"Pathways"

Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15

Last Sunday we celebrated the sending of the Holy Spirit to the gathered community of Christ’s disciples on the day of Pentecost. And we pondered that amazing event when ordinary men and women began to speak in extraordinary ways and began to be empowered to be bold in expressing their love for Christ.

So today is known as Trinity Sunday when we attempt to come up with language to describe God who is known to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We discover that the word “trinity” is not used by the New Testament writers. So our scriptures today just give us glimpses into the being of God, expressed in three ways.

Through the first centuries of the Christian church, our ancestors in the faith began to mold a doctrine of a Triune God. Early creeds – such as the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed -  were based on the Triune formula – I believe in God, in Jesus, in the Spirit.

So every year we come to this Sunday and try to explain thinking of God as Trinity, usually inadequately. It is such a mystery, but it is a beautiful mystery, and a doctrine that has sustained the Christian church for centuries. (Read scriptures.)

I have recently been rereading a book called Open Secrets by Richard Lischer. It is the memoir of a young Lutheran pastor just out of seminary receiving his first call to the church in New Cana in southern Illinois. Lischer is very open about all his adventures as a new pastor. One chapter in the book is called “Our Best Window.”

The past couple of weeks I have also been reading articles about the Trinity, and I found the diagram that is on the front of our bulletin. Please look at that picture as I read you a couple of the paragraphs from Lischer’s book about their “best window.”

“All our windows came from a St. Louis catalog, except for our best window, which was made in a studio in Chicago.  Its brilliant colors and intricate design set it apart from the others. It was a Trinity window that sat high above the altar and dominated the east wall of the sanctuary.

Our Trinity window was a gorgeous piece of classical theology, nothing less than a diagram of God. At the center of the window was a triangular area in which was inscribed the word Deus (God). In the area around the center were small triangular areas, one with the word Pater (Father), another with Filius (Son) and a third with Spiritus Sanctus (Holy Spirit). These three were connected by three little pathways running to Deus and on each pathway was the word est or is. Rimming the circle and connecting the three persons were more pathways – between the Father and the Son, the Son and the Spirit, and so forth, and on each of these were the words non est or is not. Our window’s geometric design seemed to say, ‘Any Questions?’

In Cana, we baptized our babies, celebrated marriages, wept over our dead, and received Holy Communion – all by the light of our best window. We believed there was a correspondence between the God who was diagrammed in the window and our stories of friendship and neighborliness. The paths that crisscrossed pastures among the farms where neighbors have trudged for generations to visit or help in time of need are the pathways among Father, Son, and Spirit grooved into human relationships.”

So when I found this diagram this week, I knew that I had to share Lischer’s ideas about Trinity this morning.

As we ponder this diagram from their window, we can see the connectedness and yet the distinctiveness of who God is. We can see that no one concept is enough to speak of God – our language is so inadequate: creator, redeemer, sustainer; Eternal God, Incarnate Word, Holy Comforter; Womb of life, Word made flesh, brooding Spirit; Potter, Healer, Transformer; and on and on and on.  The concept of the Trinity opens us up to the unfathomable richness of God’s being.

When John Calvin defined faith, he was certainly aware of the way his faith was based on the Trinity: “Faith is a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” Even without much thought, we use Trinitarian language all through our worship liturgy. Our prayer at communion includes petitions to Father, Son, and Spirit. Our benedictions are about the love of God, the grace of Christ, and the communion of the Spirit. So even though we are not always aware of it, this doctrine is very much a part of the way we think about God and our faith in God.

But the New Cana folk not only saw who God is in their window, they saw who they were. As they looked at the pathways between Father, Son, and Spirit, they saw more clearly the pathways between themselves and God. If Father, Son and Spirit are in relationship with each other through love, then they believed that they were in that same love relationship with God and with each other. They knew that they loved because they had been loved first by God.

Now that does not mean that they did not have disagreements. That does not mean that the preacher did not sometimes say or do the wrong thing. All those stories are in the book too. But underlying their life together was a deep and abiding love and respect.

Perhaps, that is the kind of life in community that Paul is trying to explain to the church in Rome. He writes that “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.” No matter what life offers, we are ultimately shown the love of God through Christ in the power of the Spirit.

The doctrine of the Trinity reminds us that the love of God is present with us and in us every moment of our lives. God is for us. God is with us. God is in us. We are created in the image of God who is creative, ethical, and mystical. And when we live into the many-faceted selves that we are created to be, then we are becoming whole beings.

The folks of the New Cana church were reminded of God’s eternal presence every Sunday as they studied their best window. For without the God represented in their window, they would have found themselves quite hopeless in this broken world, pitting their meager resources against the chaos of random events such as car wrecks, cancer, heart attacks, drought, and death. Their window did not explain those random events that befell them, but as long as they were convinced that some design underlay the God they worshipped, then they could trust in a hidden design in their lives as well.

So this morning we get a glimpse into who God is as we ponder the mystery of the Trinity. The pathways we see on the diagram remind us of what it means to be in relationship with someone else. A relationship is fed by talking and listening, by responding to each other in times of need, or sometimes it means just being together without doing anything.

We are invited to be in relationship with God, just as God is in relationship within Godself. We listen to God, we speak with God, we rest in God. And as our relationship with God grows and deepens, then our relationships with each other can grow and deepen as well.

So this day, may God grace us with a longing to be in love – with God and with each other. And may we love God and neighbor more today than we did yesterday. This is our prayer. Amen.