The Community of God
Dr. D. William McIvor
June 6, 2004 — Trinity Sunday
Presbyterian Church in Sudbury

Romans 5.1-5 (NRSV)

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

Introduction

For the whole church, today is Trinity Sunday in the liturgical year, which always comes the Sunday after Pentecost. So our task this morning is to try making some sense of the Trinity. Yet some think a sensible trinity is an oxymoron. The well-known Catholic writer, Dorothy L. Sayers, wrote a generation ago in a parody of creedal language that, to the average churchgoer, the mystery of the Trinity means:

The Father incomprehensible,

The Son incomprehensible,

And the whole thing incomprehensible. Amen.

She thought that the doctrine of the Trinity was something put in by theologians to make it more difficult but it had nothing to do with daily life or ethics. “So perhaps it is best not to bother with it very much. Pastors out in the parish can hope that Trinity Sunday will fall on either Father’s Day or Flag Day, or that they can find some way to finesse the topic as long as no one ever asks them to explain it.”

I have on occasion been asked to explain the Trinity. I’m sure my questioners were impressed not with the clarity of my answer but that I stammered along with more ums and uhs than usual. But I’m not alone. The Trinity just doesn’t permit simple explanation. Sayers quoted a well-known Catholic theologian named Karl Rahner who wrote, “We must be willing to admit that, should the doctrine of the Trinity have to be dropped as false, the major part of religious literature could well remain virtually unchanged … The catechism of head and heart (as contrasted with the printed catechism) … would not have to change at all if there were no Trinity.”[1]

Admittedly, then, we are in difficult terrain. But let’s push along and see what headway we can make with the Trinity and how the doctrine should relate to our lives today.

The first clue to finding our way is in my title: “The Community of God.” The second clue is in the text. In his Letter to the Romans, Paul wrote about God, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit all in one paragraph. And he wrote hundreds of years before the church fully developed the doctrine of the Trinity, a doctrine that says that God is One God in Three Persons. Paul was writing within thirty years of the earthly ministry of Jesus and was expressing the reality experienced in the early Christian community. The reality was this: the Christian community was called into being by a God who related to them in a Tri-unity. In other words, within the one God was a community of relationships known as Father, Son, and Spirit. This community of God called the community of God’s people into being.[2]

Now let’s see if we can get a little more practical. In terms of today’s text, the Trinity means that the community of God gives the community of God’s people the most important thing of all: peace.[3] Let’s talk about having peace with God.

We have peace with God

Paul wrote, “We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Whether we know it or not, peace is the one thing we most want and need.

Dante, the great poet of the Renaissance who gave us the classic The Divine Comedy, was exiled from his home in Florence and cast down by the cruel turns of fate. So he determined to walk from Italy to Paris where he could study philosophy in an effort to find the clue to the riddle of human destiny. In his wanderings, Dante found himself a weary pilgrim, forced to knock at the door of Santa Croce Monastery to find refuge from the night. A surly brother within was finally aroused, came to the door, flung it open, and in a gruff voice asked, “What do you want?”

Dante answered in a single word: “Peace.”[4]

Whether we know it or not, peace is what we most want and need.

In our wanderings in life, whatever they may be like, whether we are young, middle-aged, or older-aged, the thing we most need is peace. I was reminded by Dante of another wanderer, a wanderer in the Bible named Jacob. You remember him. Here was a man who has just deceived his father and cheated his brother out of an inheritance. So he hits the road, like Dante, a wanderer. And one night he had a dream of a ladder going up to heaven. He understood from the dream that God’s response to finding him wandering, vulnerable, sleeping all alone in open country, was not to strike him down for his sins but to give him a blessing. In other words, the response of God was to give him peace.

Jacob awoke from the dream in awe, exclaiming, “Surely the Lord is in this place — and I did not know it!” For once, his better instincts took hold, and he responded by worshiping God. He took the stone that he’d kept close all night, perhaps to use as a weapon if a wild animal or his furious brother Esau were to attack him, and set it as a shrine, leaving it for future travelers or wanderers, so that they, too, would know that this was a holy place, the dwelling place of God, a place where God’s peace was made known.

Some years ago I traveled frequently for our denomination and on one of my travels I noticed a young couple with an infant waiting to catch a plane. Traveling with a baby can be a real pain. But at least this baby for at least that moment was having a wonderful time. If anyone got close enough to be seen by that baby, it responded with giggles and smiles and absolute delight.

I was very surprised to read, then, that in one of her books, Kathleen Norris relates a very similar experience. She said it was beautiful to see. The drab departure gate became a gate of heaven. She wrote, “As I watched that baby play with any adult who would allow it, I felt as awe-struck as Jacob, because I realized that this is how God looks at us, staring into our faces in order to be delighted, to see the creature he made and called good, along with the rest of creation. And God, looks right through whatever evil we’ve done in our lives or whatever sets us wandering to the creature made in the divine image.”

Norris said that she thinks only God and well-loved infants can see like that. But it gives her hope to think that when God gazed on the sleeping Jacob, he looked right through the tough little schemer and saw something good, if only a capacity for awe, for recognizing God and worshipping. That Jacob worshiped badly, trying to bargain with God, didn’t seem to matter. God promised to be with him always.[5]

That’s what peace with God means. God loves to look at us, and loves it when we will look back at him. Even when we try to run away from our troubles, as Jacob did, God will find us, and bless us, even when we feel most alone, unsure if we’ll survive the night. God will find a way to let us know that God is with us in this place, wherever we are, however far we think we’ve run. And Norris points out that maybe this is one reason we worship — to respond to God’s grace which brings us peace. We praise God not to celebrate our own faith but to give thanks for the faith God has in us. To let ourselves look at God, and let God look back at us. And to laugh, and sing, and be delighted because God has called us his own and made us a community which rejoices in the community of God.

Conclusion

So we have peace with God and peace brings hope. Paul said, “ … hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit … ” The community of God not only gives us peace. It give us hope.

Hope is not wishful thinking or whistling in the dark. Hope is the capacity to go on, no matter our struggles, no matter our wanderings, because God is with us. I encountered a wonderful poem not long ago that describes what the Trinity — the relationships within God and the relationships with us — does in our lives.

Loving Spirit, Holy Spirit, You have chosen me to be;

You have drawn me to Your wonder, You have set Your sign on me.

The most important thing to remember as Christians is that we are not alone. God has chosen us to be. We are called into existence by God and live every moment being drawn to God’s wonder. In fact, there is a mark upon us, a reference to the sign of baptism. Do you think no one can see the sign made by baptismal waters? God sees the sign.

The second verse of the poem reads:

Like a mother You enfold me, Hold my life within Your own,

Feed me with Your very body, Form me of Your flesh and bone.

What a wonderful image of God’s creative love: we are embraced like a mother embraces us. One of the most damnable things about parental child abuse, perhaps even worse than the harm caused to children, is that it destroys the setting in which we can learn what God’s love is like. Like a mother, God’s love enfolds us and holds us.

The third verse says:

Like a father You protect me, Teach me the discerning eye,

Hoist me up upon Your shoulder, Let me see the world from high.

I love that verse. We have a picture in our family scrapbooks of our daughter Kristen riding on my shoulders. She was about 2 years old at the time, smiling happily, hanging on to my hair — I had a lot more to hang on to back then! What a view we have from our fathers’ shoulders. So it is with God.

In the final verse we read:

Loving Spirit, in Your closeness, I am known and held and blest:

In Your promise is my comfort, In Your presence I may rest.[6]

In the closeness of God we are held and blessed, comforted and at rest. That’s why we rejoice in the Tri-unity and find in the community of God our abiding peace and hope.

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