University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

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Psalm 8:1-9

O LORD, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens. Out of the mouths of babes and infants you have founded a bulwark because of your foes, to silence the enemy and the avenger. When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas. O LORD, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

Romans 5:1-5

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.

John 16:12-15

"I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

In the life of University Presbyterian Church, today is a day of many things. 

It is the first Sunday of the Sunday School Summer break, an opportunity for families to have a more concentrated devotion on Sunday morning worship, here, or church wherever they are.

It is the last Sunday for the choir before their Summer break, a time for the choir to worship in the sanctuary and enjoy community with a different perspective.  We are so thankful for their ministry and for this time of renewal and refreshment.

This Sunday is both of these things here at University Presbyterian Church, but there is also liturgical significance to this Sunday.  It is, in our worship life, the Sunday that is set aside on the liturgical calendar as Trinity Sunday.  You’ve heard it announced by John Rogers.  We’ve sung the words, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty!  God in three persons, blessed Trinity!.”  We’ve heard three words from the Bible, speaking to the three aspects of God, the Psalm, The Epistle, and the Gospel readings.  God who is three-in-one, one-in-three. Creation, Salvation, and Sustenance.

It is a day when we worship God as Creator.  The God who created all that we see and continues to create.  God who created, as written in Psalm 8, “all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.”  God created all of that.  All of this.  And, going back to the Psalm, put us in charge.  Dominion.  In the Hebrew, mashal. לשַׁמָ, To rule.  To govern.  To care.¹   We are the ones in charge, but we are not the last word.  The last word?  The sovereign, the one who made it.  Gives it.  Sustains it.  God. 

Through God the Creator, we are called to connect with creation.  To take responsibility for the hows, whys, and what nows when millions of gallons of oil are spilled and continue to escape into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.²  To act locally in order to preserve creation globally.  As any school child will tell you, to drive our cars less in order to save the polar bears who are running out of ice.   We are called to connect with creation in this way.  But that’s not all.  We are also called to celebrate and savor creation—sighting the very first firefly of the season.  The joy of fresh strawberries eaten while still warm from the sun.  And Us, created in the image of God.  Upon whom God gazed and said, “that’s good, that’s real good.”³ Caring and celebrating—some of the ways we worship God as Creator.

We worship God as the Word made flesh.  Jesus the Christ.  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. Jesus the Christ.  Who came and taught and lived and worshipped and travelled along the same paths we travel, paths of hope and disappointment, joy and fear.  Jesus who understands the complexity of Memorial Day, when we remember and give thanks for those who have given their lives fighting for this country, and at the same time we weep for living in a world where such sacrifices are deemed necessary. 

Jesus the Christ, who is not only a companion on the journey, but God who was willing to die in order to witness to the complete undefeatability of God’s love.    Love, offering a new way of living that does not return evil for evil but strengthens the fainthearted, helps the suffering, honors all people, and teaches us to love others not as we want to be loved but as Jesus loved us.  The kind of love that tells a criminal on a cross, "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise."⁴ The kind of love that could turn Saul the persecuter into Paul the preacher.   Love which converted the heart of author C.S. Lewis, while he was on his way to the zoo with his brother.  The future author of the Narnia Chronicles, Screwtape Letters, and Mere Christianity wrote, “"When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did."5 Who did that?  The love of Jesus Christ did that. 

Or consider Richard Semmler.  Have you ever heard of Richard Semmler?  Maybe not.  He is a man whose quiet faith in Jesus Christ has led him to give more than 60% of his income away.  Each and every year.  A math professor at Northern VirginiaCommunity College who gives away thirty times the national average for someone in his income bracket.  Money… and time, too.  Afternoons.  Weekends.  Vacation.  He follows the dollars and helps stretch them as far as possible.⁶ Richard Semmler is not a superhero.  He’s a man.  Who has welcomed the love of Jesus.   

Sins forgiven.  Lives changed.  We worship God as the Word made Flesh.  Jesus the Christ.

We worship God as the Holy Spirit.  When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. The Holy Spirit.  The tongues of flame on the heads of the earliest preachers, giving them the ability to communicate across boundaries.  Across languages.  To communicate.  Not just anything, the local crop reports of the news of the neighborhood, but the Gospel.  The Good News.   

More than thirty years ago, William Sloane Coffin preached, “Do not be anxious.  It may be that the Holy Spirit is urging upon some of us greater control in matters of food, drink, clothing, and shelter, not to mention gas and oil, and self-pity.  But the control in one area of life is only to liberate us in another….The Holy Spirit urges us to depart from the texts we have so carefully, so meticulously and so boringly written for our lives; as if our lives were to be controlled only by ourselves and never… by God himself who made us.  ‘No room for the Holy Spirit?’  The Holy Spirit is trying to crack open our armored life.  Or, to change the metaphor: while we think it’s a rational grip we have on life, in fact, it’s a white-knuckled grip. ⁷

What enables us to let go, to loosen our grip?  To do things we never thought we do?  To go and say and live in ways that are Gospel ways?  To know, in the words of Anne Lamott, “we are not hungry for what we do not have, but for what we do not give.” ⁸ The Holy Spirit.  We worship God as The Holy Spirit.

