Nicene Creed; Proverbs 8:22-9:6; Philippians 2:5-11

The doctrine of the Trinity is one of the central beliefs of the Christian Church that we all claim to believe, but which none of us fully understand. The Nicene Creed, which we have just recited, was assembled seventeen hundred years ago, in the Christian Year 325, at a specially summonsed “Ecumenical Council” in the city of Nicaea in the Eastern Roman Empire specifically to gather Christianity’s different beliefs about Jesus into one clear statement upon which all bishops could agree and teach. Sadly, arguments around the creed promptly split the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church into those who agreed with it and those who didn’t, and follow-up Ecumenical Councils didn’t repair the breach, but were called to address further arguments that arose in the following centuries. Right up to today there are Christians who refuse to recite the Nicene Creed because of its understanding of an equal Father and an equal Son and an equal Spirit, and even we in the Uniting Church say it differently to the Anglicans. It is for this reason that the Churches of Christ say, “no creed but Christ,” and prefer to not recite the Nicene Creed in public worship because it can appear to exclude people whom Christ himself would welcome.

So why bother?  How important is it really to believe that Jesus is equal with the Father when Philippians 2:5-11 indicates that he wasn’t? How much does it matter whether the Spirit is equal to both Father and Son, or equal only to the Son with both lower than the Father, or inferior to both Father and Son as the Anglican (and Roman Catholic) wording of the Creed might suggest? Let’s go further and ask what the point is in having a Trinity anyway. If it does actually matter, why does is actually matter?

Well I’m really glad you asked because the short answer is that the Trinity tells us who Jesus really is. The doctrine of the Trinity is the story of God’s self-revelation through the life of Jesus Christ.

One of the twentieth century’s most influential Christian theologians was a Swiss man named Karl Barth and he said that if we understand God as a unity of three equal parts then we have the necessary groundwork for understanding how Jesus is the Word of God made flesh. God the Father reveals God the Son who is himself the revelation of God and the Word of God. This is what is going on at Jesus’ baptism when the voice from Heaven says “hey, listen to him!” God the Holy “Spirit of Revealedness” is the one who moves upon those who receive the message of God’s self-declaration: we see this at Jesus’ baptism when The Dove-like One descends upon Jesus to empower him in his mission. Our understanding of the way in which Jesus lived as a man among other women and men is significant; it matters what we think Jesus was like. It also matters if we are going to follow the Way of Jesus in discipleship that we consider how he, the one and only holy God, became human in recordable time and space. God told God’s own story in the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. So we see why Karl Barth understood the Trinity to be the foundation of all Christian knowledge about God: the God revealed to Christians is defined by what we read in the Bible, and in other evidence consistent with the Bible’s message. God cannot be known beyond what God has revealed, and the mission of Christians everywhere is to tell the story of the incarnate Word of God, since without an ongoing and active revelation of God we have nothing to say to the world.

Another twentieth century Karl, Karl Rahner, observed that in the incarnation, when God The Son was born as The Son of Man, God The Father is seen to be someone else, but not something else, from God The Son. In other words God The Father and God The Son are made of the same stuff but they are distinct people; one of whom remained in Heaven and the other who came to Earth. We also find that mentioned in the Nicene Creed and the Greek word homoousion which is translated for us as “of one being”, or better said “of one essence”; two individuals who are made of the same elements/material which have the same elemental/material properties. When God the Son came to earth in the shape of a man named Jesus he did so as a human rather than as some sort of demigod: the one made of Creator-Stuff took on shape and set of properties of Created-stuff and fitted into a new existence because Jesus had to become exactly like a creature for God’s self-communication with Creation to be purposeful. That’s a big idea, let me unpack it a bit: if Jesus is God in the way that God is God then God is able to be known by ordinary women and men, and if Jesus is a man in the way that I am a man then God knows how it feels to live on earth as a man. No other religion has this sort of god, this is the one thing above all else that makes Christianity distinct, and why not all religions are the same. A God in human skin is a God who suffers, loves and has to make compromises. Christianity’s God is a God who understands.

