Preached at ADC Chapel, January 24, 2024 (some will recognize earlier versions of this sermon from earlier posts on this blog).

In the Gospel of John, John records Jesus on the night of his betrayal, instructing the disciples about many things. He tells them about things like his new command of love and about the coming of the comforter, and here he does something particularly remarkable. Jesus prays for the church.

²⁰ “I ask not only on behalf of these but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their word, ²¹ that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. ²² The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, ²³ I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. ²⁴ Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. ²⁵ “Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you, and these know that you have sent me. ²⁶ I made your name known to them, and I will make it known so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them and I in them.” (John 17:20-26, NRSV)

Here, John uses this language that within God there are two identities (and a third he mentions a few chapters earlier): Father, Son, and the Comforter, Holy Spirit, and these three identities, these persons, these three somethings are one, a mystery the church has puzzled over ever since, speculating on the meaning of person, being, substance, relations, and a whole lot more terminology. Sadly, the Trinity is nothing but terminology for many.

Dorothy Sayers, a Christian novelist and a friend of C. S. Lewis, once joked that she felt like the doctrine of the Trinity was something theologians thought up one day to make life harder for the rest of us. Ya, caught me, Dorothy! While that was a joke, we have to admit that probably most of us at one point have sympathized with Sayer’s feelings on the matter, and for some, that may have been around week 12 of Christian Theology Part One last semester (I don’t know, just a guess). Rest assured; this is not a sermon about why you need to know the historical context of terms like homo-ousia or hypostases, as important as those are. For surely, the Trinity is more than concepts and vocabulary.

Too often, the Trinity is relegated to the equivalent of the appendix: an unnecessary fixture next to our large intestine that some will just eventually have removed. Or worse: Too often, the Trinity is the club to bludgeon the dissenter with rather than a bandage to nurse the sick soul. Most often, when the Trinity is mentioned in some churches, it is to point out just how wrong some people are and how right we are. (And if that is what we think doctrine is meant for, we have missed the point).

Or we try to over-explain. If you grew up in the church, you might have been subjected to quite possibly the most overused theological explanation of all time: “The Trinity is like an _____ (egg!). There is the shell, the yoke, and the white part. Or God is like water because it can be a solid, liquid, or gas.” There you go. Solved it. I don’t know about you, but I just don’t find the idea that God is like an egg all that comforting. And we wonder why Christian beliefs don’t connect with people.

I mean, at least we could have chosen a better food. The Trinity is like waffles: the waffle, the butter, and the syrup poured out like the Holy Spirit. Look, see, there are three, and they are delicious!

The Trinity is like bacon. I can’t think of three aspects of bacon, but if God is like bacon, I want it!

Well, analogies have limits, especially when it comes to mysteries. Dorothy Sayers followed up her joke about the Trinity with a really good piece of advice: if you want to understand the doctrine, you need to look at the drama. If you want to understand our Triune God, look at the story of Scripture. It is here that we encounter the character of God.

To confess Christ is to attest to how we have found ourselves in a story where the Creator of all that is reveals Godself in the history of a people, the Israelites, a people oppressed and enslaved under idolatrous tyranny. This God says God is One, the I am who I am, the living God and this God rescues the Israelites out of bondage to be a chosen people, a nation of priests, to reflect God’s character to the rest of the world, and this One God longs to be one with us.

If you want to know that doctrine, you need to know the drama. And so when we look at the narrative of the Bible, we see this One God revealing who God is in this pursuit of being at one with us in a way that mysteriously takes on—for lack of a better word—different dimensions to God’s self: the God who is beyond all things, infinite, transcendent, and almighty, is also the root of all existence, the breath of life, the presence of beauty, one in whom we live and move and have our being, the movements of love, known as Spirit.

As the narrative shows, these dimensions relate to one another. God sends his messiah, the king, but a king that is more than another human king; he is God’s only begotten Son, yet one with the Father. The Father sends the Son, Jesus Christ, the one who perfectly enfleshes the presence of the God Israel worshiped but also fulfills the longing for righteousness, this reconciling oneness with all things Israel was called to, and Jesus does so through sending the Spirit.

This is probably where it gets confusing for people (and we do not like confusing). What does it mean to be at one? Isn’t all this oneness talk just impractical abstract mystical stuff? Are we right to ask, as modern people, is all this really useful?

