Pastor Detweiler’s sermon for May 18, 2008

Trinity Sunday

Genesis 1:1 -2:4; 2 Cor. 13:11-13; Matt 28:16-20

At the North Site, when you enter the front door, if you look immediately at the table to your left, there is a copy of the icon of the Holy Trinity. It was a gift to First English at the time of the dedication of that building from the pastor of the Greek Orthodox community in Appleton.

Icons are from the eastern orthodox tradition of the church and a little foreign to us. The figures are highly stylized – the faces all look pretty much the same. The meaning is in the details of the painting. In that one, three angels are sitting around a table. Each angel has behind him some Old Testament symbol. In one case it is a house, in another an oak tree and in the third case a mountain. These symbols tell us that these are the three angels that visited Abraham and Sarah at the oak of Mamre to announce that they would have a son in their old age.

There is more to the icon, but this pretty much tells us that for Christians, there is one God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Christians interpret the three angels as representing the three persons of the Trinity. The way we know God is as he reveals himself to us. We can speculate about God, but that will not get us anywhere. We are not able to reach God. Instead it is in the person of Jesus Christ and his death and resurrection that God has reached out to us, has shown himself. As Martin Luther put it, the one God is hidden in the sufferings, death and resurrection of Jesus.

This is the only Sunday of the church year where we celebrate a doctrine rather than an event in Jesus’ life and ministry or his teachings. We do it because this doctrine is crucial to our understanding of God’s entering human life to reach out to us. It is God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ and his sending of the Spirit that distinguishes the Christian faith from other religions. We do not have to look for or find God. He is here, among us, reaching out to us. The great 18^th-century American theologian, Jonathan Edwards, said that our knowledge and love of God are our conforming to God’s knowledge and love of himself. (Jenson, “Systematic Theology,” Vol 1, p. 234) Our struggle instead of reaching God is to recognize him hidden in the sorrow and suffering around us because he reveals himself most perfectly to us in the crucified Christ.

The point of reading the creation account as the first lesson today is to focus our attention not on the “how” of creation, but the “who.” This God who is the creator is also the Father of Jesus Christ and the one who sent his Spirit to us in baptism. It is that Spirit that calls, gathers, enlightens and sanctifies or makes holy the church, the community of the baptized. It is that Spirit that has called the people joining FELC today.

The doctrine of the Trinity can be quite confusing. The most helpful explanations of it are artistic or musical. In the icon I referred to earlier the Trinity is presented as a circle of three persons, a community that is characterized by hospitality for each other. Jonathan Edwards used an artistic image for God and said that God as Trinity is beauty, the culmination of truth and goodness. As beauty, God is to be enjoyed. A contemporary theologian, Robert Jenson, takes this a couple steps further and says that beauty is the music of the Trinity. The way we enjoy God is to be taken into the triune singing. We get to double or imitate the parts.

So a congregation singing a hymn of praise to the Father, as we do at the beginning of most of our Sunday services, “is doubling the Son’s praise, and the surge of rhythm and melody is the surge of the Spirit’s glorification of the Father and the Son. (Jenson, p. 235) Edwards says that the Trinity is the supreme harmony, and that God is truth and goodness because he is beauty, of the sort that music has.

But how can God be at the same time three persons and one God? Jenson uses a musical image for that too, one that will be dear to any lovers of the music of J. S. Bach. He says God is a melody, but there are three singers who take their part, so that the melody is “fugued.” God is a great fugue. (Jenson, p. 236)

A fugue is complicated musical form that begins with a melody or theme. As it finishes the same melody moves to a different voice – on the organ to the other hand or the feet, but the first one does not stop. It continues to develop and move around the second one. As the second statement of the melody ends, it will be picked up by a third voice and perhaps two more. In this way the melody is stated over and over – in the top line of the music, in the middle voices, in the bass – but by different voices.

When J. S. Bach wrote a mass for organ he took the hymns Martin Luther wrote for the various parts of the service and wrote organ pieces based on them. The work concludes with what is known as the St. Anne fugue because the opening theme of it is like the melody of the first line of the hymn, “O God, our help in ages past.” This fugue is Bach’s exposition of the doctrine of the Trinity. It is his way of saying “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” It has three melodies or themes – one for each person of the Trinity. They are introduced separately one at a time, but once the second and third ones are introduced and developed, they are quickly combined with the first theme, and at the end all three come together.

This is the best image I know for God – he is the music of the universe, a fugue of Father, Son and Holy Spirit in which we are caught up and awed by the magnitude and majesty of his music. So we live and gather in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.