Last week we started looking at the main body of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. He starts out with a very high falutin statement of the glory of God, listing first, blessings we have received through God the Father, then through God the Son, then through God the Holy Spirit.
Starting out like that, Paul took an approach that’s just the opposite of some modern theologians. The trend today is to do theology from the bottom. Start our with human needs, with the injustices of the world or the difficulties that humans have with belief or other elements of human brokenness, and then work up from there to try to express what God is doing about it. For example, liberation theology came largely from wrestling with political oppression in Latin American countries. And that approach can be very useful. It has helped to call the church to get involved with the injustices of society. It has a place.
But Paul starts out his theology in this letter from the top, in God. And he works down from there to dealing with human problems and daily life. And I think Paul was so wise in doing that. The Bible says that we are created in God’s image. So the starting place for understanding ourselves is to do all we can to understand God. That’s doing theology from above. He is the North Star, fixed in the sky, by which the early explorers could always get their bearings. Or, today maybe we should say he is the Global Positioning Satellite from which can take a reading of our longitude and latitude and know exactly where we stand so that we can plan the next step to get us home. He is our best protection from getting pulled off course by the cross currents of the human fads that are always coming and going.
Last week we started working our way through the Trinity, with Paul’s words about God the Father. It would be natural to move this week to the second person of the Trinity, God, the Son. But before we do that, we really need to look at the concept of the Trinity itself. What in the world are Christians talking about when we talk about worshipping one God in three persons?
Sometimes you hear people talk about the Trinity as a waste of time. ‘I don’t bother with that abstract theology stuff. I just want to live a life like Jesus on this earth.’ Have you ever heard that thinking? Well, Jesus himself couldn’t live that life without depending on the Father, so we would be fools to try it without that same help. Today I want you to walk out of this room understanding that an understanding of the Trinity and an experience of the Trinity is the very heart of the Christian life.
Would you please stand now for the reading of God’s word? We’ll look again at the same passage we started last week, Ephesians 1:3-14, but at some other passages as well.
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, 4 just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. 5 He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, 6 to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. 7 In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace 8 that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and insight 9 he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, 10 as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. 11 In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will, 12 so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory. 13 In him you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; 14 this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God's own people, to the praise of his glory.
How does the Trinity work? Well, you have never seen anything exactly like it, so trying to put it into words is sort of like describing the Grand Canyon to someone who has never left the flatlands of central Illinois. The words get you started, but you just can’t comprehend the wonder until you experience it for yourself. But let me try some analogies that can help us.
The analogy that jumps to my mind from our passage is that the Trinity is like a tag team of three wrestlers. God the Father entered the ring to start the match, creating an incredibly beautiful earth and laying out the plans, very, very well. But when the humans sinned and got themselves into trouble, God the Father tagged off to the Son, who came down and cleaned up the mess by taking care of their guilt on the cross. And then, once their sin was cleaned up, he ascended up to heaven and tagged off to the Holy Spirit, who showed up a few days later on Pentecost and is here to live in our hearts to be the presence of God living in us.
And that analogy does tell us something important about the Trinity. They do have different functions. They are different! You might say they specialize. But it falls short. They never work independently. They are always in the ring together. We think of God the Father as creator. But Genesis says that the Spirit moved over the waters as creation began. And John’s Gospel tells us that God the Father created all things through God the Son.
If that analogy helps us understand the wonderful diversity within the Trinity, let’s try one that highlights their unity. You can say that the Trinity is like water. All water is the same, H20, two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. Even though water is always the same substance, it takes different forms. Sometimes it is frozen as ice, sometimes it liquid as water, sometimes it is like a gas, as steam.
Whatever God is made of, which is hard to picture because God is a Spirit, the three persons of the Trinity are all the same substance. None is purer or substantially different from the other or more important than the other. And when Jesus changed form in going from being God to being human, maybe that’s something like water turning from a gas to a solid, but this was something very different, too, because Jesus on earth was not just God in solid form, but he also took on humanity in such a way that he was both God and human at the same time. But please don’t ask me to explain how that works.
Jesus emptied himself of all his divine powers when he walked the earth. And he prayed to his father. He only spoke the words his father gave him. Every one of the amazing things that Jesus did on earth he did through his connection with the Father.
