Trinity

We said the Athanasian Creed on Sunday.  Guess what? Everyone survived. 

I know, it's the long creed, and with it being the long creed, everyone sort of rolls their eyes when it comes up.  The creed? No thanks, that seems like a lot of work.  It ends up being like the terms and conditions that we all agree to a hundred times a year, when a piece of software, or an app asks for our permission for everything before we're allowed to install it.  And when that happens, boy oh boy, do people go off sideways on it. 

When Mark Zuckerberg was being questioned about things, he mentioned, sensibly enough, that you can choose to make things private on Facebook.  You can decide at any point to make things private, and to choose who you share information with.  But people just sort of chose to send their information out to all sorts of companies, all sorts of Russians, because they chose not to look too deeply into the terms and conditions that they agreed to.  And the Creed, well, it's no different, not really.  The creed, the Athanasian creed is the sort of thing that nobody really wants to get too deeply into.  Nobody really wants to go through it, just skip it, and let me agree already!  But the issue is that, as too many people found out, that those things you click on actually affect things.  They affect who has access to your information, who can see what you do, who can take your information and use it for themselves, that kind of thing.  Knowing the terms and conditions, knowing what it is that you agree to, that's a really important thing to get figured out.

Now, in the case of the Athanasian Creed, think of it like those terms and conditions that you skip just to say agree.  It's actually really important to know what it is that you're agreeing to.  You need to be well aware of what it is that you're signing on to, otherwise, you're going to find yourself in a situation in which you're going to agree to a bunch of bad stuff that you don't really want to agree to. And there's the problem. 

So as a Christian, what do you agree with? You agree with the concept of the Trinity. According to the Athanasian creed, you have to hold to that creed whole and inviolable, without it you cannot be saved.  This is a matter that you really do have to consider very carefully, more than just allowing access to your contact list and profile picture to the 'which hamburger are you' quiz.  It's a matter of salvation and damnation, and it's going to be complicated.  The whole reason that it is going to be complicated is because it's real.  This is how the Triune God actually works.  As C S Lewis says, the religions of milk and water are the fake ones, the simple ones.  And the more you understand about the God of the Bible, the more complicated He is.  The more you look into the God of the scriptures, the more you realize that he's bigger than you give him credit for.  As a child, you understand Jesus as looking like a consumptive girl, holding sheep or playing with model airplanes, or whatever there is on that line.  But beyond that, who is this man?  Well, to get to the bottom of things, you have to start at the top. 

You have to understand yourself not just as a mass of chemicals, not as a mass of electricity and carbon, but as a created being.  Something made and formed and fashioned by God, hand designed by him as we were in the Garden with our first parents.  The first man, Adam, became a living being when he was assembled of the dust of the ground, of carbon, of nitrogen, of the base elements, and God breathed into his nostrils the breath, the spirit of life.  And Adam became a living being.  All good news so far.  But there is a double birth there, both of the dust, and of the breath.  The dust only gets you so far, and that's the part that after sin, we inherit from our parents. The dust, the carbon, the breakdown, the decay.  When Jesus tells Nicodemus that he needs to be born again, and Nicodemas asks him if he can possibly return to his mother's womb and be born one more time, Jesus tells him that you can't just repeat what has already happened.  To go through a natural birth again, to go through the process of being a baby again, being born one more time, that doesn't do anything except to place you back in the flesh again.  Flesh gives birth to flesh, after all, but the spirit gives birth to the spirit.  And if you're counting on flesh to give birth to the flesh, well, consider a pre-breathed Adam.  Just dust, which is what we pass on from parent to child.  So, we need to consider the new birth that Jesus talks about, the new birth of water and the spirit.  The new birth that is given to us not by a father's will, nor by flesh and blood, but by God.  The same birth that Jesus had.

Jesus is the one, the only one in all of creation to get this done, to have a different origin, to be born differently.  He's the only one to have been born of a human mother and not of a father's will.  He is the only one who has not inherited the dust alone, but who has also inherited that breath of God, that spirit, and who is conceived of God's will and not man's.  Because he is not the man of dust, he is not bound by the same decay as the rest of us, and if we are going to transcend that same decay, that same rot, that same unpleasantness, we are going to have to transcend it through an outside force.

