Holy Lips
Isaiah 6:1-8

June 15, 2003

At 475 Riverside Drive in Manhattan sits a big office building alongside the Hudson River. It houses many of the offices of the World Council of Churches, along with a number of other mainline denominational headquarters and mission service organizations. It is not an architecturally inspired building, so it has long been nicknamed “the God Box.” It’s both an affectionate title, as well as a little satirical.

Just think, though, can we contain God in a box? And what size box would it have to be to hold a God? The inside of one or both the World Trade Center Towers? How big is God anyway, somebody is going to ask? How big does God have to be?

In the year King Uzziah died, that is 742 B. C., Isaiah had a vision of just how big God is. The biggest human space Isaiah knew and could imagine was the temple in Jerusalem, and he saw the Lord sitting on a throne with the hem of his robe filling the temple. Can we possible imagine the space in our marvelous sanctuary now being completely stuffed with the thickness of a royal robe. The mathematics start to boggle the mind. God, after all, is big.

The angels start singing and proclaiming the presence of the Almighty, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of host, the whole earth is full of his glory.” We sing that song too, a traditional hymn (number 1 in the old hymnal, number 315 in Voices United) that is always associated with the Trinity. The angels weren’t just repeating themselves when they sang “Holy,” they were naming the three persons of the Threefold God.

When Isaiah saw all of this, his mind was blown for no one is supposed to be able to see God and live, and he was still living. I am a man of unclean lips living among a whole bunch of unclean lipped people. It’s hard to be in the direct presence of God and not feel inferior and inadequate.

No person on LSD back in the 1960’s would have thought up the next scene: an angel brought down a burning coal and touched Isaiah’s lips with it, not burning them, but making them holy. “Whom shall I send, and who will go for me?” asks the Lord. What else could Isaiah say, “Send me!”

This is the only Sunday of the Christian year that does not focus on an event, but on an idea. As the CBC has found at 9:00 p.m. every weekday night, ideas are not just strung together words, but are aggressively alive. They can change the way we think and act and live. The Trinity can be rather boring frankly, but it also is the most unique contribution of Christianity to the thought of the world. To be an aggressive Trinitarian is not the same as an ecclesiastical goody-two-shoes, but one who boldly risks and does not hesitate to answer the call, “Send me.”

Nevertheless, the idea of the Trinity has always had its problems. It isn’t really Biblical in the way other Christian doctrines are. The Bible insinuates the Trinity, rather than spells it out. It is a rather fantastic idea: God exists in three persons - the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit - yet is still absolutely one. Again the mathematics boggles the mind, for there is no calculus in which three equals one. And yet, if the divine formula is three in one, is it not the foundation of all the world’s mathematics? We’ve been counting wrong for a long time.

The other world religions, especially Judaism and Islam, have thought we were being ridiculous and self-delusionary. Three persons is really three gods; when are Christians going to get serious about the One God?

In the early to mid-1800’s in New England, the idea of the Trinity was the hottest topic in the Congregational Church. William Ellery Channing had delivered his sermon on the Unitarian idea of God in 1819 and the resulting fire storm tore apart the New England churches. Unitarians agreed with the other people of the Book: the Trinity made no sense and was just a closet form of polytheism. The debate hit the pews and every time there was a pastoral vacancy, there was violent argument over whether the congregation would choose a Unitarian or a Trinitarian minister. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, a couple hundred meters from Harvard Yard, there are two First Church of Christ congregations. The original is the Unitarian Church which won the vote, circa 1840, and the second several blocks down the road is the Congregational Church made up of the Trinitarian thinkers who lost the vote and decided to move out and establish their own church.

So the Trinity is hard to swallow rationally, and people have rejected and laughed at it for millennia. But the Trinity does offer an important answer to the mathematical question, How big is God? An important answer, but not a mathematically precise one.

There have been many marvelous and marvelously complex descriptions of the Trinity, yet none have ever been totally satisfactory. Three in One is hard to figure out. Still, as we keep trying to explain and understand the nature of our God, the point keeps coming across that our God is bigger than we can ever comprehend. The human tendency is to reduce God down to a size we can handle, to make God our size. “Your God is too small” is the worst piece of spiritual counsel I can offer - with the proviso that this is the status quo with almost every human being.

The Trinity of Three Persons in One God stretches our minds and souls beyond our usual rational limits. Any time you think you’ve got God figured out and the universe down pat, think of the Trinity, how there is a Father, and then a Son who was not created but is the Only Begotten, equal in every way to the Father, just as the Holy Spirit never did not exist without the other two. The church even had to invent a word, in English “begotten,” to describe the unique situation of how the Son came into being without being created.

There is a way to think about the Trinity that can help us, and it largely comes out of the Eastern Orthodox churches. The Trinity is God’s way of living in community. Three’s a crowd, but the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit get along well. “We are not alone,” says the New Creed of the United Church, and neither is God alone. That is a radical idea that does not leave us alone with our comfortable patterns.

When the real nature of God is that of Three Persons, three aspects of the same One God living in community harmoniously, that means that we are not fundamentally individuals, but people living together in a community of love. That directs us to several disturbing revelations.

The goal of Christianity is not for you to live a good life by yourself, but to live Christianly among a bunch of other people. By living Three in One, God’s way of being is basically political. Christianity is a political way of life, people trying to live as well as they possibly can with other people.

Just to prove it, there is the church. The church is made up of people you love deeply and people you just can’t stand. You can walk away self-righteously and live a good life on your own, but if you want to be Christian and follow the Gospel, you’ve got to do it in the church.

Therefore, there is no such thing as personal salvation in Jesus Christ, as so many churches have advocated. God won’t save you alone, because God has come to save the whole world. When you begin to understand and grasp the true nature of God and God’s Gospel, it won’t be that you in particular are now saved, but that you are not alone, you are living in community, in the oneness of God’s love in the church.

This is a bigger God than most of us had bargained for, a God who is always beyond your ability to pin down and manipulate to your purposes, and a God whose very nature insists that if you are going to really live a good life, you have to live that good life in relationship to other people just as wonderful and just as annoying as you are.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan