June 15, 2025 The Holy Trinity, John 16:12-15

            A little girl who lived next door to a cemetery had an old teddy bear that was care worn and ragged.  It had been repaired many times but it had deteriorated to the point where the stuffing was just bursting out everywhere and no new stitches would hold.  The girl - sadly, reluctantly – knew that the bear had reached the end of its life.  She felt that the most appropriate thing to do would be to give it a proper burial.  Living next door to a cemetery she had overheard many a funeral.  She confidently set out to do what she knew how to do.  She selected a nice spot in the yard.  She dug a little hole for the bear to be buried in.  Then she had a little funeral service saying the kinds of things she’d heard in funerals, concluding with, “In the name of the Father and of the Son, and into the hole he goes!”

            This silly mistake in the understanding of the Trinity sets us up to understand the much more important way the Trinity and theology affect our lives.

            As I said at the beginning of the service, this is Holy Trinity Sunday.  It falls the Sunday after Pentecost and it is a Sunday I almost always ignore.  Why?  Because preaching a sermon on the Trinity is tough.  The doctrine of the Trinity is hard to understand, seems barely relevant to our lives, and is dull to talk about.  About the only interesting thing I’ve ever come across about the nature of the Trinity is the YouTube video St. Patrick’s Bad Analogies.  (We’ve seen it in worship and I can show it again at coffee hour.)

            Yet we do not do well to completely ignore the doctrine of the Trinity.  So this year being the 1700^th anniversary of the Council of Nicea is a good time to give it some attention.

The Trinity is an immensely complex theological construct and basically impossible to understand.  How can Christians say that there is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, yet not three gods but one God?  First grade math teaches you that one plus one plus one equals three.  But in theology one plus one plus one still equals one.  And then there’s our understanding of Jesus, one of three personalities in the one God.  We say that Jesus is one being with two natures – divine and human.  So, with theological math concerning the whole Trinity one plus one plus one equals one.  And then within one third of that Trinity one plus one also still equals one.  With this kind of logic its little wonder why churches are declining many people in our society think Christianity is absurd!

Indeed, to an outsider it is a complex mess.  Read the Qur’an and you’ll see how Muhammed, encountering Christianity late in the 6^th century, thought Christians worshipped three gods.  You certainly can’t explain the Trinity to someone in the length of an elevator ride.  You can’t explain the Trinity if you have hours to do so!

We may also ask ourselves why does any of it matter?  Isn’t simple faith in Jesus enough?  Aren’t we saved by grace?  If we have to have a thorough intellectual understanding of the Trinity in order to be saved then we’re all in big trouble!

There’s also the weakness of theology itself.  Theology means a word about God.  But can God be understood or explained at all?  It only takes one sentence to completely undermine any and every theological system that could ever be created.  Here’s the sentence:  If God can do anything, then can God create a rock so heavy that God can’t lift it?

Right there, and as simple as that, and you’ve completely jammed any headway theology could ever possibly make!  The truth is that the human mind cannot begin to comprehend God.  God is so far beyond us that we can’t understand anything about God at all.  That then give us a foundation for Christian beliefs.  Christianity claims that in Jesus God does enter into creation as a human in order to reveal God’s nature to us in a way that we can understand.  We cannot understand God, so God comes to us in a way we can understand; at least in part.

Simple as that belief is, it quickly gets complicated.  What is the nature of Jesus?  What was he before he was born?  Did he exist at all?  And how can he be both God and human?  If he is God then how can he die?  And if God has died then how can God be resurrected?  Is there something greater than God and death that can do that?  Questions like these quickly spiral out of control.

The Council of Nicea was the first time where leaders from across Christianity officially gathered to codify some official beliefs.  Prior to that there were gatherings here and there, and there were many letters written that show the early Christians were wrestling with many things, but they were never able to openly come together to hash things through.

The emperor Constantine called the Council of Nicea in order to deal with many issues, and one issue in particular.  That issue was the belief that has become known as Arianism.  Arius was a priest in Alexandria, Egypt late in the third and early in the fourth centuries.  From his thinking and reading of early Christian writings (Remember, the Bible hadn’t yet been defined.) he struggled with an understanding of the nature of Jesus.  He argued that since only God the Father could be said to be the only absolute, unbegotten, eternity then Jesus had to be in some sense subordinate and inferior to the Father.  Arius’ ideas were ultimately rejected and considered heresy, but let’s not look down upon him too harshly.  He was wrestling with deep things and struggling to come up with reasonable explanations.

I’m not going to bore you (or intellectually exhaust you) with the intricacies of the arguments but if you spin out Arius’ thoughts you come up with an understanding of Jesus where Jesus was some sort of an intermediate being created by God who was never really divine nor fully a creature.  Understood this way, Jesus is odd and weak.  God as Father remains aloof.  The whole point of the crucifixion, how forgiveness works, the nature of divine love, and a whole host of other problems creep in.

Records indicate that the debates at the Council of Nicea were ferocious.  There are even some records, albeit questionable in their reliability, that say the council sometimes turned violent.

Ultimately however, the Council of Nicea began to hammer out the understanding of the Trinity that we have today.  The Nicene Creed is often cited as being created by the Council of Nicea.  Strictly speaking that is not true.  The Nicene Creed in the form we have it today does not come about until decades later at the Council of Constantinople in 381.  However, forerunners of the Nicene Creed were indeed created at the council.

As I pointed out in my article in the June newsletter the Nicene Creed is full of obscure words and strange concepts.  Who cares whether Jesus was, “begotten not made”?  And yet here’s the thing.  Every word of the Nicene Creed – and I mean EVERY word – has been painstakingly chosen and argued over.  Study that creed carefully sometime and you discover that it is a highly complex set of logical tensions that create a very delicate balancing act stretching the very limits of what the human brain can comprehend.

Why do we say that creed in worship?  Because it is the only worldwide statement of faith all churches (or almost all churches) agree to.  While we say that the Bible is the rule and norm for faith it is actually the Nicene Creed which gives us a guide for how to interpret the Bible.  Take away the Nicene Creed and Christianity as we know it falls apart.

We may not understand that creed, but we understand God from its perspective, we study the Bible from its perspective, we preach and teach from its perspective, we pray from its perspective, and we live out our daily lives from its perspective.

Does the Nicene Creed give us a full and correct understanding of the nature God?  I would say not.  Nothing can do that and humans aren’t capable of it.  But that creed does give us an understanding of God that helps us live a meaningful relationship with God and with each other.  The math of the Trinity and the nature of Jesus does not work at all.  But the tensions give us something we can live by.

Ultimately we give thanks for those church leaders 1700 years ago who were wresting with these concepts.  They had no framework to go by, but by the Holy Spirit they came up with something that works.  We inherit a complex, rich, and wonderfully developed faith.  We do well to appreciate that.  And even if we don’t understand it, we can live it as fully as possible and enjoy the confidence of God’s love.