Or does it name something we long for? On December 31, 1989, Bono, the lead singer of the band U2, aired the band’s dirty laundry in a radio interview. The band was on tour with an album some regarded as evidence that the band was over the hill. The reality was the band was burning out. Bono had had his first child, and being away from his family was emotionally draining. Another member’s marriage was crumbling. The band was on the verge of breaking up. Meanwhile, members of the band were becoming interested in activism but struggling to make a difference. They were navigating how they could express their religious convictions in music while wrestling with the religious hypocrisy of much of Christianity. When the band got together to write music a few months later, the song “One” came out of a space of brutal honesty about where their lives were and what they longed for. Let me read you a few stanzas of it:

Is it getting better
Or do you feel the same?
Will it make it easier on you, now
You got someone to blame?

You say one love, one life
When it’s one need in the night
One love, we get to share it
Leaves you, baby, if you don’t care for it…

Have you come here for forgiveness?
Have you come to raise the dead?
Have you come here to play Jesus
To the lepers in your head?

Did I ask too much? More than a lot
You gave me nothing, now it’s all I got
We’re one, but we’re not the same
Well, we hurt each other, then we do it again

You say love is a temple, love a higher law
Love is a temple, love the higher law
You ask me to enter, but then you make me crawl
And I can’t be holding on to what you got
When all you got is hurt

One love, one blood
One life, you got to do what you should
One life with each other
Sisters, brothers
One life, but we’re not the same
We get to carry each other, carry each other

Some of you noticed the interconnected themes of love, marriage, justice, religion, responsibility, hurt, blame, differences, and division, all tied to that word Bono keeps singing over and over: “one,” oneness.

Some of you started singing that in your head. Others just sat there wondering why Spencer is quoting old people music. Some might be thinking, “Spencer, isn’t there any recent good music out there you could have quoted to connect with the younger generation?” And the answer is, “No, there isn’t.”

You can fight me on that later, but I hope you all noticed the theme: Oneness. U2, struggling with their marriages and what it means to be one life together, feels like that is one instance of a larger struggle all humanity participates in together. They use the notion in a very similar way to how Jesus uses it in John. In a similar way, my life is bound up with my spouse, how we are one flesh, how we are partners in life, and how we affect each other; God pushes us to see others that way.

 “One life, but we’re not the same. We get to carry each other, carry each other.” It is a clue into the very heart and essence of God, just as much as it is an insight into the very essence and longing of our humanity. We are creatures that are connected to each other.

The past few years have continually illustrated the fact that we are connected. I have been thinking about the wildfires we had last year. It was being talked about on the news the other day.

Hundreds of homes were destroyed by a 25,000-hectare fire caused by such dryness that is unheard of for a province that literally has ocean on all sides of it. The weather is getting more and more severe because we are dealing with the effects of climate change that can turn a spark and a few embers into a wildfire the size of a city.

We are realizing that how we treat the environment affects one another. And at the end of the day, all it took was one person to burn some leaves in their backyard, and hundreds of families lost their homes.

We all longed for rain back in June, and then, you know what happened? We got rain, so much rain there was flooding all over the province. Then, a hurricane happened. Now, we are experiencing a strange winter, which is more severe than usual, while the rest of the continent is hit with Arctic winds. Our world is out of balance, and we are disconnected from it and each other.

It is things like a forest fire and flooding that remind us that a city of a million people like Halifax still needs to be a community, depending on one another, needing one another, affected by the choices of one another; that our providences and nation, just like individuals are not self-enclosed, independent, self-reliant units, able to carry one without help or helping others.

We are dependent on the earth and the seas, the fish and the animals, for the very processes of life that sustain us. We are dependent on each other. We are learning the hard way that we are all connected. Where one acts irresponsibly, all are affected, and also, where one suffers, all suffer.

We have been reminded again and again vividly over the last few years that we are all connected.

We are feeling how industrial practices on one side of the world affect farming on the other.

Health practices on one side of the world affect the health of communities on the other.

Wars on one side of the world affect life on the other.

We can’t get away from it. We are profoundly connected, but we continue to ignore this fact, retreating into our little empires of autonomy (some of us even use our Christian convictions to do so).

And yet, our lives are marred with reminders that we are living alienated from nature and each other. We are divided against the very things we need most. We are killing ourselves because we are constantly failing to see ourselves, our fate, and our identity as dependent on others.

We know we need to be one; we long to be at one with each other; we long for unity and harmony where we can all be ourselves, and others can be themselves in peace with the earth, and yet, we are not at one. We have given in to greed and selfishness or just slipped into an easy thoughtlessness, too concerned with the rat race of life.

We find ourselves reliving this story of humanity again and again, which comes to a particular intensity when people rejected Jesus’ invitation to step into the oneness of God. John says at the beginning of his Gospel: “The world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” We know how this story goes.

Jesus died on the cross, executed by an instrument of imperial oppression orchestrated by the corrupt religious institution seeking to preserve its own power, but also betrayed by the ones Jesus was closest with, his own disciples his friends. The cross discloses the tragic depth of our tendencies to refuse to be at one with God and others, even when literally God is staring at us face to face.

