Sermon at St. Thomas

by Lynn Cunningham

Trinity Sunday, June 11, 2006

Exodus 3:1-6, Romans 8:12-17, John 3:1-16

1.         Today is the start of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, which meets to do the national work of our denominaton. Mary Ellen is one of the representatives of the Wyoming Diocese. The theme of this year’s convention is: Come and Grow, 2006. The theme is based on the church growing in Christ, both the church as a corporate body in Christ, and you and me and each member individually.

2.         Today is also Trinity Sunday, a celebration of the mystery of the holy trinity, which is an early church doctrine to express what the faith in Jesus Christ is about. The doctrine of the Trinity was an early effort to help Christians grow in Christ.

3.         At the same time, you and I live today in Dubois which has about eight different Christian churches with different ways of understanding who Christ is in our lives today. Each church has different theologies, different styles of worship, and different attitudes about what it means to be a Christian and to grow in Christ.

4.         And at the same time everyone shares in human suffering, witness the death this past week of Roger Lichtenwalner. Everyone shares in human ways of celebrating life, witness the traditional Swedish Smorgasbord feast last evening over at the Headwaters. Suffering and celebration are part of growing in Christ.

5.         Sometimes people here in Dubois can dialogue about their faith, sometimes not.

6.         Most of us can see how our lives weave together different ways of being human, different views and beliefs about God and about the role of God in our lives. The early church starting right after Jesus’ death and resurrection started struggling to understand what had happened.

7.         You and I and our fellow Christians, continue that struggle today. That struggle is not something that God disapproves of. In fact, Jesus says to his followers that they will do greater things than he did, because Jesus understood that his followers would build on his understanding of the good news that he brought into the world.

8.         The New Testament writings are filled with different writers struggling to find the best way to express the miracle of Christ. If you read through the letters of Paul, for example, you will see that his own understanding and insight about Christ changes. He too grew in Christ with time.

9.         I come back often in my own thinking to Paul’s statement in his letter to the Ephesians, where he tries to express the inexpressible, the depths of the mystery of Christ in the world. Paul writes that he desires, “That Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love may have power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” Eph 3:16-19. How often as Christians do you and I settle for less than the fullness of God? Do we sometimes stop growing in Christ?

10.       In his letter to the Romans that we heard today, Paul tries again to express how we are able to know God, only through the working of the Holy Spirit. Here is how he puts it: “When we cry, Abba, Father, it is that very [Holy] Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ — if in fact we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.” Romans 8:17. Paul is saying that somehow through the work of the Holy Spirit, we who do not know Jesus in the flesh, are still heirs with him of God, if we join in our suffering with Christ. Paul’s is a radical statement: that ordinary human beings like you and me can actually join in the glorious work that Jesus did in the world, by seeing our suffering as joined with the suffering of Jesus, and thereby, mysteriously we become children of God.

11.       2000 years after Jesus lived, Christians are still striving to plumb the depths of this mystery of how God came into and acted in the world that we live in. Trinity Sunday, which is today, asks the church to pause on the Sunday following last week’s celebration of the gift of the Holy Spirit and the founding of the church, Pentecost. Trinity Sunday invites the church to pause after the great fifty days of Easter, and after the experiences of Lent, and the Christmas celebration. Trinity Sunday, asks the church to pause, before the long summer season of Pentecost, not because any event in the of Jesus or in the life of the church happened on this day. But Trinity Sunday asks us to pause for time to contemplate the depths of this mystery of the all the ways that God has been, and is, present to us.

12.       As we make this pause, perhaps you, like Christians everywhere find yourselves asking what is this larger church that we are part of? Seeing all the various national church and religious and cultural strands swirling around us in our society, leaves many Christians asking, where do I fit into all this? It is amazing to behold a country so filled with religious people of many creeds and faiths and religious practices, and at the same time look back at the centuries of time over which Christians have contemplated the great mystery of God using many different approaches. Where do I fit in to all this?

