Egg Yolks, Apple Pie and Heresy!

The Holy Gospel According to St. Matthew, the 28th Chapter

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some

doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” 

Today is Holy Trinity Sunday.  Right now around the world pastors are using terrible food and beverage metaphors or being incredibly boring in a terrible attempt to explain the unexplainable.  Some are even now saying, God is like water because water is steam, water and ice... or that God is like an egg because an egg has a shell, a yolk and the white stuff... or like an apple pie because it has crust, apples and that sticky, sweet jelly goo.  The trouble with using food to explain God is that first off, none of these metaphors even begin to adequately describe God, second, they are all technically ancient heresies but WORST of all by far is that they make everyone hungry and thirsty right in the middle of church!  Other pastors have decided not to commit an ancient heresy but are instead committing the sin of being incredibly boring.  They are describing the history of the Trinity.  How excitement filled the room when the Council at Nicaea in the year 325 agreed to take a bathroom break after discussing the finer points of the third article on the qualities of the ZZZzzzZZZZ.

For me, the best thing we can do with Trinity Sunday is to simply be honest and say the doctrine of the Trinity is our completely inadequate human attempt to fully describe the fully un-describeable.  I personally like that way best for a couple of reasons.  First, I actually like that I can’t figure God out all the way.  If I could figure God out, then God would not be incredible enough to take care of my incredible problems.  I need an indescribably large and powerful God because there have been, and I suspect there will be again, times in my life where my problems seem to me to be indescribably large and powerful.   The second reason I like the “I don’t know” approach is that’s exactly where the disciples were at in this lesson.  It says some disciples believed and some doubted, but in the Greek, which is the language the New Testament was originally written in, it says that they all believed AND they all doubted... ALL at the same time.  

I don’t know about you but that sounds a lot like me!  I believe and I doubt all at the same time.  I totally trust that God will care for me and then still worry if things will be OK.  I don’t give my problems to God and then stop there.  I give my problems to God and then snatch ‘em back so I can worry about them more.  In other words I believe and doubt all at the same time, just like the disciples did!  Now, that kind of believing and doubting at the same time might not seem very faithful or saintly.  But that is exactly the same kind of imperfect faith that those saints named Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and the rest of them all had with Jesus standing right there in front of them!  There faith was imperfect.  My faith too is imperfect and what we understand about God is imperfect but, ... and here’s the interesting part, Jesus asked those imperfect disciples and Jesus asks us imperfect disciples to go out and do the mission anyway.  

Right there on that hill, Jesus sees the disciples believing and doubting all at the same time and simply goes ahead and gives them the mission anyway!  Go out and baptize people!  In other words, show them with water and the Word that they are loved by God without limit and without condition.  Then teach them what Jesus commanded.  In other words, teach them to live in Jesus’s backwards way of living, where we are blessed up front by God without any conditions and without any take-backs for any reason and then we’re given the opportunity to respond to God’s love for us by loving our neighbor the same way God first loved us... up front and without conditions even if that neighbor has always been, and probably always will be, a total jerk!  Our mission is to receive God’s unconditional love up front and then use that love to change the world for our neighbors for the better, believing and doubting and tripping and stumbling every step of the way. 

DOING God’s love in the world is what believing is really all about.  We’ve been mistakenly convinced, that “believing” means figuring something out with our heads, but back in Jesus’s day, believing wasn’t a head thing.  Back in Jesus’s day believing meant simply trying to live your life the way Jesus lived his life.  Back then it meant trying to transform our character to be more like Jesus’s character... more grace filled, more peace filled, more generous, forgiving, loving, compassionate and more self giving.    

We’ve become persuaded that we have to get our beliefs right in our heads BEFORE we can be allowed to bring God’s love out into the world.  But the truth is, God knows none of us will ever have it all locked down in our heads any more than the disciples did!  What God is trying to help us understand is that belief doesn’t start in our heads... it starts in our feet and our hands... DOING our faith... sometimes well and sometimes not so well and our faith grows from there.

God is asking you and me to start exactly where we are today.  Use the brain, hands and feet and whatever else we’ve got, just as it is today, and simply try today to be a little more like Christ to our neighbor than we were yesterday.  Wearing the cloths we’ve got on, working the same job, driving the same car, using the same words, simply go out and do something... even the smallest of somethings... for someone else who's feeling lost, last, lonely or left out... then, tomorrow, do another little thing and together, Jesus tells us, all those little things will change the world.  

We will never be able to wrap our minds around God with the doctrine of the Trinity or anything else for that matter.  But the doctrine of the Trinity and this lesson do give us some important clues about God.  God, it seems, is about making unbreakable relationships with all of us, regardless of how we believe or what we do in this world.  You and I and all of creation are bound up in God’s love as tightly as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are bound together.  Nothing can undo that love.  Nothing can unbind that love.  Nothing we feel, nothing we think and nothing we could ever do can unbind us from God’s love for us.

Every week that’s important to remember.  This week in our community it is especially important to remember!  NOTHING can separate us from God’s love.  God in Christ is, and will always be, with each and every one of us forever... in our faith and in our doubts, in our brightest of times and in our most horribly dark and hopeless times, when we win the fights with our personal demons and even when we don't...  God’s infinite and unconditional love, Christ’s eternal life giving presence and the life changing power of the Holy Spirit is with us always... right to the end of the age.  Amen.