Genesis 1:1-2:4a; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13;

We believe.  According to Hebrews 11:1 our faith is the assurance of things hoped for [and] the conviction of things not seen: faith is the confidence we have to trust God for what we do not (yet) understand completely.  According to Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:12 what we now know only in part [when Christ returns we] will know fully.  According to Jesus in John 16:8-9 the great work of the arriving Holy Spirit will be to prove the world wrong about sin…because they do not believe [in Jesus].

But we believe.

We believe in one God who is all of many things.  The Nicene Creed teaches that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Almighty, Creator, Eternal, and True (God/Light).  God is “of one being”.  God is the giver of life.  God is Lord, and The Christ is God.

So we believe and we trust, but do we understand? Are the ancient creeds of the Church just something we hold to as gospel and life for us, or are they words we mumble along to on sacramental occasions but otherwise forget about? The Churches of Christ, where some of us in this room once ministered, specifically hold that there is “no creed but Christ”. Perhaps the Pomonal Community Church should forget about the creeds, even as the denominational traditions behind Pomonal Uniting Church want us to recite this creed each time we approach the table.

I am not going to fully explain the concept of the Trinity to you this morning: two thousand years of Christian history and at least eighteen hundred years of Christian Doctrine have yet to make it clear, so I have no chance. You may relax, but you may not tune out. No, what I want us to think about today is what the Trinity means for us: what does having a three-person God look like and feel like?

The Trinitarian nature of our God is one of three key aspects that sets Christianity apart from all other religions. (The other two if you are interested, and you should be, are that our major prophet (Jesus) is still alive, and that we are saved only by the grace of our God and not by any one or whole of our own works of merit.)  Some religions have one God and some religions have many gods, but only Christianity has one God who is three distinct persons.

Here are five themes:

Trinity means God can be revealed. The pastor at one of the churches I attended in England used to say that Jesus didn’t teach very much, but he revealed a great deal about God and in John 10:30 Jesus said I and the Father are one. Now, this does not mean that The Father and Jesus and some as-yet-unnamed third party make up a trinity, but it means that God is like what we have seen Jesus to be like. Trinity means that God has identity in that God, the Ultimate One who is all that stuff and more from what we said in the creed, that One like this men Jesus. There is no hidden scariness in the shadow of the meek and mild one. We cannot know all there is to know about God, but we do know what God is like. It’s like standing on the East Coast of Australia and imagining the Pacific Ocean. Can we know everything about the ocean if we never travel beyond the shallows? No, but we can know some things by examining the water in front of us. We can know that whatever else the water is like between here and South America we know it is wet and we know it is salty.

Trinity means God can communicate. One of the earliest ideas about the Trinity was developed by a man named John of Damascus, who described God as a “perichoresis” which suggests a type of dance. You can see the roots for our words “perimeter” and “choreography” there. This dance is one of those folk dances in-the-round where the dancers weave in and out of each other, linking arms as they swing around the circle, forming and breaking bonds between individuals and yet always together in a way. When God revealed Godself to the earth through the prophets, through creation, and ultimately through Jesus the fellowship of the three extended to sweep humanity up into the dance. The Trinity is the basis of all true partnership, fellowship, and community in the world.

Trinity means diversity, colour, and flavour in the life of the universe. There is no monotony in a reality where One designs, One creates and One enlivens. In the first story of Creation, in Genesis 1:26-27, God creates by Word and Spirit and creates humankind in God’s own image. The words spoken by God say let us make him in our image, so God is the originator of all the diversity we see in the human race. Not only is God is revealed in male and female but and also in human temperament, appearance, and abilities. Then when you look at the diversity in other created things you can see that God has imagination based on shared pleasure.

Trinity means God is sufficient. God is complete. God is enough, and all that God requires is found in God. God’s relationships are not dependent upon others because God’s nature is union. When we were baptised into the Name of The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit we were brought into relationship with God in all of this sufficiency. Because God is enough without us, we are enough with God.

Trinity means God has what it takes: Trinity is a story of salvation. If you go through the Bible and find all of the “God is” passages you will find that God is Source; God is Wisdom; God is The Word; God is Unity; God is Love; God is with us; God is good; God is famous; God is kind; God is always merciful; God is generous; God is fair; God is on our side; God is coming; God is the one we should fear; God is truthful; God is always at work for the people who love God; God is begging you to listen to the message of the evangelists; God is concerned about you; God is our Father; God is real; God is light; God is the one you should worship. We can live a life of worship because of the grace of The Son, the love of The Father and the work of drawing all things together by The Spirit.

So, Trinity is a good concept to have of God and it fits well with all that we know about God in other areas of our belief system. And yet the earliest Christians did not speak of God as a Trinity and you will not find the word “Trinity”, or any Greek or Hebrew equivalent, in the Bible. The Jews who worship our God do not accept that God is a Trinity, and the Muslims who also worship our God believe that Christians are “polytheists” or “worshippers of many gods” where they and the Jews worship the One True God.

The Christian leader Tertullian put together the first written concept of God as “one-in-sufficiency-but-three-in-community” in the third century, about 150 years after Paul died. But Tertullian was only writing down what the Christian Church had already come to accept about God. What is important to know is that the first Christians didn’t come up with the idea of Trinity through study and discussion, but through their own personal experiences. God revealed Godself to them in three distinct yet completely integrated ways through the work of the different aspects of God. Trinity was a fact before it was a doctrine, it was known before it was described.

So I am not trying to convince you of a doctrine. What I hope to have done is to have explained to you a fact that most Christians have recognised and taught since the early days of the Church. There have been great arguments down through our history over the nature of God; indeed the first major split in Christianity occurred over this idea and the Nicene Creed we heard earlier was the compromise solution. Even today there are groups who claim to be followers of Jesus Christ but who do not acknowledge the Trinity. One example is The Watchtower Society Jehovah’s Witnesses who believe that Jesus is inferior to God, and the Spirit is inferior to Jesus. Trinitarian belief is a sticky point which is more a matter of God’s revelation to you and your own faith in God than a logical progression of an A-B-C argument. Trinity seeks to explain what you already know, but don’t quite “get”.

Trinity is what we believe, may God teach us to understand.  Amen.