Holy Trinity 6/3/07 “Clinging to God”

Psalm 8, John 16.12-15

What on earth is the Athanasian Creed, and why are we reciting it in church today? That may be a question in your mind this morning, and I think it deserves an answer. Let’s start by saying that today, in the church’s calendar, is the Festival of the Holy Trinity. Our liturgy and hymns focus on the Christian understanding of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. While most of the festivals of the church year center on events—the birth, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ, and the coming of the Holy Spirit—today’s celebration focuses on a doctrine, a teaching of the church. That makes it very tricky to preach on—indeed, I’m always relieved when choir Sunday falls on the Festival of the Holy Trinity, so the choir can provide the sermon and I don’t have to figure out how to preach about the Trinity! Truth be told, the Trinity is better sung about than preached about—more effectively praised than explained!

And yet, because human beings communicate most consistently with words, sometimes words must be used. This is what the early church learned, as it tried to answer the question Jesus himself posed to the disciples: “Who do you say that I am?” The disciples were convinced that Jesus was God—but as good Jews, they believed what Moses had taught: The Lord our God, the Lord is One. How could the One God have become flesh in Jesus Christ? And what about this Holy Spirit of God that was poured out at Pentecost? How does that figure in? How do we find language to talk about it? How do we grasp it?

Of course in one sense, we can never really “grasp” God. God is a mystery to us, unfathomable, unknowable except as God reveals himself to us. Yet we need concepts, and we need words, because that is how we begin to understand. And as the church tried to grope its way to some understanding, it came to focus on Jesus’ last words to his disciples in Matthew 28: “Go make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” That seemed to the church to be a key, a way of talking about God that helped make sense of it all.

And so the church developed creeds, statements of faith about God, and they reflected this understanding of the One God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—One God who is the Holy Trinity. We see it in the Apostles’ Creed, with its three articles, one each on Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The same structure is in the Nicene Creed.

But that was not the end of the story. There continued to be debates and discussions about how to understand the Trinity, and how to talk about the Trinity. Hard to believe, from this chronological distance, but there were actually battles fought by armies over this subject! There were slogans, there were hymns, there were official Councils—and all because Christians were convinced that what we say about God, what we teach about God, what we believe about God, is very important—so important that the church could say, “Unless you believe this, you cannot be saved.” It was not just a matter of opinion, but a matter of life and death.

Today we are often reluctant to be quite so sure of things. We live in an age when everything is seen as relative. You can believe this, or you can believe that, or you can believe nothing. No big deal. To the early church, though, it was a very big deal indeed, because what is finally at stake is what we believe about Jesus Christ.

And so we have, in the Athanasian Creed, the church’s consensus on just how we understand Christ—what we mean when we say he is indeed God the Son, and also what we mean when we say he is both divine and human, both God and man. This is a creed that was written as a sort of doctrinal summary; it was not intended to be used regularly in the worship of the church; but in many churches, and especially in many Lutheran churches, it became the custom to read this Creed on this particular Sunday, this Festival of the Holy Trinity, as a way of reminding us all what the church believes and teaches about the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Having said all of this, let me point you to one of the most wonderful verses in the Bible, which comes in our gospel lesson today. Jesus says, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” If ever there was as word meant for us, this is it. We haven’t learned everything there is to know about God and his plans for us. Going through Sunday School as children gives us some good information, but there’s more. Two years of confirmation instruction helps us begin to understand our faith, but there’s more. Some of us actually go to college and graduate school and seminary and study theology and Bible and church history, but there’s more, much more.

I think one problem we human beings have is that we want to learn something and then feel that we’ve mastered it. Remember the story of the teenage girl who was attending a formal dinner party and happened to be seated next to a famous astronomer? “What do you do?” she asked, and he replied, “I study astronomy.” At this she expressed surprise: “You study astronomy, at your age? I learned astronomy in 7^th grade!” But of course she misunderstood! When we begin to learn, there aren’t any boundaries. There’s always more to understand. That is even truer of faith than any other aspect of life. God always has more for us to learn—but God knows we can only understand a little bit at a time! We cannot bear too much!

But that is why God comes to us as the Holy Spirit, the Guide. The Holy Spirit is how we continue to learn, how we grow in our understanding. The Spirit, Jesus says, is the One who will “guide us into all truth.” Luther puts it another way when he says that “I cannot by my own understanding or effort believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him. But the Holy Spirit has called me . . .enlightened me . . .” Our own understanding will never bring us to the place of knowing everything there is to know about our awesome and mysterious God. But the Holy Spirit guides us, leads us, helps us grow in our understanding. And that happens, God willing, each day of our lives.

I admit to you that there is a lot in this Athanasian Creed that I do not understand, at least not fully. That’s equally true, of course, of the Bible itself. There’s a lot there I don’t understand. But in the Athanasian Creed, there is one phrase I love: it is that line right at the beginning: “Whoever wants to be saved should above all cling to the catholic faith,” the universal faith. Finally, you see, faith is not something to be understood or intellectually mastered. It is something to which we cling. It is, as I so often say, “trust.” We may not be able to articulate or understand everything about God—but we are able to praise him, to sing “Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee,” to shout or to whisper in awe, “O Lord, our lord, how exalted is your name in all the world! . . . What is man, that you are mindful of him?” We are able to join our voices, as faltering as they may be, with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven to sing their unending hymn, “Holy, holy, holy Lord.”

And in breathing these words of praise, we in fact open our hearts to the Holy Spirit, who will guide us into all truth as we are able to bear it. With that guidance, our task is not to understand, but to cling to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.