Then Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd: “Fellow Jews and all of
you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say. These people are not drunk, as you suppose. It’s only nine in the morning! No, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel:
I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
your young men will see visions,
your old men will dream dreams.
Even on my servants, both men and women,
I will pour out my Spirit in those days,
and they will prophesy.
I will show wonders in the heavens above
and signs on the earth below,
blood and fire and billows of smoke.
The sun will be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood
before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord.
And everyone who calls
on the name of the Lord will be saved.’ (Joel 2)
“Fellow Israelites, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know. This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him. David said about him:
Because he is at my right hand,
I will not be shaken.
Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices;
my body also will rest in hope,
because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead,
you will not let your holy one see decay.
You have made known to me the paths of life;
you will fill me with joy in your presence.’ (Psalm 16)
“Fellow Israelites, I can tell you confidently that the patriarch David died and was buried, and his tomb is here to this day. But he was a prophet and knew that God had promised him on oath that he would place one of his descendants on his throne. Seeing what was to come, he spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah, that he was not abandoned to the realm of the dead, nor did his body see decay. God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of it. Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear. For David did not ascend to heaven, and yet he said,
“Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.”’ (Psalm 110)
“Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.”
Today is Trinity Sunday and our
reading follows on directly from the reading for Pentecost we had last week.
Last week we heard about the first Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit was poured
out on the Jesus' disciples and they were blessed, praising God in many
languages. In response to this a crowd gathers around them wondering what is
happening, and Peter addresses them as we have heard. This is perhaps the first
Christian sermon, and it is rather humbling to be following in its steps today.
It is also a great reading for
Trinity Sunday, because here he talks about all three persons of the Trinity:
God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit being present and active in
the events of Easter and Pentecost, and through the three persons of God we are
carried up and included in God's great work, with the Spirit within us, the Son
beside us, and the Father above us. Humanity is the 4th part of this, called to
be part of Christ's body, and so surrounded by God.
In the Gospels, the disciples
often struggle to grasp what Jesus is telling them will happen, but here after
time with the resurrected Jesus following Easter, and with the Holy Spirit
newly come upon them they finally understand God's plan to build his Kingdom.
Here we see the very earliest Christian theology, the attempt to wrestle with
the astonishing things that the Disciples had seen. And the understanding of
God as a Trinity of persons is at the very centre of that from the beginning.
People sometimes struggle to
understand the idea of the Trinity, and they use all kinds of odd analogies to
compare God to things in our world. But while we should try to understand this
idea, we must remember that we will never fully grasp the nature of God with
our mortal, limited minds. But thanks to God revealing himself to us we can get
a partial view of his eternal nature "as in a cloudy mirror" .
This is profound and fundamental
stuff, and we should not expect it to be entirely simple, just as the world we
live in, the universe we live in, can be complex and paradoxical. The more
Science delves into the fundamental nature of physical reality, the more
astonishing it seems to be. When I was at university, we studied Einstein's
theory of Relativity: did you know that if you travel fast enough, time
actually slows down, from your perspective, but not that of the people around
you? Did you know that gravity also actually slows down time by distorting the
fabric of space around massive objects? Did you know that at very small sizes,
quantum sizes, physical matter acts like a wave and can diffract and refract
the way lights does when it shines through water? Did you know that
mathematicians study different sizes of infinity, and that if you add one
infinity to another, it's the same size, but if you take an exponential - say
two to the power of an infinity, you get a larger infinity?
Now, you may wonder why I'm
getting off the topic, but I promise you all this is relevant, because, as
C.S.Lewis once said, we should not expect spiritual reality to be any less
complex and bizarre than physical reality; we should not expect Theology to be
less wonderful than Physics. Indeed, it is from that spiritual reality, it is
from God, that the complexity and beauty of the physical world originates.
"The heavens declare the Glory of God, and the skies display his
handiwork", as the Psalms say.
And when we are talking about the
Trinity, we are talking about the Special Relativity, or the Quantum Mechanics
of Theology. There's lots of things about God, lots of true things, that even a
small child can understand; just like there's lots of things about the natural
world, about the Sun and Moon and stars, that anyone can grasp. But with the
Trinity you're getting into the heart of things, the fundamental reality that
everything else comes from: and that is going to start stretching us.
So why do we describe God as a Trinity? Well, because it is the only explanation that fits the evidence. In Physics, Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics were nobody's first guess. Nobody invented them because they seemed sensible or common sense, or because they're what you come up with if you just sit down and try to be reasonable about it. No. They are complex, counter-intuitive ideas that are demanded by the facts we have gathered through experiments.
