Finnish Lutheran Church in Ball

Pastor John-Otto Liljenstolpe's sermon, May 30th, 2010 ;

Regarding the Holy Trinity

What Sunday is it today? Indeed today is Holy Trinity Sunday! Heikki, I’m sure, didn’t know it when he invited me to preside and preach today; but the Holy Trinity is one of the topics that I spend a good deal of time reflecting upon. So guess what the sermon is going to be about today?............How many of you in this church have ever heard a sermon about the Holy Trinity? How many of you have reflected lately on the nature and meaning of the Holy Trinity? Hmmm, well this morning we are going to fix that. (And if you find this subject not to your taste, talk to Heikki about it, not me. It’s his fault.)

So why don’t we Christians leave well enough alone. I mean our Jewish neighbors, our Muslim neighbors; yes even our spiritually inclined neighbors who practice no religion - if and when they speak of God are quite willing to leave it at that. Just God! Isn’t that enough? No, it’s really not. Not for them and not for us. When our Jewish friends speak of God, whether they say so or not, they are actually speaking of God as they know that reality through the Torah. Muslim people know God through the Qur’an. Yes even our non-religious spiritual acquaintances when they speak of God, whether they are aware of it or not, are speaking of something which they have come to understand from religious traditions that are rooted in particular revelatory events and the writings that record those events.

When we Christians speak of God, it is the God that we know through the Old Testament, yes. But above all it is the God we know through the stories about and the living Spirit of that Word we know as the man, Jesus Christ. We profess to know God, not primarily through a scroll, nor through a book; but through a human life, a life we consider to be the very Word of God. We together with our Jewish and Muslim friends confess that that reality we call “God” is not readily perceivable through our senses. The New Testament simply says “No one has ever seen God.” And yet we profess to know God. We profess to know God through God’s Word and through God’s Spirit.

When I, as a pastor here and in Sweden, used to have confirmation students, I often did a little experiment with them. I would have one of them go out of the room and close the door. Then I would ask that person to call out to the students remaining in the room. I then asked them if what they were hearing was actually the person standing on the other side of the door. They, of course, answered, “Yes.” I then would ask them whether in hearing the student outside of the room if they were experiencing that entire person. The answer was, of course, “No.”

So it is for us Christians when it comes to God. Are we through Jesus addressed by God himself? Do we experience the presence the Spirit of God within us? It is our confession that we do. But at the same time we agree that there is an aspect of God that is above us, beyond us, not yet seen or directly experienced. The short way of confessing this experiencing of God and yet not experiencing God, the God seen and felt yet not seen and felt, is the symbol of the Holy Trinity.

At the same time, together with the other children of Abraham, our Jewish and Muslim friends who share our monotheistic faith, we confess that God, that the Ground of all that is, is ONE. Do we Christians then contradict ourselves when we also confess that God is three? No, for the oneness of God we confess is not a simply unity. It is a complex unity. How is this to be understood? Let us consider ourselves. I want each of you to think for a moment about yourself. Are you one person? (I see most of you nodding yes.) Now tell me. Be honest now. Do you ever talk to yourself – silently if not out loud? When you do that, who is talking to whom? Have you ever sensed that there is more than one person within the unity that is you? The theologian, Paul Tillich, put what I am trying to say to you very simply. He said, ‘if the God we believe in is a personal God (and not just an impersonal force) then that God must be a complex unity, a unity which must be within itself both subject and object.’ Are you following me? Is this making sense to you?

Good. So let us then consider the nature of the Holy Trinity from yet another angle. Consider this line between my hands. Think of it as a spectrum of the various ways that we human beings think of and experience God. On the left, let us put those who think of God as being everything, those who have a more or less pantheistic perception of the ultimate reality we call God, those who view God as immanent in all that is. Various forms of Hinduism represent such a viewpoint.

Now on the other side, the right side, let us put all those religious perspectives that tend to see ultimate reality as totally transcendent, totally beyond all material reality, us, our earth, and everything else. Religions that have this perspective because they see true reality as something beyond all that we humans can experience through our senses tend to see material reality as illusory in nature, as “nada, nada,” “nothing, nothing at all.”

Now as a pastor I am convinced that in some sense everyone is a theologian. So I want to ask you theologians sitting here this morning a question about this spectrum I’m holding up here. Where on this line would you put Christianity?............... Someone said, “In the middle.” Why did you say that? Yes! Very good! Is it not true what our fellow human beings say about ultimate reality being beyond all materiality? ……. And is it not true that the divine is imminent, that is to say, within all things. The dogma of the Holy Trinity is a perspective that affirms both of these truths and asserts that these two apparently contradictory truths must be held together in a unity. And this unity of transcendent reality and imminent reality has revealed itself to us in the form of a human life. So it is that we as Christians confess that we believe in Father, Son and Holy Spirit, One God with three persona, three modes of being.

