Scriptures: Genesis 1:1-2:4, John 16:12-15, & Romans 5:1-5
Given on Trinity Sunday, 2019
It was called the “chocolate milk lecture” and it was one of the first lectures in the first class that everyone at my seminary takes—a course spanning two semesters on Church History and Theology taught by every member of the theological faculty at one point or another during the year. In it, students were walked through all the doctrines of the faith and the history of the church. For many of us it was the first experience any of us had had reading a lot of the foundational theologians and they had wrestled with different aspects of Christianity. So it was that we began with the doctrine of God and learned how a number of historical and contemporary thinkers conceived of God as the creator of all time and space and ultimately humanity. We studied original sin and about humankind’s fall from glory, tumbling out of the Garden of Eden and the perfect relationship that we had shared with God. We had a section on the class with readings of the way different thinkers had conceived of God’s son, Jesus Christ, and about the redemption of the world that was accomplished by his life, his death, his new life, and his resurrection. And we learned about the Holy Spirit. About how this spirit of God moves chaotically throughout creation, inspiring and giving courage to those who seek to faithfully serve God. And then came the chocolate milk lecture. On that day, we all walked into the lecture hall and were greeted by a single table placed at the front of the room and on it sat a half-gallon jug of milk, a bottle of chocolate syrup, and an empty widemouthed glass bottle with a lid on the top of it. And at first not much was said of it. The topic of lecture for the day was introduced and we began to talk through many of the earliest writers and their beliefs on the Trinitarian nature of God often thought of as God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. And for many of us, this language transported us back in our minds to those times in Sunday School when we were maybe a little too curious for our own good and would query some poor Sunday School teacher to explain to us how God can be both “one” and “three.” Or maybe that was just me. Because, if we can all be honest for a minute, three as a value of quantity is never and can never be equal to one as a value of quantity. For instance, if I take the boys down to the farmer’s market on a Saturday morning and find on the back of some pickup truck a farmer selling some perfectly ripe Chilton County peaches, while I may be tempted to, it’s not like I could have snatched three baskets of them while paying for one and explained to her, it’s ok, I’m just trinitarian. So it is that at the heart of all Christianity is profoundly poor math skills that even a young child would find exceedingly problematic. And if you have ever read much of the earliest writings around this issue of God as three and God as one you know that that the history around the debate is actually riveting stuff, that the discussion was, at times, heated to the point of almost all-out war, and that on at least two occasions, that discussion tore the capital C church in two. And though I can’t imagine any of that was playing out in my mind as the professor lectured the class on God being of one substance but three persons there surely must have been some degree of confusion on the countenance of us first year grad students because at some point he came to a stop and said, “maybe we need a more visual explanation.” So he moved to the table and took the empty glass bottle and explained that this was God, as the creator of the universe. God as creator was in all and was all and the whole of time and space were contained in God. He then took the jug of milk and poured it in explaining that after creation had fallen away, God needed a way to be more real, more immediately present, more tangible in the world, to have the love of God touch the world in a more life and history altering way and so the milk represented Jesus, the Christ, born into this world, to be the love of God made manifest for all. He then set the bottle of milk down and began to squirt chocolate sauce into the bottle which, of course came to a rest at the bottom of the bottle. Christ, the milk, arising to the top, the Holy Spirit settling at the bottom, and the glass bottle containing it all. And he took a step back, as if to say, see, my dear students, the trinity is crystal clear. God the container, God the milk, God the chocolate. Of course this did not satisfy any of us who were now feverishly trying to sketch in our notes a bottle with a layer of milk and a layer of chocolate with me trying to remember if colored pencils were on the list of the required supplies for this class. And I don’t remember if someone pointed out that the parts were still completely separate from one another or if the continued confusion on our faces reminded him that there was still a final step but he walked back over to the bottle and said three persons, and then shook the bottle vigorously for like 10 seconds and then put the now brown liquid back on the table and said, homoousia, which is Latin for same substance. God is like chocolate milk, three separate pieces that come together to form a single substance. Any one of the three is completely self-contained. But when they are brought together, they are a single reality. A single God. “And besides, he said, “who doesn’t love chocolate milk?” I swear this is how this lecture went.
