Trinity Sunday

By Fr. Chuck Collins on May 29, 2015 in From Our Pastors

Dear Christ Church family,

Fr. Chris, Tracy, Owen, Anna and Claire are off for a much-deserved time of refreshment. Please join me in praying that this sabbatical will be filled for them with wonderful, surprising, and replenishing times with each other and with God.

This coming Sunday is “Trinity Sunday.” It is common to hear, “Don’t even bother trying to understand it; it’s too mysterious to comprehend; after all, the math doesn’t add up!” This is nonsense, of course. The Trinity is a central teaching about God in the Bible. Although the word “trinity” is nowhere found in Holy Scripture, the doctrine itself is plainly and gloriously taught there. And although God is bigger than our ability to fully comprehend him (otherwise he wouldn’t be God), we can certainly know him as he reveals himself in Holy Scripture.

The doctrine of the Trinity can be stated very simply, as St. Augustine does in seven statements:

  1. The Father is God.
  2. The Son is God.
  3. The Holy Spirit is God.

(and because the three are not just different names for the same thing…)

  1. The Father is not the Son.
  2. The Son is not the Holy Spirit.
  3. The Holy Spirit is not the Father.

(and because there are not three Gods…)

  1. There is only one God.

The “Trinity” is suggested in the plural titles used for God at critical places in the Bible (e.g. “Let us make man in our image” [Gen. 3:22]). The Bible attributes the creation to the Father (Ps. 102), to the Son (Col. 1), and to the Holy Spirit (Gen. 1:2). Each of the persons of the Trinity are referred to as God; each is shown to be equal to the other two; and the threefoldness is affirmed in Jesus’ baptism (Matt. 3) and in the Great Commission (Matt. 28).

Just a few minutes before Jesus left this world for heaven he delivered the Great Commission (Matt. 28). Among other things, he told them to baptize all new disciples in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But what did Jesus mean when he said “Baptize them in the name” of the Trinity? The idea of pouring water over bald chubby heads three times to usher them into the New Covenant Community is certainly part of the meaning of baptism. He meant this and something much deeper.

Baptism is a borrowed term from the secular world that literally means “to immerse or saturate,” just as someone would thrust a cloth into a vat of dye so that every fiber is saturated (or baptized). And “names” were so much more meaningful in biblical times than they are today because then they were chosen or changed to express the true nature of a person (or the hope of parents that their children would live into their names). Therefore, when Jesus asked the disciples to baptize new believers in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, he was asking that they be saturated by God himself – his Name, his character, his nature. Jesus’ focus in the Great Commission is not so much on a liturgical rite that brings someone into community, as important as that is, but that new believers will be thoroughly in God and God in them – that every fiber of their being will be affected.

Doctrine matters – because the revealed truth of Scripture matters, because God wants us to know him and his plan for our lives. May we know him in the fullness and power of his name!