13.       One ancient guidance on this issue is found in the Athanasian Creed, which is in your prayer books at page 864.

14.       I am asking us today to recite the Athanasian Creed in place of the our more usual Nicene Creed, so that you can experience the whole of this creed for yourselves at this time of pausing to contemplate the mystery of the Trinity.

15.       The Athanasian Creed was an attempt made in about 380 AD to express a framework for what this mystery of God at work in our world was all about.

16.       Before the Athanasian Creed was put together, there had been three hundred years of people just like you and me sitting together to study the Bible and to worship. There had been groups just like us holding discussions all over the Roman empire about how to express the fact that God has shown God’s self in creating the world in the very beginning. And then how God had revealed himself in the actions of the specific human being, Jesus Christ. Then, how God continued to reveal himself in the lived, concrete experiences of Christians everywhere even in the days and years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. Was there one God doing all these things, or were three Gods? and how did they go together?

17.       There were fierce debates among Christians within a Roman world, where the Emperor himself was worshiped as a god, literally. This was a world where most Romans worshiped many kinds of gods, a whole pantheon of gods. For many people of that time, hearing Christians talk about God the Father, and God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, seemed just fine, since most people saw various gods doing various kinds of action in the world all around them all the time. Three gods at work at one time, many people said, no problem.

18.       The Athanasian creed was an effort by church leaders to express in a few short phrases both the unity of God, and God’s closeness to Christian believers in many different ways, and at the same time avoid the notion that Christianity worshiped several different gods, just like many other religions at the time which worshiped different gods.

19.       Christians today, who worship in many different denominations can learn something from what Christians were going through in that time. Those times like what we are going through today.

20.       Episcopalians today, and members of St. Thomas, since we do not all think or believe alike, can learn something from what Christians went through in Roman times in debating the nature of God.

21.       To me, the key lesson is that different people’s experiences and life histories may lead to very different understandings of some limited aspect of God. Some may think of God as fiercely judgmental of sins. Others think of God as profoundly forgiving. Others revel in the beauty of creation. Still others focus primarily on God’s demand for justice and equality for all human beings. These are all aspects of God, yet individuals tend to get focused on one particular aspect.

22.       So, it is very useful to go back from time to time and look again at what the early Christians distilled from their wide variety of experiences and understandings as to what were the core truths about Christianity.

23.       Let’s pause for a moment and read the creed together. I ask you to get out your prayer books and turn to page 864, and join with me in saying, slowly and prayerfully, this Athanasian Creed.

24.       [Read the AC together.]

25.       The language and the imagery in this creed are strange to us, because they are from a different culture and a long time ago. Yet something rings true about this creed to me today.

26.       Let me summarize it.

27.       The three persons described in the creed are deeply in communion with each other. God’s most fundamental nature is to be in communion and relationship. God is three persons who are different from each other, do different things, but also deeply one with each other, in relationship that is both made known to human beings, but is also incomprehensible to us.

28.       The more deeply you and I can live in communion with one another and with the world around us, the more we are living the way God lives, according to this creed.

29.       The creed helps a person steer away from driving himself crazy trying to figure out God based on just one part of God. The creed helps steer a person towards living in a developing and deeping relationship with God, and seeing where such an effort leads that person. The creed steers a person away from trying to predict and control God’s actions.

30.       The creed can be a guide for growing in Christ, a path of life going into the full richness of God, as Paul puts it. The creed tries to steer a person away from limiting his or her understanding to just one aspect of God.

31.       All the seeming contradictions in the creed, boggle the mind, but having our thinking challenged, also challenges the human tendency to think that just one part of God is all there is to know.

32.       I think that everyone in this congregation knows in your heart that wherever you go, God is there with you, guiding you on to the next steps in your life, deeper into Christ, deeper into the mystery of God’s love for you and for the world. The Athanasian Creed provides one roadmap from an earlier generation of Christians. I urge you to turn to that roadmap from time to time to compare where you are with where they went before.

33.       In Jesus name, Amen.