Dear Brothers and Sisters,
I hope you are enjoying our series on Half Truth; I find it fascinating and very current with the questions people ask today. I also pray you will like the closeness of our worship space and that you will continue to worship with us even in the aduditorium. In some ways, it makes like more simple. And I hope it does not last too long.
Today we confront the half-truth that all religions are the same, deep down. Now it is true that all religions attempt to answer the same questions about God and the meaning of life: does God exist, who is He, are there many gods, who am I and where did I come from and where am I going? Religion is about a set of beliefs that attempt to answer these and other questions. Even a very short look at religions shows us that they are very different.
First of all to say that all religions are the same does not allow us to enter into a real dialogue with others who have different beliefs from us. It creates an insincerity by just glossing over the difference in beliefs and a real conversation does not take place. All religions do ask the same questions but they do not come up with the same answers to those question. To point out the difference let’s look at some very basic questions and see how they are answered by others, and then by our faith. The most basic questions religions ask are about God. Who is he, what is his nature? Is there one God or many gods?
This is oversimplifying the issue and in describing other religions it gets tricky which does show that they do think differently. Some religions say there is a God but you can’t know anything about him. Others say there is no God at all. There is only human ethics, nothing supernatural. This would include Unitarianism, Confucianism and secular humanism.
Some religions say there are many gods; this is called pantheism. Hinduism and Buddhism would fall in this category. Others say there is one God. So Judaism and Islam fall in here. But they would have very different concepts of what this means. Judaism says God can be known in a personal way and Islam says that it is impossible. There are many more nuances to these than I am describing and my point is this: even on the most basic questions, all religions are not the same. And what I want to do for the rest of this time is then explain the Christian answer to “Who is God?” The answer to this question has incredibly important implications for your life. I hope by the end of today you will understand a bit better who God is and how the Trinity validates what you already believe in your heart.
We say that there is one God and three divine persons. At the very heart of reality there is a community of three persons. There is God the Father who created you, God the Son who died for you and God the Holy Spirit who lives with you. All three persons are eternal and all three are God. Each one is distinct. At the heart of reality is the Trinity. And today on Trinity Sunday we celebrate this supreme mystery of our faith. A mystery that we cannot fully comprehend but we can know something about it.
This is the most complicated mystery of what we believe but that should not be surprising. If God is God then we should find his reality both surprising and difficult to explain. Imagine if God was someone who could fit inside of our understanding, what kind of God would he be?
The Trinity is like a family; actually the reverse is more true: the family is modeled after the Trinity. Your family is one but it has more than one member. In a family a husband and wife love each other and then out of that love a child is generated. There is one family but three persons in the family. God the Father loves God the Son so intensely that it generates the Holy Spirit. None of them have a beginning or an end.
Each person of the Trinity praises and defers to the other. They each center on the other and adore and serve the other. This produces infinite joy. Now this implies that the reality of the Trinity makes real what most people think is the highest value in the world, which is to love, unconditionally. To love means that there is always communion among the family, even where there are fights, the dis-communion ends quickly, through reconciliation.
By loving the other we are doing what God has been doing from all eternity: deferring, praising, adoring God and respecting others. Love is primarily a verb not a noun. God from all eternity is a community of love; it is a mutual self-giving love. If God were not a Trinity then love would not be the highest value since it was not the nature of God. For God to love he must have an object of his love. If God is only one person and not three, there was a time when God did not love because there was no one there to love. You cannot love someone who does not exist. If an un-personal God had created the world his essence would not be love; it might be power but not love.
God however is Trinity; he is a community of self-giving love. Because God is love the self-centeredness that you see in others and yourself drives you crazy. You know that you were not made for this. At the very source and heart of reality is love. When we focus only on ourselves and our desires we are fighting against the very nature of who we are and how we are made.
God is a Trinity and he did not create us or the world because he was lonely or needed someone to worship him. He did not have any need for us or was bored or needed additional joy. He created us out of his goodness and love. After he created us something went wrong. He gave us free will to see if we would love him back without being coerced. And our first parents chose themselves rather than loving God and as a result of that self-love relationships are broken and we all tend to selfishness. All of this creates chaos. And God did not leave us on our own but sent his son into the world to show us his face, to show us the love of God for us.
Jesus then ascended into heaven and did not leave us alone, but sent his Holy Spirit to guide us and give us courage and he dwells with us. This is our faith. Isn’t it beautiful? It presents an image of what God made us to be and it can be ours.
God is an external exchange of love: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He is a community of love and wants us to share in that love. His love is an ocean. His will is that we be part of it.
My invitation, my challenge to you this week is what do you need to do in order to be less self-focused this week. Choose one thing: listening better to your spouse, cleaning up after yourself, slowing down in order to appreciate what is around you, helping in the kitchen rather than escaping to your room. So ask the Trinity, or one person in the Trinity, to help you to experience this communion of love and joy.