And the bottom line is that there is nothing else like God. He is one God existing in three persons. They are totally unified in will and purpose, but while they work for the same purpose, they have different functions. And I don’t have the mind to comprehend that, let alone the words to explain it.
So is it a waste of time to talk about something we will never completely understand, the Trinity?
Think about your TV set for a minute. Do you understand how it works?
A video camera takes in a scene and converts it into a pattern of hundreds of thousands of tiny dots. A TV station’s broadcast transmitter takes that pattern and shoots it out through the air in all directions.
As we are sitting here, this room is filled with energy waves passing through us. How many broadcast TV stations are there in the Chicago area? 20? Their signals are going right through us right now. How many radio stations are there in Chicago? 50? Their transmissions are going right through you right now. How many people are talking on cell phones within 5 miles of us right now? Each one is broadcasting its signal to the local cell phone tower that picks it up and shoots it to a satellite. This room is full of things we can’t see. Does it make you want to hide under your pew or go live in a cave? There’s no need for that. But there is energy all around us that we are blind to. And the fact that we can’t see it makes it no less real.
If you run your TV on an antenna, it can pick one channel out of all those broadcast signals in the air. I don’t understand how that works. Or, you are probably running in on cable, and then it has to pick out just one channel at a time from 80 or 100 channels all mixed in together. How does that work? I don’t know. Anyway, it catches the signal, turns it into an electric current. That current runs through a circuit board of transistors, resisters, conductors and capacitors to turn that signal into a code that can reproduce the same picture on your picture tube. How does that work?
And then the picture really is reproduced on your picture tube. Unless you have moved into plasma TV, your picture tube has hundreds of thousands of phosphor dots on it, arranged in lines. One line has dots that turn red when they get hit by electrons, one blue and one green. In the back of your picture tube there are three electron guns that shoot those dots in perfect coordination, scanning at 15,000 lines a second, hitting each dot just hard enough to add the appropriate amount of red or green or blue to create just the right tint that makes up the picture of your favorite movie star walking across the screen in living color.
How does that work? I don’t know. I don’t understand it. But that doesn’t stop me from receiving its blessings. I know how to use the power on button on my remote, the channel changer buttons and the volume changer buttons. I’ve gotten very comfortable with something I don’t understand.
So do we really need to try to figure it out? Can we just sit on the sofa and reap the blessings of the Trinity without understanding it, like we watch TV?
No, this is something we need to do our best to understand. You and I are created in the image of a God who is, at his very core, a God of unity in diversity, a God of relationship, love and unity. He experiences at every moment this incredible love, right within himself. His primary will for us is that we would experience the same life, and a large part of the way we experience his life is in relationships with one another.
In Genesis we read that God created us in his image, male and female. There is something about us being male and female, in marriage that allows us to experience something of the unity and diversity of God himself. One God in three persons. A man and a woman can become one, different, but united.
If we try to reduce marriage to an economic institution or sex or child rearing we miss out on the most important part. Marriage is one of the best opportunities for humans to experience what God experiences. When husbands and wives live in love, one heart, one mind, one body, they have a taste of the sheer blessedness in which God lives. We have days when we do it better and days when we fall far short. But God is our model. And God is dedicating to helping us make it work.
But it isn’t only for marriage. In the ‘words to ponder’ section at the top of your bulletin, we printed part of a prayer that Jesus prayed for his disciples, and all who would believe in Christ, which means us.
Can you read it with me? "I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” (John 17:20-21)
Have you ever had a moment in church when you just felt the love, and it seemed so right? You wouldn’t come back if you didn’t. That’s the test for a church. You had a taste of what it’s like to be like God, the most important part of being like God. And we have all had times when we tasted that unity for a moment, and then something stupid happens, hurtful words, careless actions, and it’s gone. And your heart aches.
Paul’s letter to the Ephesians was written, primarily, to help them be one, to experience the love within the very heart of God, that incredible unity within diversity, different persons, united in one heart, one mind, to experience that love and unity, and to maintain it. Read through Ephesians on your own this week and you’ll see that’s Paul’s focus again and again.
The desire for love, the desire to truly be united, does that have anything to do with your life? It has everything to do with our lives. We find the deepest longings of our hearts fulfilled, we find our very selves, as we come together in this amazing God, who is three in one. AMEN