In the same way, the Trinity is
nobody's first idea of what God is like, it's not common-sense, it's not the
sort of theory you come up with if you just sat down and made something up. But
it is beautiful, and it is the truth. It is the understanding the Apostles, and
the generations of Christians who came after them, put together because it
seemed the only one that fit the facts they had experienced. So, what sort of
facts are those? When we seek to
understand physical reality, we get laboratories and telescopes and a lot of
equipment, but we can't do that with Spiritual reality. God is not an object to
be measured and weighed, but he is a person, three persons in fact, and because
we are persons too, made in God's image, we can experience him because he has
revealed himself to us. This is the type of evidence that we have, it is the
kind of evidence you have that someone loves you, it is the kind of evidence
you have that music is beautiful; or that life is worth living: it's the
experience of the heart, the spirit and the soul, of one person revealing
themselves to another. It is the type of evidence that, in the end, really
matters.
So what facts led to the
understanding of the Trinity: that the one God, the creator of all things,
exists in three persons, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit? Firstly, was the
experience the Apostles had of Jesus himself, that here was a man who spoke of
God as Father, as separate from him; but who also did miracles, forgave sins on
his own authority, commanded the wind and waves to obey him, who fulfilled the
prophecies about God coming to his people, and revealed God's Kingdom as though
he knew its every detail. Here was a man who described himself as the Son of
the Father, who alone reveals the Father - The Way, The Truth and the Life. And
they had witnessed the Father honouring Jesus as his Son, most gloriously
through his Resurrection. This was a man, but this was not just a man, this was
Emmanuel - God-With-Us.
So there was God, who Jesus had
revealed to the apostles as the Father, and then there was Jesus his Son, two
persons of God: but there was also a third. There was the Holy Spirit that had
been poured out onto them, whose power they felt moving within them, speaking
to them. This was not the Father, for the Father exists infinite and eternal,
beyond time and space and our physical universe; and it was not the Son, it was
not Jesus, who they had seen ascend into heaven; it was a third person of God
that they were all experiencing resting in them, filling them with courage and
understanding. This is the reality that generation after generation of
Christians have lived with, through struggles and triumphs and losses; and the
reality we can only explain through the idea of the Trinity: the Father who
created all things; the Son who walked on our earth and lived our life and bore
our hurt; and the Spirit who dwells every day within us.
It is important to realise that
this is not just a New Testament idea, either. God did not become Trinity when
Jesus was born, or baptised, or resurrected. God has always been Trinity, from
eternity to eternity, and that is written throughout the Bible, from beginning
to end. It is easy for us to look for the Trinity in the New Testament, but as
well as their own experiences, the Apostles and early Christians looked into
the only Scriptures they had: the Hebrew Scriptures, that we call the Old
Testament. And we can see that in the reading today: Peter makes clear what the
Father has done through Jesus at that time, but to explain this to the people of
Jerusalem, Peter looks back to the Old Testament scriptures they knew so well.
Firstly, he claims the promise of
the Prophet Joel that God, "will pour out [his] Spirit on all
people", that "sons and daughters will prophesy" and "even
on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit". Then he
quotes from the Psalms: notice here that Peter is saying it is Christ himself
speaking in that first psalm. When it says "I saw the Lord always before
me, because he is at my right hand", that is Christ, the Son, talking
about his Father, though David wrote the psalm. We know this because he refers
to himself as the "holy one" who will not be abandoned "to the
realm of the dead", but as all Jews knew, David sinned, and he died, and his
tomb was known. It is Christ who was resurrected. Then in the second psalm it
is not Christ speaking, but David being given a glimpse of the Father
addressing the Son: "The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand".
David was the King of Israel, he had no Lord except God, so who are these two
figures: The Lord addressing David's Lord? They are the Father and the Son.
The New Testament is not some
dramatic left-turn away from the path taken by the Old Testament, rather it is
a reflection on a thousand years of God's promises to his people; and whether
it's the Gospel, or here in Acts, or Paul's Letters, it declares with one voice that the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, spoke of Christ. This
is one of those things that sounds strange at first, but when you know where to
look, you start seeing it everywhere. Now, when I say the Old Testament speaks
of Christ, that could mean two things: firstly, it could mean the Old Testament
prophesied and promised that Christ would come. It certainly does that, if
you've ever listened to a 'Nine Lesson and Carols' service at Christmas-time
you have heard a highlight of points in the Old Testament when Christ's coming
was promised; or you can read Isaiah chapter 53, the Suffering Servant, and I really challenge you to
tell me that passage isn't describing Jesus, though it was written 500 years
before he was born.
