“Like No Other”

(Matthew 28: 16-20)

2 Corinthians 13:11-13
Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell. Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you.  Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you.  The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.

Matthew 28:16-20
Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.  When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.  And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

     There is, perhaps, no more difficult tenet of our Christian faith for us to comprehend than the mystery of the Blessed and Holy Trinity.  That our God is revealed and made known in three persons, each member existing as an individual person and also as one true God is a mystery to be sure.  In the context of our modern-day world, the mysterious truth that our One God exists in three distinct persons may not seem to be a major issue.  But to the Jewish people and the early Christian Church, it was a really big deal.  The people of Judeo-Christian faith, who shared a common heritage, were living in Israel and the surrounding territories of the Roman Empire that bordered many larger nation states.  These nations had a cultural heritage of worshipping many Gods.  There were Gods of the sun, moon, stars, earth, harvest, rain, fertility, prosperity and fortune in war, just to name a few.  But the Israelites and early Christian Church held firmly to one God-YHWH-as the supreme God above all the other gods of human beings.  They took seriously God’s first Commandment, given to them through Moses on Mt. Sinai, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.  You shall have no other gods before me.”  No other Gods meant firmly to the people of Judeo-Christian heritage that they were to have and to serve one and only one God-YHWH.

     Bearing this information in mind, I suspect it might now be easier for us to understand the precarious position a triune God has posed the people of the Judeo-Christian faith tradition down through the ages.  Because they believed in and worshiped a God who created all things, understood the movement of God’s Spirit acting among faithful believers in the course of history, knew or knew of the wondrous works of Jesus, and of his death and resurrection to fulfill God’s plan of salvation, and then received the gift and power of the Holy Spirit working in and among them, they were often criticized for having and worshipping many Gods.  To Judeo-Christians, it was the “heathens” and “pagans” who worshipped many gods; not them!  So, how could these people capture appropriately this most confounding circumstance of a Triune God?

     Try as they might, a satisfactory and concrete explanation that was understandable from the world’s perspective failed them.  You see, our God is just too vast, deep, and wide to fit into any comfortable and tidy box that we might create.   That one God exists in three persons and is still one God, is a holy mystery.  

Not, of course, one for which I did not attempt to develop a comprehensive explanation grounded in the world.  I considered myself to be developing a parable about our Triune God, much as Jesus told many parable stories to his Disciples and followers to explain God and God’s eternal kingdom to them.  Being a scientist, a Chemist by trade, I believed that I had found the perfect parable example for our Triune God in the chemical compound water.  Water exists in three forms, and yet all of them consist of the same chemical composition; one oxygen atom bonded with 2 Hydrogen atoms-H2O.  Whether in the form of liquid water, solid ice, or water vapor, all are composed of bonded atoms H2O.  Eureka! I believed I had my worldly explanation of the Holy Trinity.  I even once preached this most creative parable to my church congregation.  I had my glass of water, my bag of ice cubes, and my iron turned to the steam setting to use as visuals in this object lesson.  The congregation was receptive to my parable example, and I even felt a little pride in the success of my creative idea. 

     I am sure we have all heard the saying “pride goeth before the fall”, and great was the fall of my parable of our Triune God.  You see, I used this very example in one of my theology papers about the “Doctrine of our God”.  Doctrines are the tenets of our Christian faith that we both believe and teach others.  Doctrines are a serious business, and anyone who violates them is in danger of being charged the “heresy”, or so I learned the hard way.  My professor dressed me down in no uncertain terms for my “heretical theology” of the Holy Trinity.  “Please understand”, she said, “I applaud your creative spirit and your use of your scientific knowledge to attempt to explain a God who is unexplainable.”  But God is a person, not to be compared to any earthly form or physical state.  God, our Triune God who exists as one God in three persons, is quite simply a holy mystery which defies any worldly human explanation I was told.   As Paul wrote to the Corinthian Church, “Now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then (meaning when the complete comes at the end of this age) we will see face to face. Now we can know only in part; then we will know fully, even as we are fully known.”  In our humanness, we can both experience and understand only so much about the true nature of God and God’s kingdom.  Some bright morning when the perfect one, Christ Jesus our Lord, returns everything will be made clear to us.  Everything we have blindly trusted by our faith will be revealed to us when we meet Jesus face to face.  Until that time, we must trust what we cannot see, and, in faith, believe God’s promises for those unspeakably wonderful joys we have yet to experience.  Our Triune God is simply a mystery-like no other.

     And so, dear church friends, I stand before you today exalting a wonderful God for whom there is no earthly comparison, no suitable explanation.  God is a mystery, plain and simple.  If we look to God for understanding, God will share with us what God has shared with faithful believers through the ages.  When Moses encountered God on Mount Sinai, he asked God what he should say to the people when they ask “What Gods have sent you to us?”  God replied “Say to this people ‘I am has sent me to you’.”   The prophet Isaiah also spoke of the marvelous mystery that is our God.  He recorded God as having revealed to him to share with the people of his time “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways.”  Let us praise and worship, honor and glorify, this day, the heavenly mystery that defies all attempts at a human explanation, our one God in three persons, the Blessed and Holy Trinity.  Our God truly is a sovereign, powerful and loving God-like no other.  Amen.