Three in One: Peace, Hope, Love

Romans 5:1-5
Trinity Sunday 2010

Since the twelfth century in England and since the fourteenth century in Rome, the first Sunday after Pentecost has been designated “Trinity Sunday,” an annual celebration by the church of “The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity,” as it is officially known. When I think of Trinity Sunday, the first thing that occurs to me is that even as I say the phrase, “the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity,” I can see people’s eyes begin to roll back into their heads. And I can pretty much finish that move off by explaining that the Trinity is the Christian doctrine that God is one in essence—homoousion in the famous Greek term, “of one essence”—but God is distinct in “persons” or individual realities—hypostases in Greek. Now, if you think eyes roll back at “the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity,” you should see the heads begin to snap back with them at homoousion and hypostasis. It only takes seconds for a preacher to lose an entire congregation, and on no Sunday in the Christian year does it happen any faster or more consistently than on Trinity Sunday.

And to tell you the truth, that’s probably a good thing, because there is no single doctrine in the entire history of the Christian church that has generated more claims and counterclaims of heresy than the doctrine of the Trinity. To this day, the great Eastern communions of the church such as the Greek Orthodox Church and Armenian Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church are irreparably separated from the Western communions by competing doctrines of the Trinity generated by the Roman insertion of a single Latin word into the Nicene Creed in the sixth century: filioque, which means “and the Son.” The question is, “Does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father?” as the Nicene Creed originally read, or “Does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father and the Son?” as it was edited to read. That one word, filioque, has divided the church doctrinally for more than a thousand years.

Now, if I haven’t lost you completely, perhaps you can understand why some early Baptist preachers declared that the doctrine of the Trinity was essentially unbiblical speculation and an impediment to the proclamation of the gospel. Those early Baptists were more concerned with preaching the gospel pure and simple than they were with debating the philosophical subtleties of Christian theology. They had seen those eyes roll back, and they had seen those heads snap, and they swore off the Trinity. Don’t you wish about now that I was one of them? But as the apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12:1, Brothers and sisters, “I want you to be informed and knowledgeable” (The Message), so on Trinity Sunday you are going to hear from me the words homoousian, “one essence,” and hypostasis, “individual reality,” and filioque, “and the Son” because those are the great and historic terms of the Christian faith on Trinity Sunday.

But the apostle Paul also said, “Do not be conformed. . ., but be transformed” (Romans 12:2); and that’s what those early Baptist preachers were after. They were not so much concerned with conformation to doctrine as they were with transformation of lives. And it is that transformation of our living that is at the heart of this morning’s epistle lesson from the Revised Common Lectionary. If you look carefully, you will see lurking in Romans 5:1-5 the three individual realities of the one essence, Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit; God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; Lover, Beloved, and Love: the Three-in-One and One-in-Three, the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. But the apostle Paul’s concern in Romans 5:1-5 is not speculation about the nature of God in God’s own self but the transformation of our selves by the active presence of God in our lives. And there just happen to be three transformations in this passage, just as there are three individual realities in the one God.

Transformation number one: “we have peace with God.” We have peace with God, Paul says. I want to contrast what Paul says in Romans 5:1 with what the great Italian poet Petrarch wrote about peace in a sonnet in the fourteenth-century on “the contrarious passions in a lover.” The sixteenth-century British poet Thomas Wyatt pretty much stole Petrarch’s sonnet and put it like this: “I find no peace.”

I find no peace, and all my war is done.
I fear and hope. I burn and freeze like ice.
I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise;
And nought I have, and all the world I season. . . .
I desire to perish, and yet I ask health.
I love another, and thus I hate myself.
I feed me in sorrow and laugh in all my pain;
Likewise displeaseth me both life and death,
And my delight is causer of this strife.

That’s one miserable puppy. And that's all of us in a nutshell. The very things that give us joy cause us strife; life displeases us, but death terrifies us; no matter how much we have, we feel as though we don’t have enough; and even when we are not personally at war, we find no peace. That’s not only “the contrarious passions in a lover”; that’s the human condition as Petrarch and Wyatt posed it.

But the apostle Paul poses a transformative alternative to “I find no peace.” Paul says that peace has already found us. “We have peace with God,” he says. We don’t have to make peace with God; in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has already made peace with us. God has buried the hatchet. God has lit the peace pipe and passed it to us. God has signed the peace treaty, and in the blood of Jesus Christ, no less. The first transformation of your life by the active presence of “God in three persons, blessed Trinity” comes when you stop trying to find peace or make peace but simply accept and receive the peace that God gives you in Jesus Christ. There is nothing more you need to do; there is nothing more you can do; you are already good enough for God to be at peace with you, thanks to the goodness of God in Jesus Christ. So stop trying so hard to make peace because you are turning peace into strife by your effort.

Peace does not come by the strain of clenched fists; it only comes with open hands. Peace comes with the open arms of a loving God who runs to embrace a prodigal child. Peace comes with the open arms of a loving Christ on a cross. Paul’s image in verse 2 is that God has already ushered us into a room where we stand in grace (N. T.Wright, NIB, X.516). Look around you. The cross, the baptistery, the table, the Christ-light, the Pentecost banner. You are already in the room of God’s grace and peace. Live in it. Stop trying so hard to be at peace with God! God is already at peace with you. To be at peace with God, all you have to do is be. Transformation number 1: God is at peace with you; you have peace with God. Accept it and live in it.