So the Old Testament promised
that Christ would come: as Emmanuel, God-With-Us, and Jesus fulfilled those
prophecies. But, just as important for understanding why we have our doctrine
of the Trinity, is the fact that God the Son, who has existed from eternity,
and was born in Bethlehem as Jesus, Mary's Son; also appears in the Old
Testament, again and again. He appears, as a separate person from God the
Father; and he is recognised as God, by people in the Old Testament. In the
same Old Testament that famous declares that "the LORD is our God, the
LORD is one", the same Old Testament that is the source of Monotheism, our
belief in One God, that we share with Jews and Muslims, and Sikhs and others.
In the Old Testament, the Son
appears most often as a mysterious figure identified as the 'Angel of the
Lord'. Do not be fooled by the word 'angel' though, for this is no mere angel,
but rather one who is sent by God to save and teach his people, who speaks as
God, and is recognised as God. If I were to go through all the times this
happened, I would be here all day, so I just want to briefly talk about two of
the first examples in the Old Testament from the book of Genesis.
Hagar was the maidservant of Sarah,
the wife of Abraham, but because Abraham and Sarah had no children, Abraham
took Hagar as his wife as well, and Hagar became pregnant with a son. But Sarah
then was jealous of Hagar and so mistreated her, leading to Hagar running away
into the wilderness. There the Angel of the Lord found her in the wilderness
and told her to go back, and promised her that God will bless her son and make
him the father of a great nation. This is how she responds (in Genesis 16:13) -
"She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: “You are the God who
sees me,” for she said, “I have now seen the One who sees me.”" Hagar has
spoken to the Angel of the Lord, but she knows she has seen God. Who is this
God, who comes as the messenger from God?
Then two generations later we
have Jacob, Abraham's grandson, and he had run away from his family because he
was afraid of his brother Esau. Now years later he is returning to his family
with his wives and children, afraid that Esau will attack him. The night
beforehand though, he has a strange meeting: a man appears from nowhere and
wrestles, physically grapples with Jacob through the night, until morning is
about to come, then the man touches Jacob's hip and dislocates it. The man then
says to Jacob "“Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you
have struggled with God and with man and have overcome.”", he blesses
Jacob and then disappears. Jacob is in no doubt about who he met, like Hagar he
says (in Genesis 32:30) "So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “It is
because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.”
I could quite literally go on and
on like this for some time, there are so many examples, and when you realise
what you're looking at, they're so clear. John's Gospel tells us that
"nobody has seen the Father", except the Son. So who is this God, who
comes from God the Father, who meets us face to face, who brings God's blessing
to Hagar, and to Jacob, and so many others throughout the Old Testament? He is
the Son, who in the fulness of time was born in Bethlehem at the first
Christmas, and ever since we know as our Lord Jesus Christ, who unites our
humanity with God forevermore. But God has always been Trinity from the
beginning. That is what Peter is talking about in our reading today, that was what
Jesus meant when he claimed that the Law and the Prophets all pointed to him,
and that has been the Christian faith from the beginning.
Why does this matter though?
Until we see God face-to-face in heaven none of us can fully comprehend how the
three persons of the Trinity relate to each other, or how they share a Will and
Purpose as One God. But this is not just a matter of abstract theology, it
matters because it is at the core of what God has done for us. God became one
of us and died for us; God's Holy Spirit dwells within us. That is amazing, and
if we did not believe God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we could not say it
was true. It was not some prophet or spirit somewhere between us and God who
became man and died for us, it was God himself. It is not some mere blessing
from a distant God that lies upon us, it is the Holy Spirit, God himself, who
lives within us. It is this that makes the Christian faith unique.
Islam, the Muslim faith, is in
many ways like Christianity, it is based on belief in One God, that is believed
to be the same God described in the Old Testament. But it differs from
Christianity in this one crucial point: Muslims believe that it is not possible
that God could have been born as a man and died for us. Islam believes that to stoop
so low, as to be born in a stable, and to die on a cross, would shame God,
would make God less.
We believe that it makes God
more. We believe that God is so glorious that by being born as a Man he makes
humanity and our whole world holy. We believe that it proves God is even
greater than we imagined, that he could face death on the cross and make it no
shame. We believe God showed greater love than we could imagine, because he did
not scorn our weakness. We believe that the martyr who sacrifices his own life
triumphs nonetheless, because the Holy Spirit within him is more powerful than
any physical force or violence. It is this faith that allows Peter, in our
reading today, to speak with such astonishing confidence, as he does again and
again in Acts, knowing that the power of mobs and armies and kings is nothing
before the power of Jesus Christ.
Christ changes everything, he
changes lives, and whole societies; he is the sure and certain rock around
which everything else in this world must turn, because he is God. Through the
Holy Spirit there is nothing we need fear, for the power within us is greater
and more enduring than any in the world, because he is God. And all this comes
from the Father, who is the eternal source and creator of all things.
And for that, Amen!
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