance, advocacy, caregiving, love, meant for human flesh and bone, for us and for the whole world. Come, join the dance of Trinity.