Three in One

Lenten Vespers, Week Two

Reading: The Apostles’ Creed

I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.
He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit
and born of the virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again.
He ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of the saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.

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.

Lent is a season of catechesis; that is, basic instruction in the Christian faith. We began last week with the Law of God, summarized in the Ten Commandments and, more importantly, in the Beatitudes of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Next up is the Creed, from the Latin word credo, meaning “I believe.” And the Creed indeed consists of the central beliefs of the Christian faith, confessed at every Baptism and reaffirmed at every Divine Liturgy.

The Apostles’ Creed—along with its expanded forms, the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds—follows a Trinitarian pattern, confessing God as Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit. And the Trinity must be at once the most sublime and most confounding conviction of orthodox Christianity. We can neither avoid it, nor are we terribly good at explaining it. God is, after all, a mystery, infinitely greater, infinitely better, infinitely more compassionate than any idea that we could possibly have about Him. We can only ever speak of God in analogy, in truths that point beyond themselves to a greater absolute Truth.

Christians, of course, are monotheists. In this we are not unique. Most every serious system of religious and spiritual practice is monotheistic, or at least monotheist compatible. The dictionary will tell you that monotheism is belief in one god. But it’s more than that. Monotheism isn’t about math: as though I believe in one, you believe in two, they believe in 12, and so on and so forth. Monotheism, rather, is the conviction that there is one infinite Unity behind all the realities that we could ever experience or imagine.

This One is the source and ground of all being, the Creator of all things, in whom we all live and move and have our being. This One is infinite, beyond space, beyond time, beyond human conceptions of scale; all-knowing, all-powerful, and all good; everywhere present yet nowhere at all. This One is Goodness and Beauty and Truth itself: not a being, but Being itself; not a god, but the God beyond all gods, eternal and perfect and loving and free.

I could go on. Philosophers and mystics and theologians certainly have, at length, through thousands of years and forests of paper. It seems that when you are describing a God beyond all words, you need to use a lot of words. Yet all fall short. And this brings us to one word in particular: Trinity.

Trinity is our word for the belief that God is Three in One. And rather like the God that this belief describes, it is often easier to say what it is not, rather than what it is. When we say that God is Three in One, we do not mean that there are three separate gods who just happen to agree on everything, as though Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit had board meetings every morning with each resultant vote unanimous.

Neither do we mean that there is One God who merely appears behind different masks: as though this morning He’s wearing His Father hat, then this evening He’ll switch to His Son hat, and maybe tomorrow if He’s feeling saucy He might dress as the Holy Spirit. In such Modalism* the true God remains hidden behind all Three.

Now, I could get technical here, and explain that the Trinity understands God as One Essence in Three Hypostases, or Underlying Realities. And that’s true—certainly truer than saying that we believe in One God in Three Persons, which I find to be a very unfortunate translation. But I’m not sure all that’s terribly helpful. So let us begin where Christian belief must always begin: with the person of Jesus Christ.

The people who knew Jesus—who heard Him preach, watched Him heal, shared His company, ate His bread, witnessed His Crucifixion, and absolutely panicked at His Resurrection—grew steadily more convinced that He was, impossibly, God. And this idea was even more scandalous to them than it is to us today. They were all good Jews, after all, good monotheists. But the truth is that most all monotheists, Jews included, have some tradition regarding multiplicity within the Godhead. That is to say: God can be many things at once, and still be One God.

Somehow this Jesus, this Christ, was God on earth, God-With-Us, God become one of us. He really, truly was a human being, no illusion. And yet He really, truly was God. The presence and the power of God shone through Him so perfectly and so transparently that we simply could not tell where His humanity ends and His divinity begins. And Jesus isn’t some mask that God wears, mind you, some disguise He hides behind. No, the face of Christ is the face of God—really, truly, fully. How this works is a mystery. Yet the more we experience this mystery, the more we know it’s true.

And through Jesus—through His words and His promises, His Sacraments and His Holy Spirit—God came to dwell within us: both within our community, our ecclesia, the Church; and within the heart of every Baptized believer, every sainted sinner. And again, this was not counterfeit. It wasn’t merely some pale reflection or emanation of the real God hidden away in the heavens. No, the Holy Spirit too is God, really and truly, just as surely as is Jesus, just as surely as is the Father of us all.

God is beyond us, God is within us, and God is one of us, all at once, all at the same time. And these are not masks or hats that God wears to stay hidden. No, they are the true faces of God, the revelation of who God is in Himself. That whole notion of One God in Three Persons is in fact better translated as One God in Three Faces.

Try to explain it, try to rationalize it, and it all just sounds like nonsense, like Christians cannot count. Yet in the experience of our community—in our shared life of prayer and of service, of love and forgiveness, of resurrection and new life in Jesus Christ—we all know that this is true.

Jesus Christ is God in the flesh. And He comes to share God’s Life with you.

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

*In emphasizing the Oneness of God, one risks accusations of Modalism from overeager armchair theologians. Modalism, however, is not simply affirmation of God’s Unity. It is the notion that while God appears to us as Trinity, that isn’t really who God is in Himself. In Modalism He “really is” One and just shows up in three different masks or modes.

Christian orthodoxy, however, affirms that Trinity is who God really is in and of Himself. The Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit are not simply human perception, but the relationship of God to Himself as Knower, Knowledge, and Known; as Lover, Love, and Beloved. Thus my emphasis on the Trinity as Three (true) Faces rather than Three (false) Masks.

Of course, all of this is speaking analogously. But analogies convey truths.