Transformation number 2. I know it’s trite and it’s trendy, but I’m going to say it anyway: no pain, no gain. No pain, no gain. Because we are at peace with God, all that “contrarious” stuff that led Petrarch and Wyatt to despair leads us instead to hope. Before it ever became a mantra of the overachieving fitness crowd, the apostle Paul said it in Romans 5:3-4: no pain, no gain. That’s the irreducible minimum of Paul’s sequence, suffering-endurance-character-hope. Every person who exercises or who works in their yard or garden or who changes diapers understands that sometimes life hurts, sometimes life’s a pain, sometimes life stinks, but “hurt-pain-stink” is not the end but the beginning of growth and beauty and strength.

I have a friend who occasionally calls me a “spin-doctor.” It hurt the first couple times he said it, but that’s O.K., because one of the things I appreciate most about him is that he calls it like he sees it. But as I see it, my propensity for seeing or saying what’s good in a situation has less to do with “spin” than hope. I can’t help it; I’m wired that way. Some of you may have heard me say before that when I was young, my father used to say of me that I was the kind of kid to whom you could give a silo full of manure for his birthday, because he’d shovel through the whole thing to find the pony. The truth is, I’ve shoveled a lot of manure in my life, and not just in sermons. When I worked for Witherspoon Rose Culture when I was in college and seminary, I shoveled great mounds of cow manure, entire dump-trucks full of it every year. Nothing makes roses grow like cow manure. One year Bob Witherspoon made the mistake of trying chicken-stuff instead because it was cheaper. Word to the wise: Stay away from the chicken-excrement.

Every gardener knows that crap makes things grow. Whether it comes from a cow or from a compost pile, crap makes things grow. Some people might say I’m an optimist, but I say I’m a realist—as long as there is organic material, there is life and the potential for life. That’s a biological reality and a theological reality. The next time you stop and smell the roses, be thankful for the crap that helped produce them. Paul was more sophisticated than I am, so he said suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope. I say, when life gives you a silo full of manure, know that even if you don’t find a pony, you can grow something good with it because crap grows stuff. All that “contrarious” stuff that led Petrarch and Wyatt to despair leads us instead to hope, because God has already ushered us into the room where we stand in grace. Look around you. The cross, the baptistery, the table, the Christ-light, the Pentecost banner. You are already in the room of God’s grace and hope. Accept it and live in it. That’s transformation #2: no pain, no gain; hope grows from crap.

Transformation #3: It’s already in you. It’s already in you. Paul says in verse 5, “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” Do you see the past-perfect tense: God’s love has been poured; the Holy Spirit has been given. It’s already in you. Some people get all excited about last week’s Pentecostal experience of the Holy Ghost in tongues of flame and tongues of languages, but Paul says in Romans 5:5 that Pentecost is all about God’s love that has been poured into your heart through the Holy Spirit that has been given to you. It’s already in you. You don’t have to earn God’s love for you; there is nothing more you can do; you are already good enough for God to love, thanks to the love of God in Jesus Christ. So stop trying so hard to be lovable to God because you are turning love into strife by your effort.

But there’s another “already in you” in this passage, and that’s your love for God. In verse 5, the expression “God’s love,” hē agapē tou theou in Greek is entirely ambiguous. If I hadn’t already dragged you through homoousion and hypostasis and filioque, I would give you a short treatise on the difference in Greek between the subjective genitive—as in God’s love for us—and the objective genitive—as in our love for God. Interpreters of Romans 5:5 have argued for centuries over that phrase: is it a subjective genitive or is it an objective genitive. In my interpretation of the phrase, I’m going to come down firmly . . . on both sides. I'm going to call it a great double entendre (although I grant it’s not as titillating a double entendre as we usually like to find). There is a double meaning in this expression. Paul did not distinguish clearly in this verse between God’s love for us and our love for God because those are two distinct realities of one and the same essence that has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. It’s not the “contrarious passions in a lover” of which Petrarch and Wyatt complained. It’s the complementary power of God’s love for us and our love for God.

I have known God loves me at least since I learned to sing, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Little ones to him belong; they are weak but he is strong. Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me, for the Bible tells me so.” Knowing that God loves me is not knowledge I attained on my own. It was a gift that was poured into my heart by my parents and Sunday School teachers and entire congregations of people who cared for me and nurtured me in God’s love. As far back as I can remember, it was already in me. And when the love of God—God’s love for you—is in you, you can’t help but love God back with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength. Our children may grow up to hate us, but when they are young they can’t help but love us. They don’t know any better. The love that we pour into them overflows back to us, at least until they are old enough to decide for themselves who they are going to live in a loving relationship with and who they are not. God knows how that works; God has seen it billions of times! God’s love for you is already in you; all you have to do is accept it and live in its relationship. And your love for God is already in you; all you have to do is let it out!

Which brings us back to that whole idea of the Trinity. It was already in God; all God had to do was let it out. Genesis 1 tells us, “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.” From the very beginning, God was present and active in Spirit. John 1 tells us, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . And the Word became flesh and lived among us, full of grace and truth.” From the very beginning, God was present and active in the Word that became flesh and lived among us. Three in One and One in Three: three realities in one essence, peace, hope, and love. That’s not speculation; that’s transformation. Accept it; live in it; let it out.

This material is Copyrighted © 2010 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.