God of Answers...and Mystery

So...yesterday was Trinity Sunday and after a turn of events I decided to actually preach on the Trinity.  I can't speak for every pastor out there, nor would I want to if I could (like Derek Webb once sang, "I thank the Lord that the Truth is not dependent on me"), but for me it was a difficult assignment.  Not that I don't believe in the Trinity, I do, but how God works is a little confusing.  To that end I got up to preach and my sermon looked a little like this.

 First I talked about the progression of the Trinity.  In Gen1:27 there is some kind of our, some kind of community.  So, in the beginning all three persons were in heaven.  Secondly, starting with the indwelling of Jesus and continuing with the sending of the Spirit on Pentecost, one part of God was here on Earth, and the others were elsewhere.  This continues to the present day, God and Jesus in heaven and the Spirit moving among us today.  Unfortunately the Spirit is like a scent on the wind, filling your nostrils but sometimes hard to pin down its actual place. Finally, in Revelation 21-22 there is coming a day when the Godhead in all its fullness will dwell among the people in a New (Redeemed) Earth.

Following that I went into a history lesson of how the whole idea of a Trinity became a doctrine of the Trinity.  Looking at Arius and Athanasius and their disagreements on the person of Christ, how that was decided at the Council of Nicaea.  The looking further at the First Council of Constantinople and how they decided that both Jesus and God were equal with and one with the creator God.  And the idea of the Trinity was born, or at least upheld roughly 350 years after Jesus hung on a cross.

Following my little history lesson I told a story of St. Augustine,

One day when St. Augustine was at his wits' end to understand and explain the Trinity, he went out for a walk. He kept turning over in his mind, "One God, but three Persons. Three Persons--not three Gods but one God. What does it mean? How can it be explained? How can my mind take it in?"

And so he was torturing his mind and beating his brains out, when he saw a little boy on the beach. He approached him to see what he was doing. The child had dug a small hole in the sand. With his hands he was carrying water from the ocean and was dumping it in the little hole. St. Augustine asked, "What are you doing, my child?"

The child replied, "I want to put all of the water of the ocean into this hole."

St. Augustine asked, "But is it possible for all of the water of this great ocean to be contained in this little hole?"

And then it dawned on Augustine, "If the water of the ocean cannot be contained in this little hole, then how can the Infinite Trinitarian God be contained in your mind?

I finished up with the following...I can give you a multitude of analogies that may get you to understand the Trinity, but none of them will really explain it, in the end it is a mystery, maybe like Augustine said it is just too big for our finite minds to grasp.  

The truth of the matter is that even though I am a pastor I do not have all the answers, too many times I have an 'I don't know' for an answer.  That is not always an easy answer to share, it is altogether easier to try to convince people that I do have all the answers.  After all, that is what I thought about my pastors growing up, that they knew things that I didn't, which was and is true to an extent, but pastors, much like everyone else can only know so much.  Past that point we have to merely rely on belief, on faith, on the knowledge that God doesn't require complete knowledge, just complete love.

Peace and love,

Pastor K