Eastern Orthodox Churches understand that God the Father is the source of unity within the Trinity, but that God is better thought of as personalised interrelationships of unceasing, dynamically mobile, mutual love than a simple hierarchy. The Father has the responsible job of being “the source”, but he is not “the boss” because within God there is no boss. (Outside God, God is boss of everything else). God the Trinity is the original Christian community, and the primary example of how to truly share all things in common: God the Trinity is a society of relationships. If we can grasp that the passion of Christ (his life, death, and resurrection) is a revelation of the eternal passion of God then we will see that self-sacrificing love is God’s eternal nature. The cross is a comprehensive demonstration of the nature of God in a world of suffering, evil, pain and death. God is love, and love makes a person capable of suffering. If you don’t love then you don’t care, and if you don’t care then you don’t suffer. If God the Son did not suffer he could not have been human; but Jesus did suffer, horribly, and that is our evidence that he really did live in flesh. Our loving Father felt the deepest heartbrokenness at the suffering of the Son of Man: the Father could never have apathetically “allowed Jesus to suffer”. God in Christ suffers on behalf of humankind and the cross can never be told as a story of “divine child abuse” as some modern apologists for Atheism would have us believe. The doctrine of the Trinity is foundational to Christianity because it challenges and disproves the accusation that God is an ambivalent spectator to human pain. A suffering God is capable of feeling and expressing deep love, and of displaying patience, understanding and compassion. One more modern theologian, (but not a Karl), Jürgen Moltmann wrote that divine unity was threatened when Jesus felt abandonment on the cross, and this unity was only restored at the resurrection. So God the Trinity has experienced risk, loss, pain, and the joy of restoration. Moltmann calls the Trinity a doctrine of liberation because it shows how each member of the group is important. In the sermon you heard two weeks ago from Janet you heard how the Oneness of God is revealed in the oneness of The Church: as it is in The Trinty so as it is in The Church, each member of the group is important.

Eastern Orthodox Churches teach a lot more about the Trinity than the Roman Catholic and Western Protestants do; their understanding is that there is a difference in what each member of the Trinity does, but all are of equal value because no one member acts separately from the other two. The radical equality of the Trinity is a model for true human community and human social relationships and another twentieth-century theologian, (the last one for today), Leonardo Boff, used the Trinity to criticise the Communism and Capitalism of his day. Boff was inspired by this new picture of God as the true model of relationship, or perhaps the model of true relationship, to search for new and better ways for women and men to communicate and belong within society. The Uniting Church thinks this way about how we do community, that no one is a more important being because of their job. I am no more important than you just because I am the pastor, and Rev Susan is not more important than me just because she was ordained. My job is different to yours, my intrinsic value is not. Likewise God The Father is not superior to God The Holy Spirit, they just do different things.

In the fourteenth century the English mystic Mother Julian of Norwich wrote that in Christ God exhibits motherliness in grace. Julian’s view of Jesus with female characteristics connects with the traditional Jewish image of Wisdom which is personified as the woman chokhma as she is in Hebrew. Everyone say chokhma; really get that “ch” going.  If the person in front of you isn’t wiping booger off their neck then you haven’t said it right…chokhma! In Greek, Wisdom was called Sophia like in philosophy (phileo sophia love of wisdom), and in Latin she is Sapientia like in our biological species Homo sapiens (man with wisdom). In all three languages, Wisdom is a “she”, and in Proverbs 8:22-9:6 Lady Wisdom describes how she worked beside God at the beginning and how she has now come to dwell among God’s people to teach them the ways of justice.  She does so with a love that fully engages with human life and suffering, participates in celebrations, and includes the marginalised at her table even as she is herself marginalised by the authority figures of her day. In Sophia, the Church is presented with the idea of God as friend and God as hostess, images of the Trinity which sit well within ideas of what it means to serve. The three members of the Trinity love and serve each other; submitted but not submissive as all are equal and they work together. None is a doormat, none is a king, all are LORD and all are love. In embracing this understanding of Wisdom within our understanding of God the Trinity we begin to understand the arguments for male-female equality both inside and outside the Church, and why as The Uniting Church your sexuality or biology need never be a barrier to your service.

The form in which God revealed Godself to be is an encouragement for all who are marginalised and alone.  God understands what it is like to be human, to be born in poverty, to die shamefully while mocked, naked and alone. The God of Trinity is both the message and the inspiration to all Christians, that God is sending us to the margins in the very same way that God in all Heaven’s fullness first came to us.

Amen.