This is obviously a ridiculous way of explaining something that is difficult to fully comprehend. Each week in this place, we wrestle, in much the same way as seminarians around the country, with the nature of God, with the mystery of God, with understanding how it is that God is related to us and us to God. And historically this has been understood, at least in Christianity, through this trinitarian language that we encounter in the scriptures we have read this morning. We first encounter God as the creator of all. Who from the very beginning of the Judeo-Christian story spoke all that is into being. Who molded humankind from the element of the earth. Who made us in such a way that we all bear the divine image printed on our very being. Who entrusted the human race with the care and responsibility of the planet that we inhabit. Who was and is the foundation of all the cosmos. And who, when we as a faith, as a people, as a species, had so inexorably destroyed our relationship with God that we were left a people blindly bumbling through the darkness of a creation without its creator, God sent the person of Jesus Christ, to, as Paul says, justify us in faith, that we might have peace in God. And in this process of redemption back to God, this process of justification, this re-turning of our gaze away from the wall of the cave and back to the light of the new day, Jesus shows us in life and death and new life how to bit-by-bit, inch-by-inch, moment-by-moment, put the pieces of a shattered cosmos back together. But that task is daunting, that work seemingly Sisyphean as we time and time again push a boulder up a hill only to see it roll back down and come to rest at the exact spot where we had started. It is hard to see ourselves as the descendants, the inheritors of the mission started by Jesus the Christ in our world, and there are times when it is exceedingly lonely and frustrating and exhausting and yet, knowing this, Jesus tells us, as he told his disciples in the farewell address in the Gospel of John, that there is another divine force about to be birthed into the world, again. The same force that passed over the waters of chaos at the beginning of time. The same force that enlivened the prophets to speak to courageously speak truth to power again and again and again. The same force that, from the moment that sin, brokenness, fallenness entered our world began about the task of slowly, gently, carefully moving all the world, all of humankind back to God, that we all one day might be able to come home, might be able to find rest.
So it is that when we gather here each week we do so not alone, not just as a collective of the faithful here in this space, in this place, in this time, but as merely a part of the whole of the cosmos united in one God as creator, one Christ as redeemer, one spirit as sustainer. We are created. We are redeemed. We are sustained. We are the whole of God coming together in one place and at one time, a reality that is replicated in every moment of time, a reality that is replicated 7 billion times across the expanse of the planet, a reality that enlivens all the world, a reality that causes the whole of the cosmos to be teeming with divine presence and energy and love. And the greatest blessing of all of that is that we get to participate in that same process with one another. We get to depart from this place alive in the spirit and power of God to go out into the highways and byways of our community and find those who need for the gospel of Jesus Christ to come alive in their lives. We are called, each of us, to leave this place on a search for the lost and the lame, the troubled and the lonely, the one that feels like no one cares, and we are called to join in that long line of the faithful who have reached out into their surroundings no matter where they find themselves and attempt to bring all of God’s children home. And that is never an easy task. Whether that is here in a town and a region and a culture where it is easy to presume that everyone we encounter on our journey already has a church home, everyone has religion, everyone has faith, or whether it is in those places around the world where to practice Christianity is against the law and the penalty for doing so could well mean the death of the practitioner, we are still called to reach out into whatever place we find ourselves and make disciples of all the nations. But we only ever do so undergirded by the might of a God whose presence is felt in each of us as in three separate yet deeply interconnected ways. When we affirm God as creator and ruler of all we declare against the forces of this world that no matter what happens within the physical universe, there has never been a time, a moment, a second when we are not held in the hands of a loving God. Knowing that we can face any challenge that life throws at us, either as individuals or as a faith community, we can rest assured that no matter what, God, as the creator of the universe is intimately connected to everything that has been created. Though the storms should arise, though the tempests will blow, we can found ourselves in the eternal presence of God, from the beginning of time. And we can trust this, we can believe this, we can know this because we have each experienced the power of the risen Christ in our midst. We have each, everyone one of us, been redeemed by the sacrifice, the actions, the love of Jesus of Nazareth in his efforts to demonstrate the power of God to overcome all the obstacles that we face, even death. In the power of the risen Christ, we can gain peace—a peace that surpasses all understanding that come what may, when all we can see is carnage and struggle, pain and injury, the healing power of Christ is present in this life, and the next. Jesus as the Christ has redeemed us and walks with us every step of our lives. And when, as they inevitably do, questions, concerns, doubts about the future creep into our minds, even then, we can find peace and sustenance for the journey. Jesus has told us so. The Holy Spirit, the movement back and forth of love from God and to God, that love for which we are blessed to serve as a conduit, is already and always moving through this creation, chaotic and unpredictable, and calling all of God’s children to come home. We are forever held in the power of the trinity because it reminds us from whence we came, it reminds us that we are never alone, that Jesus walks with us always, and that all of time and space and history and our stories all lead back to the God of love and grace from whom all creation emerged and to whom all of creation will one day return. The trinity reminds us that we are, as we have ever been, awashed in grace, alive in the spirit, crafted in love, and forever and always children of God.
In that spirit and knowledge, we arrive to this place, this Sunday, this Trinity Sunday, this time in the story of our world in which there has never been a more important time for the Church to be the church, for the church to challenge the dueling force of apathy and nihilism, those little voices that speak in the darkness and tell us not to care about one another because there is no point to all of this anyways. We as the followers of Jesus know differently. We know that we are forever and always grounded in the faith that God the creator is the foundation of and inhabits all that is and all that will be. That we are redeemed and being redeemed every moment of everyday by the spirit of Christ who dwelt among us for a time but who continues to dwell in each of our souls for all eternity. That we are always and forever being challenged, pushed, enlivened, and sustained by the power of the holy spirit to bring order out of chaos, and words from the mouths of prophets, and a hope that can overcome all despair. Created. Redeemed. Sustained. Now and always. Glory be to God in the highest and on earth peace amongst all God’s peoples. Alleluia, amen.
Image: Adoration of the Trinity by Albrect Dürer, 1511