Sermon 5.31.26 Trinity Sunday: Beware of Telescopes

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Good Morning St. Andrew’s

Happy Trinity Sunday, or as I like to call it, the day where we all try our hardest not to be modalists.

May 31^st is also the day 45 years ago that I was baptized in the name of the trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and welcomed into the household of God.

When I was living in Lincoln Nebraska after college before I really became reintegrated with my faith life, I remember driving on the main street through town, “O” Street. And when you got to a certain point outside of downtown, there was a church off of “O” that always grabbed my attention.

It had this kind of 1970’s bowling alley or movie theater look including a big marquis in front bordered with light bulbs.

I am sure that the marquis said the name of the church, but what I always noticed the words underneath in big bold letters, “Jesus ONLY.”

I was always curious about that.

I came to find out later that this is a particular subset of the Pentecostal movement, which has split itself several times.

It began in the early 20^th century, and it denies the doctrine of the Trinity on the grounds of Acts 2:38, which we will come back to later.

And so, instead of delving into modalism, or Arianism, or Marcionism, or any of the other heresies of the early church, I want to talk to you about the historical-critical problem of telescoping.

When we look back at historical events and people, especially things that did not happen in our lifetime, for which we only have a cognitive model, but no actual first-hand experience,

We can often fall into a way of thinking about the past called telescoping.

Like its namesake, the idea behind telescoping is that we are looking at something really far away and trying to bring it into focus.

This is great, because we can focus our attention on details that are far away, we can expand our understanding.

But, the other thing that a telescope does, if you’ve ever looked through one, is that it takes what is three dimensional and flattens it, so that everything looks close up.

It can be hard to tell what’s in the foreground closest to us, what is in the far off background, and what the relative sizes are.

So, for instance, if we were to look at the moon and a meteor just so happened to be passing between us and it, through the lens of a telescope, it would look like there was this huge rock that was almost the size of the moon floating somewhere in front of it,

But we would have a difficult time determining how far in front.

They could be a hundred thousand miles apart, but they would appear to be very close to one another in the telescope.

This same phenomenon happens when we think about the past.

When we look into the past, if we aren’t careful, we can fall into the trap of taking a series of events that unfolded over a long period of time, and condense it in our minds, so that it seems like it happened very close to one another.

Have you ever had this happen in your life?

You look back at certain series of events and think that they happened near one another, but then you find out that they were weeks, months, or maybe even years apart?

In your mind they happened at almost the same time, but then you find pictures with a time stamp on them.

Telescoping is a pretty well-known phenomenon in the study of history.

The goal of understanding this effect of the human mind trying to grapple with the passage of time is to add context to historical inquiries.

The reason that I bring it up this morning is because, to the extent we consider the comparative dating of our New Testament texts at all, I think that we often telescope the New Testament.

I think that we often look at the epistles written by Paul and others, the gospels, and John’s Revelation, which were composed over the course of at least a 60-70 year period, and think of them as a single document written around the same time like a book.

Take for instance our second epistle to the Corinthians this morning, which is generally dated to around the year 55 of the Common Era.

This is about 20 years after the death of Jesus.

We get a very small, but important few lines from the end of the epistle that show us that Paul and his community already had a concept of the three persons of the Trinity.

“All the saints greet you.

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”

It’s one of the few things that Paul takes for granted in the letter.

One of the things he doesn’t feel that he has to explain.

One of the only things that the Corinthians are NOT fighting about.

It is just a matter of fact for them.

Our gospel lesson from Matthew, by contrast, was completed sometime after the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem, which the Romans destroyed in the year 70.

You remember Jesus saying, “not one stone will be left upon another.”

Within 10-20 years of Second Corinthians, and probably stemming from a collection of Jesus’ sayings that came earlier, we have another clear reference to all three persons of the Trinity,

And this time as the formula for baptizing new Christians.

Yet, just a few weeks ago on the third Sunday of Easter, we heard Peter say in Acts chapter 2 that those who want to repent should be baptized in the name of Jesus and then receive the gift of the Holy Spirit through that baptism.

We could be forgiven for telescoping these passages. Acts is dated to around the same time as the Gospel according to Matthew, which means they were all written in the same generation.

What they show is that though there was a clear understanding that Jesus had taught about the coming of the Holy Spirit, and that the trinitarian formula (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) was in use,

There was actually a little bit of disagreement about what the trinity meant and how it related to baptism.

Do we baptize only in the name of Jesus and the Holy Spirit is a subsequent gift as in Acts?

or do we baptize in the name of all three as in Matthew?

On the one hand, the Jesus-only Pentecostal churches made up their mind in the early 20^th century only to follow the witness from Acts and to ignore Paul and Matthew.

From our trinitarian side of the aisle, it can be tempting to telescope the Nicene Creed back onto our Scriptures and pretend that Matthew and Paul had a full and robust concept of the Trinity 250 years before the Council of Nicaea.

But that would be a mistake as well akin to believing that just because George Washington knew the concepts of intelligence and things that were artificial that he knew about Artificial Intelligence.

There was no Nicene Creed, when the first followers of Jesus were trying to figure out how Pentecost had changed their belief system.

Too many times in our current world of sensationalism and seeking, you’ll see headlines pass your newsfeed like, “Earth-shattering revelation, the ancient Christian belief that THEY tried to hide for centuries.”

Or like a billboard that I saw last summer, which is trying to revive the ancient heresy of Gnosticism, “Jesus is NOT God, and he wasn’t in the beginning with God, find out all of the secrets that THEY never wanted you to know.”

(just to be clear the billboard did not have a really bad version of a movie trailer voice-over, but I feel like it was implied)

What I want to say to you today, on Trinity Sunday, is that the Trinity is complicated,

It was far from settled doctrine for the first two and half centuries of the church,

The councils of the church were brought together to gain clarity and unity on the subject.

But, it is also clear that the earliest Christians did have a concept of the Trinity as something unique and important to belief.

Even Acts 2 assumes that the Holy Spirit has a role to play.

Beware of easy answers and half truths.

Beware also of telescoping it all into one time period.

The truth is that Christians debated and believed for more than two hundred years before the doctrine of the Trinity was settled, and even after that some differences remained.

There is a resurgence of questioning about the Trinity that in some sense has always been around among those who don’t know how to properly understand history and biblical exegesis,

But also, which has become even more pronounced with the rise of conspiracy theory culture.

The Nicene Creed, though it does not go back to the earliest days of Christianity is still valuable, because it is the way that the church found unity out of plurality.

And, just as we continue to wrestle with the meaning of America and Democracy after 250 years of nationhood,

The Creed represents more than 250 years of the church’s wrestling with the fact of Pentecost and Jesus’ identification of himself as the great “I AM.”

Never take for granted how difficult that consensus was to achieve and how precious our faith in the Trinity is.

There is no Jesus ONLY without the Trinity.

We can argue all day about how the Trinity co-inheres one to the other and in some way, we will always fall short, because human language cannot encompass the fullness of the supernatural and incomprehensible God.

What we can say is that from the earliest days of Christianity there has been Trinity; the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Love of God, and the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.