“God is Still Speaking!”
The Rev. Sandy Selby –
Trinity Sunday, Year C –
Texts: Romans 5:1-5 and John 16:12-15
The
Scottish theologian T. F. Torrance tells how, as a young army chaplain, he held
the hand of a dying 19 year-old soldier and then, back in Aberdeen as a pastor,
visited one of the oldest women in his congregation—and how they both asked
exactly the same question: “Is God really like Jesus?” He assured them both
“that God is indeed really like Jesus, and that there is no unknown God behind
the back of Jesus for us to fear; to see the Lord Jesus is to see the very face
of God” (William Placher, Christian
Century).
On
this Trinity Sunday we might also say that to be in the presence of the Holy
Spirit is to be in the presence of Jesus. For today we celebrate the God who is
three-in-one—Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Theologians have tried for centuries
to explain the paradox of the unity and diversity of God. It is because that
mystery cannot in the end be either understood or explained that many preachers
would just as soon take Trinity Sunday off.
Today’s
reading from the gospel according to John seeks to answer a very basic question
asked by the early followers of Jesus, who lived in considerable danger: “What
now?” Around this basic question John fashions the “Farewell Discourse,” the
final words of Jesus about his departure and its effect on the disciples’
future.
Jesus
tells his followers something surprising: that it will be to their advantage for
him to go away, because then he will send them the “Advocate”—the “Spirit” who
will guide them in the way of truth. The Spirit will be the way in which God’s
self-revelation continues in the community after the death and resurrection of
God’s incarnate Son. The Spirit will link history to future, providing for
God’s people by keeping alive God’s incarnate work in the world.
Jesus
tells the disciples that they will be tested in ways that they cannot
anticipate, and the Spirit will be with them in that testing. For us today this
means that the teachings of Jesus are not locked into the historical context in
which he lived but continue to be revealed, through the Holy Spirit, in the new
and changing circumstances of the 21st century. I like the way the
United Church of Christ describes it in one of its advertising slogans: “God is
Still Speaking!”
In
today’s reading from John Jesus tells his disciples, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”
Both our Presiding Bishop and her predecessor have quoted this particular verse
in discussing the Anglican Communion’s ongoing discernment of the
appropriateness of ordaining as bishop an openly partnered gay man.
The
choice of this passage by our denomination’s leaders says something important
to the Church of the 21st century, because in it Jesus suggests that
the Spirit is a gift not to individuals but to the community. It is as a
community that we try to discern God’s Word for us, today. Because the
revelation of God through the work of the Holy Spirit is both conservative—grounding us in
tradition—and creative—calling us to be
open to present context—that discernment can be both difficult and divisive.
“God
is still speaking!” and it is not always easy to discern (let alone agree upon)
what God is saying. Christians have always lived in the tension between the
conservative and the creative. In the 21st century that tension is
being lived out in new and challenging ways. God does not forsake us in this
challenge but empowers us through the Holy Spirit.
Implicit
in the United Church of Christ slogan is a second truth that we celebrate on
Trinity Sunday: “God is still speaking” because God is still present! Paul
tells us in Romans that “God’s love has
been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”
It is through the presence of the Holy Spirit that we have hope, because the
Spirit draws us together in relationship with God and one another, just as in
the Trinity the Holy Spirit draws the Father and Son together in love.
That
God’s very essence is one of relationship tells us that relationship and interconnection
are built into the very structure of the universe. The Eastern Orthodox
tradition conveys the Trinity through the idea of perichoresis, the circular dance of the three persons of God in a
divine choreography of liveliness and love, ever moving, ever changing.
Occasions
of joy can make us feel that we have been brought into that divine dance. Who
among us hasn’t experienced that divine dance of joy at a wedding? But we are
also included in the divine life of the Trinity in occasions of suffering. For,
Paul says, “(we know 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 that has been given to us.” Hope rises
up most clearly when we are in community with others in a dance of divine love,
even if that dance moves to the music of tragedy.
The late
Leslie Weatherhead, the British Methodist pastor, told this story about a
difficult pastoral call to a grieving family:
In
one corner an old white-haired woman is sitting in a low chair, her face half
hidden
by her hand…Her other hand is on the shoulder of a younger woman, little more
than a girl, who is sitting at her feet. There is a fire in the grate…The
younger woman had only been married three months, and then death stalked her
husband through pneumonia, and brought him down at last. It was the day after
the funeral. Suddenly the younger woman turns almost ferociously on me…”Where
is God?” she demands. “I’ve prayed to Him…where is He?...You preached once on
the ‘Everlasting Arms.’ Where are they?”…I drew my fingertips lightly down the
older woman’s arm. “They are here,” I said. “They are round you even now. These
are the arms of God.”
In
the 4th and 5th centuries the Church fashioned the
doctrine of the Trinity in order to understand and articulate in a way that is
faithful to Scripture how God works in the world as Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. The Trinity may seem like an arcane concept that only theologians
really care about trying to understand. There is some truth to that.
But
those of us who have felt the everlasting arms of God in times of joy or sorrow
know that we are children of a God who has experienced the joy, the vulnerability,
and the suffering of being human. In the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit
God reveals Godself as One who has walked among us and whose presence surrounds
us still. We are not alone, and never will be. And that, in the end, is reason for
hope.