The next time you hear someone say, “It doesn’t matter how you understand God just so you believe in God, I want you to think of this spectrum. Does it matter how we understand God in regard to God being everything or God being simply beyond all things? I assure you it does. To begin with, a worldview that sees everything as being divine tends to have little reason for changing anything. The societies such a worldview generates tend to be very conservative. Since everything is divine, everything is as it should be. There is no good reason for changing the world. One should not mess with what is divine. Societies, on the other hand, in which the divine is understood to be beyond material reality, also tend to be very conservative, because from this perspective, material reality is something to be seen through or ignored. Changing the way the world is, is to become involved with something that does not really matter. For this latter viewpoint, the point is to see past the world not change it.

The Christian worldview, properly understood, is “panentheistic.” It affirms that although matter is not itself divine, God is present in and through all things and therefore the material world is to be trusted as something that reflects the goodness of God. Certainly the material world is something to be taken very seriously. As our Psalm for today suggests, it is indeed the handiwork of God. So while acknowledging that we ourselves are part and parcel of the material world we are free to mess with it. This way of looking at the relationship between the divine and materiality gets us into trouble now and then – just look at what our messing with the material world has resulted in down in the Gulf area. But the culture this Biblical worldview has generated has proven itself to be the best basis for the development of the modern scientific enterprise. For looking at nature through the window of the Hebrew Scriptures we in the West came to see material reality as neither divine nor illusory but rather as an orderly reality that makes sense and is available to us as a medium for our own creativity.

Speaking of science, let us this morning consider one final aspect of Trinitarian thought and belief. As all of us in the sanctuary are aware, there are a good many people in our world, among them a good many scientists who, in contrast to those folks who believe that material reality is in fact an illusion, see matter as the only reality and the only thing to be taken seriously. The usual name for people who see the world this way is “materialist” or “atheist.”

For many of these materialistically minded people what we human beings call “consciousness” is simply a byproduct of material evolution, an accident of random mutation and natural selection. For them consciousness in fact is a delusion. According to them we human beings may experience ourselves as being able to decide to do this or to do that, we may think we have minds that are something more than the electro-chemical processes of our brains, but according to them we are deluded. There is nothing in our universe, they are convinced, other than the sub-atomic particles that know nothing and for which there is no purpose or meaning.

Of course, not all scientifically trained people think this way. Allow me to quote, for instance, the founder of quantum physics, Max Planck:

“All matter originates and exists,” he writes, “only by virtue of a force... We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.”

Now Dr. Planck and others who share his worldview, as scientists say nothing, as far as I know about the Holy Trinity that we Christians believe in. But in fact our understanding of the Holy Trinity is very compatible with their interpretation of the data of quantum physics.

Many contemporary theologians when they attempt to provide an image of what God must be like speak of a vast cosmos embracing field of energy that is conscious. The primary activity of this conscious field of energy is to create. Just as quantum physics suggests, this creative activity is not something that happened only at the beginning of the universe, the so-called Big Bang. No, they understand it to be a continuous process in which each particle of matter or material event is projected or materialized again and again, from moment to moment.

In this process of materialization two types of processes occur. Matter is energized and matter is shaped or informed. Particles of matter are formed over time into more and more complex entities. And the energy within and about these entities continuously draws and pushes them towards other entities so that even more complex entities are formed. The process of energizing and giving ever more complex form to matter, scientists tell us, has continued over many light years until, presumably on a number of planets in certain solar systems such as ours biological entities were formed that are so complex that they have become self-consciousness. That is to say, the conscious energy field that is the Creator of all created, at least upon this earth of ours, beings who because we are conscious and creative image our Creator.

We human beings are still part of this creative process. The Ground of Reality we call God continues to energize our lives and is shaping us into ever more complex forms of human community. We daily experience these two creative forces working upon us. The energizing force we call “the Spirit” and we experience her as love. The shaping force we call the Logos or the Word and we experience him as the Truth and the Way. Though the Power of life does not provide us with Google or Yahoo maps so that we know exactly how we must twist and turn our way through our individual lives to participate in what the Bible calls – the fullness of life, our Creator has provided us with an image of what we are being created to be. That image spoke of himself as the “Son of Man” which translated into everyday English simply means “the Human Being.”

So there you have it. I hope what I have said to you this morning has helped you understand, at least a little better, what it means to believe, to by live or live by the Holy Trinity. May the creative energy of that field we call God continue to fill you with love and may the Word from that divine reality continue to shape your lives into that intimate community that is the Body of Christ, now visible among us as the Church. Amen.

Prästen John-Otto Liljenstolpe

May 30th 2010, Seattle

Saarnat Suomeksi	Previous Sermons in English
Jouluk. 28, 2008	Dec. 28, 2008
Jouluk. 14, 2008	Dec. 14, 2008
Marrask. 23, 2008	Nov. 23, 2008
Marrask. 9, 2008	Nov. 9, 2008
Lokak.12, 2008	Oct. 12, 2008
Syysk.28, 2008	Sep. 28, 2008
Syysk. 14, 2008	*Sep. 14, 2008*
Elok. 31, 2008	Aug. 31, 2008
*Elok. 24, 2008*	*Aug. 24, 2008*
Toukok. 25, 2008	May 25, 2008
Toukok. 11, 2008	May 11, 2008
Huhtik.27, 2008	April 27, 2008
*Maalisk. 30, 2008*	Mar. 30, 2008
Maalisk. 23, 2008	Mar. 23, 2008
Maalisk. 09, 2008	Mar.09, 2008