The Holy Trinity: June 6, 2004.

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

Psalm 8

Romans 5:1-5

John 16:12-15

Holy Trinity is the only festival in the Lutheran Calendar that celebrates a doctrine of the church. It is also the feast day for the many Lutheran churches around the country that are named Trinity.

First Reading

This first Sunday after the Pentecost gives us an opportunity to test our new communications capabilities. If it was difficult to put words to Resurrection and the experience of new life, it is also a challenge to find words to express these three ways God is God and God is One, and give voice to an experience of this life-giving relationship. You can't just do the math. And it can't just be an extended metaphor.

Once again, we can take courage and inspiration from the faithful example of those who have gone before us in this enterprise, in this case those who developed the early doctrine of the church as well as its poets. While some might consider exploring the history of our trinitarian creeds a dull and irrelevant exercise (or even wince at the church-dividing and institutionalizing politics involved), as the story of Spirit-led theologians struggling to order what they saw in the scriptural witness as God's intrinsic order in a dynamic relationship bearing witness to God's self, we might find kin as well as fresh insight here.

LBW Hymn #188 "I Bind Unto Myself Today" is a stunning poetic example of the meaning and power that claiming a Triune God can hold in the lives of the baptized. Check out the Hymnal Companion to the Lutheran Book of Worship (Stulken) for the story behind this hymn, a lorica (hard shell or breastplate, sometimes made of deerskin) attributed to St. Patrick. It will preach!

Our texts for the day give us a sampling of the scriptural bases for the doctrine of the Trinity. Though in their original contexts they do not speak to the concept of Trinity, in the frame of this celebration we are given avenues for expression of God's nature. Our reading from Proverbs introduces Wisdom as both part of the ordering of the created universe and its delight. Just as creation is both intrinsic to God and an expression, delight is intrinsic to the relationship within the Trinity as well as its effect.

Romans reminds us that the celebration of the Trinity is about more than a relationship that remains intimate and exclusive within God's self. We have been invited to share in this relationship! In the Second Person of the Trinity, and through his earthly life, death, resurrection, ascension, and promise to be with us in the Holy Spirit until he comes again, a new relationship is established between God and creation, especially the human creation. We are brought into the circle to share the glory of this relationship through the gift of grace, a peace with God accessed by faith in this gifting nature of God that we experience in Jesus the Christ. This gifting and invitation into glorious relationship is available even in, and especially throughout, the trials we face in our earthly experience, as St. Patrick expresses in his trinitarian binding hymn against deadly enemies.

John revisits Jesus' farewell discourse. The aim of these reflections on the Spirit, or Paraclete, is not explicitly to establish a treatise on the trinitarian economy as much as to explore the relationship between Jesus and the Spirit and its implications for gifting the community of faith's ongoing relationship to God and the truth that is to be revealed in the ongoing mystery of God's relationship to the world. The choice of the word paraclete seems also to lean toward the gift of a strong and multifaceted God available to us as individuals and communities in our times of trial.

Pastoral Reflection

As Trinity is our congregation's Name Day, I asked our study group about the origins of our name, and how "binding to ourselves the strong name of the Trinity" shaped their understandings of our community's relationship and mission. We recalled the earlier story of the deliberate decision to make a name change for our congregation that would reflect an outreach to the community. We wondered if it was connected to the relational nature of God, and the inclusion into that intimate circle of love that Jesus provides for humanity. A group member who sat on the congregation council at that time seemed to remember that one of the connections made was to a change from a single ethnic gathering principle (the Finnish people in our area) to a more geographical mission field of the "individual yet yoked" communities of Stambaugh, Caspian, and Iron River. One person recalled the pastor at that time wondering if they "couldn't come up with something more original!" The group said that they were "proud of our name, even if it is common. We have the very 'name of God' behind us, underneath us, and through us!" Another felt that the name of our congregation could be a teaching tool for newcomers as we reach out. "The Holy Spirit is often lost in the shuffle between God and Jesus. Rooting ourselves in the Trinity helps us teach about the power of the Spirit."

Finally, I wondered, with our new communications capabilities, what words or images or stories we would use to tell a friend who this mysterious One in Three, Three in One, is for us. I think we're all still chewing on it. One member contributed simply that "this God is with us always, in all these aspects." Other responses centered on prayer. "Sometimes, when we are praying, who do we pray to? When we ask for help, it is in Jesus' name ... but we address God. Where is the Holy Spirit in prayer? Well, that's a good question. Jesus was a person, but the Holy Spirit is everywhere, especially in our minds. The Holy Spirit is also magical, the part we can't explain. The Holy Spirit is the miracles that Jesus performed, so maybe that's where the Holy Spirit is in our prayers."