The Revd Canon James T. Payne
St. Thomas of Canterbury
May 22, 2005
Trinity Sunday
"And when those beasts give glory and honour and thanks to him that sat on the throne, who liveth for ever and ever, The four and twenty elders fall down before him that sat on the throne, and worship him that liveth for ever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne, saying, Thou art worthy, 0 Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created." (Revelation 4:9-1 1)
When I was a young man I was, for a time, minister in the Methodist Church. I remember going to my District Superintendent very much like an Anglican Dean, and asking him for some advice as to how to teach the doctrine of the Trinity. To my surprise (being unaware as a young man of how the liberal mind works) the old minister said: "I don't know why we even bother to teach the Trinity since no one understands it anyway." All over the world, on Trinity Sunday, sermons are preached on the mystery of the Holy Trinity. And the truth is, not one of us can ever completely understand this doctrine. But we keep trying.
Trinity Sunday is important. It serves two essential purposes in the practice of the Christian religion. The first is to remind us that God is Who He is, and not what we want to imagine him to be. What we think or believe about God is both useless and meaningless, unless our belief conforms to who and What God knows himself to be from before the creation of the world as he has revealed himself to mankind in the Holy Scriptures, in his Son Jesus Christ, and in his mighty acts in history.
To say that we worship the Trinity in Unity and the Unity in Trinity is a profound statement. It means that each person of the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit is revealed to us in a different manner and teaches us different attributes of the one God. Thus we accept God the Father, who has presumably chosen to reveal himself to us in that role for a reason of his choosing. For all the glories of motherhood, God does not reveal himself as our mother in heaven. Jesus Christ comes to us as the Incarnate Word. He is not the revolutionary, the mere teacher, philosopher or even miracle worker. He is the incarnation of perfect man united with God. In Him we see God's love in action as He pours Himself out from the Cross. We also see and celebrate the work of the Holy Spirit, in the Greek, the "breath or wind of God". As long as we focus on the Trinity, we can escape the modalism that allows us to paint a picture of our favorite attributes of God while ignoring or downplaying the least popular aspects.
Those who hate God and deny him often say that Christians invent a "god" of their own liking, made in their own image and likeness. And these despisers of God are right but only in one particular set of circumstances. If those who claim to be "Christians" re-invent God to please themselves as do liberal revisionist clergy of every denomination; if they pick and choose what they will believe and what commandments they will obey; and if they demand that God submit to them and to their understanding of time and culture; then they are not really "Christians" at all, but rather are just as much idolaters as the Israelites who worshipped the golden calf.
It is worth remembering that those idolatrous Israelites knew better, or at least they had every opportunity to know better. God had made himself very clear at the burning bush when he told Moses, "I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you" (Exodus 3:14). And Moses delivered that message. Nevertheless, the Israelites wanted a "god" that they could man-handle, manipulate, and carry around. They wanted control of God, and not to be controlled by him. They wanted to worship as they chose, and not as God commanded. Thus, they all died in the wilderness.
Trinity Sunday, in its first essential function, erects a barrier of truth between us and this same dead-end. Trinity Sunday forces us to confront the truth that our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ gave his Apostles before he ascended into heaven: "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost" (Matthew 28:19). Thus, the Son of God Himself perfects and completes the revelation given to Moses. The I AM THAT I AM can only be known as God the Father, and God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.
No matter how pious or spiritual a person may appear to be, such a person is not worshipping God unless he is worshipping the Blessed and Undivided Trinity, the Eternal, Changeless, and Indivisible One True God who is God the Father, and God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.
Now someone might say "I don't understand how God can be Three Eternal Persons and still be One God". The proper Christian response is a combination of "of course" and "so what?" Of course none of us fully understands God. The entire purpose of the eternal life to come is to have worship and fellowship with God and come to know him better forever. But that is in the future, not in this life. Moreover, not one of us truly understands himself completely (since we often find ourselves doing things we never imagined we would or could do), Debbie and I have been married almost 32 years. I love my wife more than any other person in the world, but sometimes, being a man, I don't understand her. She would undoubtedly say the same about me. Husbands and wives cannot completely understand one another no matter how long they are married. None of us can fully understand the ordinary human beings around us at work or in church, or in our families.