The Old Testament reading has Isaiah understanding his sinfulness, and being forgiven of it by an outside act of God; he understood himself as a sinful man, as a man of uncleanness, as a man of sinful words and deeds, and was forgiven of his sin by the Lord his God through an external act.  There was no penance, no sacrifice, it was the work of God to make him clean.  This works for Isaiah, and it works for us too.  Salvation is outside us, it is alien, it is not of our own, it belongs to God.  He works for it, and bestows it to us.  That is the work of Christ who shed his blood for us on the cross, who died on the tree of Calvary, who had water and blood proceeding from his side when it was pierced by the lance of St. Longinus, when that happened, he bestowed righteousness, inheritance of the Spirit, of glory, to all the faithful. 

And this is where the Holy Spirit comes in.  The Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life.  For outside of his work, this is all theoretical.  Outside of the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, this all seems like so much nice dialogue, doesn't it?  You're a child of dust, which you see every day all around you, both within you and in other people.  You're a child of dust, you get things wrong, and no matte what you do, you can't seem to get away from the dustiness of things.  Flesh gives birth to flesh, and your flesh was given and handed to you by your parents who are as sinful as you are.  They didn't want to, they didn't mean to, but that's what happens.  You get all the problems that they have, and you can't inherit anything but what they give.  Flesh gives birth to flesh, and if you want a new birth, you are going to have to look a little further afield than just the flesh.  Being born of your mother again wouldn't do much of anything, it would just lead to the same results.  If we're going to look for different results, which we should, it's going to have to be a whole new direction.  It's going to have to be a new birth. The dust of the earth, and the breath, the spirit of God.  And that's the Holy Spirit's job in your baptism. 

In baptism, you have one moment, one time, one place to point to, and to say that this is the moment when the Lord your God washed you clean of your sins, gave you a new birth of water and the spirit, called you by name, and made you his own.  And when we're talking about Trinity, when we're talking about the work of the Holy Trinity, that's what we're talking about, the Holy Trinity that came together in your baptism, which is the absolute best way to understand the Trinity at all.  You understand it best through how it relates to you.  You understand at that moment, that salvific moment of baptism, that God the Father who created you, who created the water, who created the atoms that make all of you and the rest of creation up, that God knew that you were made of dust, and knew that you had inherited all the concupiscence that your parents could give you.  He knew that no matter how many generation would come and go, none of them would ever be able to be born of anything but dust, being born of a father's will and flesh and blood as they are.  So, his word took on flesh, and dwelt among us.  The aspect of God that was not born of a father's will not born of the flesh, but who combined the dust of the earth, the elements of humanity with the word of God in human form, lived and dwelt among us, and finally shed his blood for our sins.  And after that blood was shed, the next phase could begin.  The next phase of the water and the spirit, the new birth that Jesus told Nicodemus about, and the one Nicodemus had a hard time understanding.  If you're going to see the kingdom of God, it's going to have to be with better than the dust of the earth.  It's going to have to be the new birth, not of a father's will, not of flesh and blood, but through the water and the spirit.  that's the work of the Holy Spirit, the sanctifier, the one who is the the work of God in you.  He has made you a temple of God, not made with human hands, but set apart by God himself.  And in your baptism, you have the sign, the mark of God calling you by name, setting you apart, and adopting you into his family.  The best picture you have of any of this, honestly, is the baptism of Christ, where you have Jesus in the water, God's voice from the sky, and the spirit of God descending like a dove.  This is all good, and it is exactly what is mirrored in your baptism as well.  The one who created the body, the one who redeemed the body, the one who sanctified the body, all that working together in that one moment.

This is Grace's font here in Regina. I highly encourage you to visit their church, and hear their preaching.

If you want to understand the trinity, don't think about water and steam and ice, don't think about an egg, don't think about an apple, think about baptism.  Your baptism, not someone else's.  Think about your baptism, your  adoption into God's family, the new birth of water and the spirit that you received.  Think about God the Father as the one who created you, God the son who in space and time shed his blood for your salvation, and God the Holy Spirit, who was bestowed on you in and through baptism, and that works much better.  It works better because it's not an illustration, it's not a parable, it's not a metaphor.  It's your baptism.  And it works.