God.  The Trinity.  Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

God.  Sun. Ray.  Warmth.

God.  Rainbow of Promise.  Ark of Salvation.  Dove of Peace. 

The Trinity.  God in three ways.  Three aspects of one.  One God.  They interact and share in common, but they are three distinct forms.  Three aspects of one God, none subordinate to another and all eternal, all of them have always been.

Not a math equation to be figured out, but a mystery to be embraced.  For which we give thanks

A place of faith where the whole is truly bigger… greater… more than the sum of its parts. 9

For, with all of their divinity individually, the Trinity does something that no one aspect of God can do.  It calls us into relationship.  To be together, just as God is together as the three-in-one.

Today, as we worship God who Creates, God who Saves, and God who Keeps us Going, we can look around and see that we are the Trinity in Action.  God with Us here and now.

We, too, are called to be more than the sum of our parts.  More than any of us could be on our own.  Not by magic.  By God.

Brothers and sisters.  Beloved children of God.  By our very act of being here, lifting our voices together, we are beginning the embodiment of what God  Godself intended, is intending, and intends.   The Trinity, ultimately, isn’t something of which to make sense, it is a way to live.  And there is much that God has for us to be and to do.  Oil Spills.  Polar Bears.  Forgiveness.  Proclamation. 

But before you get overwhelmed, I want to tell you about a phone call I got the other day.

I was in my office, knee deep in commentaries.  New Interpreter’s Bible Dictionary.  Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity.  Aristotle’s Metaphysics.  Knee deep in Trinity.

When my phone rang.  My cell phone.  It wasn’t a number that I recognized, but that’s not unusual.  So I answered it.

"Hello?"

"Who is this?"

I hear voices in the background, but the voice on the phone is not one that I recognize. 

And so I respond:  "Who are you calling?"

"Who is this?"

"Well, who are you trying to call?"

I'm calling the number I found written on the wall underneath, 'for a good time call.'

"I think you have the wrong number."

"Well, can you give me a good time?"

I pause, looked around at the books.  Looked at my watch and realized that I was running late to pick up my six-year-old for swim practice, and realized that this was my list for the week.  Swim practice, hospital visits, Trinity.  Trinity, swim practice, pastoral visit.  And so I told the guy on the phone:  "Dude.  You've REALLY got the wrong number.  You don't even know how wrong this number is."

And then he hung up.

But you know, as I’ve thought about it.  I don’t think that he had the wrong number.  I think that I was wrong.  The Trinity is a big deal.  It is a big deal in faith.  In life.   God is calling us into the world to be and do lots of things.

But we’re also called to have a good time.  To be joyful.  The Trinity, in its togetherness, I believe, also reminds us of the importance of joy.  Of gathering as a family around a table, staying long after the food has been eaten, because there is still laughter to be shared and stories to be told. 

It may not have been the good time that the person on the other end of the phone was seeking, but it is the kind of good time that nurtures and sustains us.  It is important, too.

God.  Speaker.  Word.  Breath.

God.  Source.  Salvation.  Hope.

Sisters and Brothers.  Today is Trinity Sunday, and we are together, just as God is One in Three.   Three in One. 

And this is a strong foundation on which we can proclaim:  Alleluia!  Amen.

  ¹http://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?Strongs=H4910&t=KJV

  ²http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/01/us/20100501-oil-spill-tracker.html?ref=earth

³ .This is a line borrowed from Big Mamma Makes the World, by Phyllis Root.  Helen Oxenbury, Illustrator.  http://www.amazon.com/Momma-Makes-World-Phyllis-Root/dp/0763626007/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_7

  ⁴Luke 23: 39-43.

  ⁵http://www.cslewisinstitute.org/cslewis/index.htm

  ⁶http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/10/AR2005061001843_2.html

  ⁷ The collected sermons of William Sloane Coffin: the Riverside years, Volume 1 (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2008) Page 181.  The sermon from which this quote was taken was preached on March 25, 1979.

http://books.google.com/books?id=yII7PLA8oWcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=william+sloane+coffin&cd=4#v=onepage&q=Holy%20Spirit&f=false

⁸  http://www.worldmag.com/articles/8036

  ⁹This quote is frequently attributed to Aristotle, but I have been unable to find any conclusive reference.  

After my research (although I readily admit that I am NOT an expert in this) I think it is more likely a false attribution. 

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Who_originated_the_phrase_'The_whole_is_greater_than_the_sum_of_its_parts'

http://en.allexperts.com/q/Etymology-Meaning-Words-1474/Origins-phrase.htm