"160 Times"

Sermon-Trinity Sunday June 3, 2012 160 times


The Cloud of Unknowing,

"O God, our great companion, lead us ever more deeply into the mystery of your life and ours, that we may be faithful interpreters of that Life to each other, through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen."

Today is Trinity Sunday. Trinity Sunday is the Sunday after Pentecost every year. As church time goes this is a relatively new celebration-it’s only been around since the 14th century. Has anyone, anyone here ever had occasion to talk about the Trinity (not the church but the theological concept of the Trinity) to someone/anyone in your lifetime? Anyone? Ever? So this is not exactly a critical issue in the life of your faith, right?

Do you know how many times you say one of our names for God in today’s service? Father, Son, or Holy Spirit, Lord, Jesus, Christ, Savior, How many times do you think we will say one of our names for God (Not counting the sermon or the hymns) in today’s service? 160. At the 8am service that’s almost every 15 seconds/at the 10:30am service that more than twice every minute (not including hymns and sermon). When we’re in church we are using the name of God almost nonstop the whole time we are here, a wide variety of different names-all describing who we believe God is.

Rev. Dr. Tom Long tells the story of-The Reverend John Buchanan ...just retired after 48 years as a Presbyterian pastor; [Rev. Buchanan] remembered one Sunday service in which he was baptizing a two-year-old boy. After the child had been baptized with water, John Buchanan, following the directions of the Presbyterian prayer book, put his hand on the little boy's head and addressed him in Trinitarian language. He said, "You are a child of God, sealed by the Spirit in your baptism, and you belong to Jesus Christ forever." ... the little boy looked up and responded, "Uh-oh."

When St. Patrick went to Ireland to convert the heathen Celts, he kept trying to explain the Trinity to the people there, and finally in frustration at his inability to make them understand reached down and picked up a three leafed clover and told them God was like that leaf-1 in 3, three in one.

Today is the most theological Sunday of the year, a day devoted to an explanation of who God is. We try to find ways to define what we believe about God. There is a very clear definition of what we believe in our Book of Common Prayer. On this one day of the year the church is encouraged NOT to say the Nicene Creed, but rather another one. Turn in your red prayers books to p. 864. This is the Athanasian Creed, and this is the one we’re supposed to say on Trinity Sunday. Look at it.

We could say it today instead of the Nicene Creed if you would like? The problem is, the harder we work at defining God-the more distant God feels, and the less we seem to understand. The problem is that in the west we have to solve, to define everything- Listen to Dan Clendenin: “When Eastern Orthodox believers celebrate the Trinity, they start in a different place than their western cousins. And it's a good place to start when worshipping God. Western theology tends toward intellectual abstraction. Eastern theology emphasizes adoration of the mystery. It has always been wary of the inadequacies of human language, the limitations of the human mind, and the infinity of God. The desert father and intellectual Evagrios of Pontus (345–399), who spent the last sixteen years of his life among unlettered Coptic peasants in the harsh Egyptian desert, one observed: "God cannot be grasped by the mind. If he could be grasped he would not be God." “

This is Trinity Sunday, the day we try to describe God, and eventually we say that God is too much for us to explain. But still we name God, and we call on God, even if we cannot define him. 160 times in this short worship service. We may not be able to define the Trinity. We may not be able to explain God. But like the 2 year old, we know what it is to be “child of God, sealed by the Spirit in baptism, and belong to Jesus Christ forever.” Even if we never come up with a good definition, even if we never commit the Athanasian Creed to memory, we can still proclaim that we are God’s, and God knows who we are. Amen.