Sermon of the week: One plus one plus one

(With this homily for Trinity Sunday, the UPI series of sermons will end after 111 installments. However, UPI will continue to publish theological reflections frequently, albeit on an irregular basis. Today's preacher is the Rev. Fred R. Anderson, senior pastor of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York.)

This sermon is based on Genesis 1:1-2:4a, Matthew 28:16-20.

One, plus one, plus one equals one. That's what we celebrate this Sunday: the Triune God. It is hardly reasonable. It is a mystery. Mysteries are above or beyond reason, knowable only to the extent that they are revealed to us.

In today's postmodern world, with the Age of Reason in eclipse, the concept of mystery once again has validity. Reason is of course a most valuable tool -- in its place. Don't try to build a bridge or a building without it! But today we are learning that much in life is not reasonable. What, after all, is reasonable about beauty, love, or life? They transcend rationality; they are mysteries.

Trinity Sunday is about THE mystery behind all beauty, love and life -- the mystery revealed to us as the grace of Christ, the Love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. These are the three distinct ways of the One God's self-revelation to us. Each has a distinct identity of its own yet is so connected to the other two that it is ultimately One.

This notion of God as three but one emerged out of the first three hundred years of the church's life when its best thinkers tried to figure out what it meant to say "Jesus is Lord," for in the Old Testament the word, Lord, is virtually synonymous with the one God whom his people worshiped since the Book of Deuteronomy.

At the same time the church tried to understand how the Spirit encountered at Pentecost could be both the Spirit of God promised by Jesus upon his return to "the Father," and the Spirit of Christ, who in today's Gospel lesson promised not to leave his disciples desolate, but to be with them always.

The church fathers plumbed the scriptures beginning with Genesis 1. The almighty and eternal God, whose breath at the beginning of creation hovered over the formless void, was the same God who breathed life into Adam fashioned from clay. God's Spirit then spoke through the prophets; ultimately, we are promised, the Spirit would descend upon all God's people. In the Nicene Creed we call this Spirit "the Lord, the giver of life," who connects Pentecost and creation.

There was also a connection between the God the church fathers knew behind creation, and the Lord they knew who had died, had been raised, and who with all power and authority in both heaven and earth had sent them forth to make disciples of all peoples. That connection was nothing less than that same Spirit.

God's Spirit bonds the Father and the Son in unity. This bond is so pervasive that what belongs to one belongs to all, what one does, all do. Though each of the three has a special relationship, not only to one another, but also to the world, each also participates fully in the work of the other.

For instance, creation was not just the work of the Father. Father, Son ("by whom all things were made" – John 1:3) and Spirit were creators in the beginning -- just as Father, Son and Spirit redeemed the world in the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of the Son, and sustain it as it moves to its ultimate point of redemption, when God will make all things new.

The three are not separate gods, though, but the one God who has revealed himself to the world in these three faces:

1. The grace of Christ. The early Christians knew it first hand. Jesus had done for them what they could not do for themselves -- he had opened the door into the heart of God, giving them a new status, as beloved children of God. As Jesus has called God "Father," so may we. Jesus enables us to rush into God's presence as those who are as beloved as was the other child -- the Only Begotten Son of the Father through whom God had first made all things. What he had done was pure grace.

2. The Love of God, which is more preeminent still. It drives grace. "God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him might not perish, but have everlasting life."

3. The communion and fellowship of the Holy Spirit unite love and grace. The Spirit connected the disciples to the risen Lord, following his ascension. Through this link the faithful found the risen Lord present in their preaching, teaching, healing, and baptizing, in their prayers, their breaking of bread, and common life.

The Spirit is like a conduit joining us to God, even as it holds the Father and the Son in eternal unity. Through the Spirit we experience God. When we pray for the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, we are not simply praying for the presence of God's Spirit -- though surely we pray for that -- but also we are praying to be bound by God's Spirit to one another in precisely the same way the Father and Son are bound together in the Spirit.

To know the communion -- the fellowship of the Spirit -- is not only to be empowered by the Giver of Life, but also to be bonded with, united to, infused by that power which bonds Son to Father and Father to Son, and binds both of them to us.

The communion of the Spirit comes from the Father through the Son into our lives. This causes us to know God in the first place and call Jesus Lord. That fellowship is signed and sealed in our lives when we are baptized. That communion continues to link us to God in prayer, the lessons, song, sermon – and Holy Communion.

When we are gathered in worship we pray to the Father, through the Son, by or in the Holy Spirit. All prayer, corporate or personal, is precisely that way. It is the Spirit, which urges us to call on God in the first place. But it is not limited to only these moments of worship. Mysteriously enough, God's unity includes the addition of you and me. You and I are drawn into the divine unity of God's life and love, a bond so strong nothing shall ever separate us from it.

One, plus one, plus one equals one – unreasonable? Let's remember how the Triune God has revealed himself to us, and what he has done to claim each of us as beloved children. Let's remember the gift of life, which emerges when we live out of this mysterious union with God.

Then, when we experience the mystery in our own lives, the Trinity no longer seems all that difficult to grasp.