But it is in these dark moments that God showed us who God is.

For Jesus to die one with sinners, yet one with the Father, reveals God’s loving solidarity with the human form—our plight, no matter how lost or sinful. God chooses to see God’s self in us and with us, never without us. God chooses to bind himself to our fate to say I am not letting you go.

John records Jesus putting it this way: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” And he counts the ones in front of him, the ones who he knew would betray him the worst—he counts them as his friends.

So often, we are tempted to lose heart, to recoil and collapse under the weight of our guilt and shame, when we think about the state of our world, our complicity in things like racism, war, climate change, consumerism, all the toxic squabbles we see on social media, or just our individual apathy to the needs of others we encounter on a daily basis— there is so much that might cause us to shrink back and say we don’t deserve a better world. We deserve what is coming to us.

To be a part of the people of God is to trust in Jesus Christ; it is to remember that in these moments of condemnation, we have been encountered by the presence of the Spirit, a love that invites us to see that we are loved with the same perfect love the Father has for his own only begotten Son. The same love that God has for God in the Trinity, God has for sinners, for you, and for me. God is not going to give up on us. Trust this. Trust this.

God is the God who, throughout history, stands with the undeserving, the least of us, the oppressed, the god-forsaken, the outcasts, the sinners—all humanity—announcing as Jesus did to the unfaithful disciples: “peace to you,” announcing God’s will for us is and has always been eternal life.

When we are suffering and scared, our cross becomes his cross.

When we are lost and hopeless, his resurrection becomes our resurrection.

This God who is God above has come and walked with us in Christ as God beside us and has redeemed us with the Spirit, leading us forward as God within us and through us, a love so undivided and unlimited, it is making all things one.

As John says, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness could not overcome it.”

And so, John challenges us to be at one with each other in a similar way to how the Father is at one with the Son: “May they be one as we are one.” 

He prays for his disciples. He is praying for the church, which means he is praying for us today. In a world that is broken and divided, be at one with each other. Model the kind of empathy, acceptance, reconciliation, forgiveness, and encouragement that says, “I need you; I can’t be me without you; I cannot succeed unless you succeed; If you are hurting, I am hurting; We are one.”

“One life, but we’re not the same. We get to carry each other, carry each other.”

That is Jesus’ prayer. God knows I could use some prayer on this. I had my family call me from Ontario, wondering if I was safe through all the fires and floods. I tried to explain to them that not all people in Nova Scotia live in Halifax (a point that is routinely lost on them), but I also caught myself saying, “I am okay. This does not affect me.”

I caught myself doing something we all too easily do: since hardship or oppression does not touch my immediate experience, my job, and my family, I conclude I am not affected.

We can do that with so many things. Injustice does not affect me. Poverty does not affect me. Illness does not affect me. War does not affect me. That person’s financial troubles, that person’s health risk, that person’s views: not my problem. It’s theirs, not mine. And so, we choose to forsake the invitation into oneness of love again and again.

One reason the Trinity feels abstract is that we so often use it as just one more way to honor God with our lips (and perhaps our cognitive minds), but the reality is our hearts are far from God.  

Two days ago, I was driving into work, and CBC radio mentioned police charged a guy with accidentally starting the fires, as I mentioned before. A 22-year-old decided to burn some dead leaves in his backyard. I remember uttering things to myself about what I hope that guy gets for being so stupid and thoughtless. But then the radio had an interview with a man who had lost his house, his farm, and even his cottage on the other side of the forest fire. The man was asked how he felt about the person charged, and all he could say was, “I can’t blame him. I’ve done a lot of thoughtless stuff over the years. Mine, thankfully, just didn’t have as severe of consequences as his. His mistake could have just as easily been mine.” I remember sitting in my car in the parking lot, just having a moment to take those words and that profound lesson in humility I just experienced. To the one who had caused all this destruction, this man who had every possession of his destroyed in those fires chose to see himself in the other. He chose empathy and mercy. He chose oneness.

Again, folks are so often tempted to see the Trinity as some abstract idea (and we theologians can admit some part in that), but the Trinity flows from our relationship with God and each other. It is an invitation into the movements of worship and prayer, service and sacrifice, solidarity and forgiveness that speaks to the essence of who God is and who we are and the only way we can move forward as people: We are connected; we belong to one another, and in God’s choice to be bound to us, to refuse to let us go, we are awakened to our responsibility to others—more than this: our privilege, our witness, “so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”

May we, daily in choices, grand or small, step into the oneness of God as a college, a community, a church, awaiting the day when God is all in all.