Sermon on John 16:12-15

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

Today is Holy Trinity Sunday, and it’s got to be one of the most confusing Sundays of the year.

After all, the Trinity isn’t something our finite human brains can fully wrap themselves around. And when we try to come up with analogies to describe the Trinity, they all fall short and can evenget us into heretical territory.

For instance, a common analogy is that the Trinity is like water: it can be in three different states (liquid, solid, or gas), but it’s the same substance. However, in general, water isn’t in all three states at once, so that’s where the analogy breaks down, because God is always Father, Son, and Holy Spirit or Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer or however we try to express the Trinity in our finite, human language.

It’s especially tricky because the Bible isn’t explicit on giving us direction about the doctrine of the Trinity. Jesus didn’t sit his disciples down one day and say, “Listen up: this is exactly how I’m related to God the Father and God the Holy Spirit.”

So, the early Church had to wrestle with what it means that Jesus was God in the flesh, and that he sent an Advocate after him, and that the Bible equates Jesus with Wisdom as described in our reading from Proverbs which says Wisdom was there at creation, and that Jesus said in the Gospel of John that he and the Father are one, and all the thorny theological questions like that.

It might sound a little nitpicky to need to pin all this down exactly, and in general, I agree. But the implications for the nature of God and God’s relationship with humanity and creation were so important that people kicked each other out of the Church over it. If you want to hear more about that, come to my study on creeds later this year – details to come.

But long story short, Christians have enacted violence and fought wars over doctrinal issues like this.

And unfortunately, violence is still carried out today by Christians in the name of God.

Our Social Justice Discussion Group is reading Seeds of Racism in the Soul of America by Paul R. Griffin, and it’s making the argument that the well-educated Puritan clergy of New England laid the theological foundations for justifying enslavement in the US.For instance, they wrote horrible things about God having created humanity with a hierarchy—no surprise who was on top and who was on the bottom, instead of God creating all humanity equally in God’s image. White Christians in the North had a huge hand in reinforcing the concept of white supremacy that still has violent effects today.

One example we remember every year occurred ten years ago this week. After sitting through the entirety of a Bible study on June 17, 2015 at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, a twenty-one-year-old white man shot and killed nine Black people and injured another. He said he hoped to start a “race war.”

Our denomination remembers this event every year, because the shooter grew up in an ELCA church, and two of the people he killed, both pastors, went to an ELCA seminary.

Our denomination is implicated in numerous instances of violence justified in the name of God throughout our history.

Martin Luther, who wrote and preached beautifully about God’s grace and love and freedom, also wrote really terrible things about Jewish people. The Nazi movement used Luther’s writings to justify the Holocaust. We have to grapple with what we embrace from Luther’s work and what we denounce.

One of Luther’s more helpful teachings is that we are all simultaneously saints and sinners. We all have great capacity for loving action and great capacity for violent action.

That also affects how we view scripture. When we search the Bible, we can find individual verses and passages for pretty much whatever we’re looking for: justification for silencing women, for excluding LGBTQ people,for hating people of another racial background, for beating ourselves up for not being perfect, even for genocide.

But we can also find a beautiful love story between God and humanity that begins with God creating this beautiful universe and calling it good. We read about God over and over again calling God’s people to a more abundant and free life. We find that God met us in the flesh to expand our view of who matters and belongs to God. We see God’s Spirit continually surprising the early Church with how God is at work loving this world.

When we look beyond individual verses to the Bible’s themes of love, peace, and liberation, we can see the nature of God in the Trinity. We see that our God is relational and loving—within Godself and with allCreation.Even just in our readings today, we see beautiful aspects of God’s character.

Our reading from Proverbs shows Wisdom, associated with the second Person of the Trinity, working and playing alongside the Creator from the beginning of time and delighting in humanity.

In Romans, we read that “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”The Holy Spirit fills us with God’s love.

In our reading from the Gospel of John, Jesus promises that the Holy Spirit will bring truth to his disciples and alludes to a reciprocity and generosity within Godself when he says,“All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”

The Trinity is confusing, but we can glean understanding of God’s nature and character when we stop worrying about the exact mechanics of it (unless that really floats your boat, in which case, maybe come talk to me about going to seminary).

It’s good to grapple with challenging questions of faith and to dwell in the mysteries of God, but sometimes we can get caught up in the frustrations of not fully understanding and miss the beautiful truths God is offering us: we may not fully understand the Trinity, but we can marvel at our God who is relational, generous, and loving.

We can find whatever we’re looking for in the Bible, so let’s make sure we’re asking the Holy Spirit to guide us, looking for big themes in the Bible and not just individual verses, and keeping our values in mind. This congregation values service, compassion, and inclusion. This is how we feel God calling us to relate to our neighbors and with each other.

We can find these values throughout the Bible—in the Creator’s service in bringing abundant life, in Jesus’ continuous compassion throughout his ministry and beyond, and in the ways the Holy Spirit draws the circle of belonging ever bigger—beyond our wildest dreams.

Let’s hold onto these values in our life togetheras the congregation that feeds people body and soul.

Let’s remember the Emanuel Nine this week and commit to resisting the power of white supremacy wherever we find it.

Let’s celebrate Pride Month and give thanks for the many LGBTQ ancestors and current voices advocating for inclusion and belonging.

On this Father’s Day, let’s honor the positive father figures in our lives and strive to find whatever healing looks like around those who should have been positive father figures in our lives. If God the Father is a helpful image for you, may you feel safe and loved in the arms of God the Father.

And secure in the love of God the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, may we each be fierce in our service, compassion, and inclusion.