We love our families, not because we understand them, but because they are our families. We love God because He is God. Because He is God Almighty, He reveals Himself to us on His terms, not ours. When God reveals Himself to me in the Scriptures, through His Son Jesus Christ, and by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, all I can say is "Yes, Lord," and trust Him, taking Him at his Word. The alternative is to either call God a liar and to search for "some other god" that doesn't exist, or even worse to be my own god. This alternative, however, isn't much of an alternative, since it constitutes a form of spiritual, moral, and intellectual suicide.
Our particular Anglican tradition of Christianity places so high a value on insisting on the reality of God as he is that our calendar of worship is organized around Trinity Sunday. From Advent to Ascension Day we concentrate on the life and work of our Lord Jesus Christ. On Pentecost we focus on the on-going work of God the Holy Ghost in each and every Christian, as well as in the entire Body of the Church. And then, on Trinity Sunday, we place these wonderful gifts, graces, and works of God in context understanding them as the mutual, cooperative, and united will of God the Blessed Trinity. The remainder of our Christian year will be denominated "Sundays after Trinity," so that every week until Advent begins again, we will be reminded that it is God the Blessed Trinity that we worship, and not this or that Person of the Blessed Trinity in an imaginary and artificial isolation.
For over a thousand years we called all the Sundays between Trinity Sunday and Advent "Sundays after Trinity". Then in 1979 many American churches suddenly decided to call them Sundays after Pentecost. The late Massey Shepherd, the priest who was largely responsible for the 1979 Prayer Book said that the purpose was to give special emphasis to the Holy Spirit. Who can be against that?
Well, one problem is that the de-emphasis on the Trinity means that God as creator and righteous judge is sent packing except as some abstract white-haired old man in the sky. The hard edge of Jesus teaching can also now be tempered with the supposed "new work of the Holy Spirit". This tool, in the hands of the liberal revisionist or the charismatic seeker of warm fuzzies, allows one to fashion a God of his or her own liking. One can ascribe anything to the work of the Spirit and forget that God cannot contradict God. Yet everything from gay marriage to Women's ordination and praying to God our mother is called the work of the Spirit.
And that takes us to the second essential purpose of Trinity Sunday the acknowledgement that Christianity is not about us. Our salvation in Jesus Christ is the most wonderful gift imaginable, and the perfection of God's love for us, demonstrated in Jesus Christ's death and resurrection, in the Commandments, and in the gift of the Holy Ghost, is too immense for words. Such mercy could not be praised enough if the whole human race did nothing but shout Alleluia and Hosanna until the end of the world.
But that's the point. Christianity is about the glorification of God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, One God, as they honor and glorify each other eternally, only a part of which glory is the mercy that has been lavished on us. Our prayers and praise are possible only because of the divine permission to join in the eternal glorification of God. Our worship is both God's due and our privilege. Our religion is not about our salvation. Our religion is about glorifying our Father in heaven, through God the Son, and by the assistance of God the Holy Ghost.
Think back to the portion of St. John's vision of heaven with which we began. The four and twenty elders, representing the chosen peoples of the Old and New Testaments (and thus, all the faithful of the whole human race) "... fall down before Him that sat on the throne, and worship Him that liveth for ever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne." Those crowns represent every good and blessed human achievement, all that the human race will ever accomplish on earth or in heaven by the grace of God. And where do those crowns belong?
The crowns of the redeemed in the Blood of Jesus Christ belong at the foot of the throne of God. They belong to God as the tribute of our love and devotion to the glorious and eternally Blessed Trinity.
The prayer that goes with those crowns sums up all that man can rightfully, loyally, and faithfully say to God Almighty: "Thou art worthy. 0 Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created." This is true "worship" in the original sense of the word, "worth-ship" the declaration of the worth, value, glory, kindness, goodness, mercy, and grace of God.
It has pleased Almighty God to create us, to redeem us, and to give us eternal communion with Himself through his Son Jesus Christ. We will not see heaven ourselves, let alone understand what heaven is, until we focus the entirety of our lives on the glory and pleasure of God the Blessed and Undivided Trinity. We will know neither truth, nor reality, nor peace until we know God as he has revealed Himself, willing to live our lives, wherever God takes us, whatever comes, with the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost. To Him be all glory forever. Amen.