God is One

Trinity Flower

Propers: Holy Trinity, A.D. 2019 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

God is One. This is the heart of our faith.

By this we do not mean that there could, in theory, be many gods and that there just so happens to be one. Rather, our understanding of God is such that there could only be one; for God is not one creature amongst many in the cosmos. God is the Creator beyond the cosmos, the maker of this and all possible worlds. He is eternal, beyond time, and infinite, beyond space. He has no component parts or pieces. He is perfectly simple, in the way that pure white light is perfectly simple, yet contains within it all possible colors and combinations.

God is not a being in the way that we are beings. He does not exist in the way that we exist. Rather, God is Being itself, Existence itself, and we only exist insofar as we all live and move and have our being in Him. Every moment, every thought, every heartbeat, every breath only exists because God loves us, loves all that He has made, and pours out Himself for us. He didn’t just snap His fingers at the Big Bang. God creates us in every moment of our lives. If you exist, that proves that God loves you. Because if He were ever to stop, you would simply cease to be.

And so when we talk about monotheism we’re not just talking about math, as though we’ve subtracted every god but one. Monotheism is much greater than that, perhaps the greatest single idea humanity has ever been blessed to have. Monotheism turns the world inside out, so that instead of there being many gods within the larger universe, we understand this and all possible universes to exist within God. In monotheism, all of reality, all of possibility, is upheld forever in love.

And this is not a uniquely Christian idea. Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, Platonists, indeed any monotheistic faith understands God in this way. We all come from the One. We all worship the One. And we all seek to return, in grace and in peace, to unity with and in the One. What does make us unique—what makes us uniquely Christian—is of course Jesus Christ.

Even from a purely secular perspective, Jesus is the most impactful person who has ever lived. Fully one-third of the population of this planet in some way follows Him, teaches Him, worships Him. The only person whose moral teachings even come close in terms of profundity and importance would be the Buddha. And his is a story for another day.

Jesus lived in such a way that the first question people asked upon encountering Him was not “Who are you?” but “What are you?” He overturned all of our notions about power, religion, fate, love, life, death, morality, eternity. And yes, He built upon the strong and ancient foundation of our Israelite forebears. But He fulfilled that inheritance in such a way as transformed the entire world.

And all the people around Him, all who encountered Him, were inexorably drawn to a shocking, scandalous conclusion: that this Man was not simply another prophet; that He was not just one in a long line of rabbis or priests or kings or even angels. But He was something more, something infinitely more. And as reluctant as we were to see it, kicking and screaming, the realization slowly dawned on us, in wonder and horror and mystery and awe, that this Man Jesus is God.

Not a god. Not one amongst many. But the God, the Creator, the One. And it thrilled us. And it terrified us. And it didn’t seem to make any sense. Yet we could not escape the Truth as it stood before us in human flesh: that Jesus is God on earth, God come down, God emptying Himself, to become one of us, to stand beside us, to laugh and live and work and weep and suffer and bleed and die and rise up again with death defeated and hell harrowed and all of humanity raised up to heaven in His Name.

We had had hints of this before, in the Bible, in the Hebrew Scriptures, when the prophets of old spoke of Holy Wisdom and the Holy Spirit as being somehow both God and yet from God, God come down, the Creator entering the Creation. But it’s one thing to read it in a book of prophecy and poetry, and quite another to realize that here He stands before us in the flesh.

And then beyond that—beyond becoming one person—Jesus then poured out His Holy Spirit, His Breath and Life and Light and Love, the fire of His very essence, into us, into the Church, into humanity. So that we are the Body of Christ now! We are God upon this earth, divinity come down, humanity drawn up, so that we are sent to be God’s hands and feet and voice for a world still very much in need of Him. That is both the honor and the terror of calling oneself a Christian.

And the real scandal of this, the real shock, is that God did not simply send Christ and the Holy Spirit, as if they were sub-gods, deputy deities. Any monotheist could agree with that. God sends spirits all the time. Angels abound in other religions. But we have the audacity to assert that Christ really, truly is God. Not a mask. Not a disguise. Not some separate god who serves the real God hidden in the heavens. Somehow God is all these things yet still remains One God.

Our word for this is Trinity, itself a kind of paradox. It’s a splicing of our words for three (tri-) and one (unity). And so we say as Christians that God is Trinity, that God is Three and One, Three-in-One. But what does that mean, really?

When I was a kid, and my pastor would talk about the Trinity, I couldn’t quite fit my head around it. I imagined God as if He really were three separate persons: three dudes who had committee meetings, each with his own cup of coffee, where they all just happened to agree on everything. But that’s not what the Trinity is. We say, in English, that we believe in “One God in Three Persons,” but this is just straight-up a terrible translation. What Christians profess, in the Greek, is that God is “One Essence in Three Underlying Realities.” And that’s something very different.

What we mean by this is that when we encounter God as transcendent, infinite, the unknowable Creator aloft and aloof beyond the heavens—that’s real. That’s a real encounter with God the Father. But when we then encounter God in Christ—when we are stunned by the life, death, and resurrection of this Man, when we come to ask not “Who are you?” but “What are you?”—that’s real too. That’s really and truly God. If you want to know the Father, look to the Son, for as Christ Himself says, “The Father and I are One.”

And then when we encounter God as wild and living and immanent; when He blows unexpectedly through our lives like a wind, like a breath; when we see Him in nature and family and sudden inspiration, and especially in the community of the Church—that’s real too. The Holy Spirit is God Himself. Not a deputy. Not an angel. Not a sub-god. That’s God alive and at work in your life.

And all three of these encounters, all three underlying realities, are one and the same essential God; who does not have parts; and who is perfectly simple in His unceasing love poured out for us. And this is important. Because sometimes people act as though God has parts—as though part of Him, for example, demands justice, while another part seeks mercy, and that these two aspects of God—which would really be two different gods—must clash. Must fight. Must shed blood, like Zeus slaying Kronos.

This is why I roll my eyes whenever some fundamentalist preaches as though God the Father were a bloodthirsty tyrant demanding human sacrifice and Jesus threw Himself in front of the bus for us, to slake the Father’s thirst for vengeance. Thus are we saved from a vengeful god by a merciful god.

That is not a Christian understanding. That is not a Trinitarian God. To be clear: all of God loves you. All of God wills your forgiveness, your resurrection, your salvation. And He will go to any length, even to hell and back, to save us from ourselves, to bring us home in the love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, for all that He has made.

Because the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. And God is One.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.