Unity in Diversity: Embracing Trinitarian Fellowship

Well, I'm so honored to be here. I want to say hi to everybody at the North San Jose campus, at the Sunnyvale campus, at the Fremont campus, and people joining us online. I'm very grateful to get to be with you and think about what we will over the next few moments.

I want to start by diving right into the scripture. These are words that the Apostle Paul wrote to a church in Ephesus many, many years ago, starting in chapter four. Paul says, "As a prisoner for the Lord Jesus, then I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle, be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all." But to each one of us, he goes on, "Grace has been given as Christ apportioned it."

Now the word that keeps cropping up there is "one," nine times in these few verses. That single word recurs. Now it's very significant. At Echo this week marks the beginning of a series thinking about God. Today we're going to eventually get to God the Father, but it's also looking at the idea that God exists as a Trinity, three persons: Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, and yet one God. Philippe asked if I would talk a little bit about that notion of the Trinity to kind of set up the series before we move towards God our Father. So I want to do that.

I grew up in the church, and sometimes people would talk about the idea of a Trinity. Sometimes they would use analogies to try to explain it. It's kind of like an egg, where there's three parts: a shell, yolk, and white. I never found that very helpful; it was kind of confusing for me. So what I want to focus on for a moment is the significance of the idea that God exists as Trinity.

What do you think life is like within the Trinity? What do you think is the experience of Father, Son, and Spirit together? Do you think there's a lot of arguments about who's the oldest or who's the smartest or who's the most powerful? My wife Nancy and I will sometimes argue about who's a blanket hog. Is that the kind of experience going on in the Trinity?

What we actually see in the scripture, as the members of the Trinity talk about each other, is this remarkable sense of deference and love. So I'm going to draw the Trinity; you've never seen the Trinity drawn before, so you're going to see it today, but I'm not an artist. Um, so here's the Trinity, and what we see in the New Testament is that Jesus will say, "My food is to do the will of my Father. I love to obey the Father," but then when the Father speaks, the Father doesn't say, "Yeah, Jesus, you do whatever I tell you to." Uh, the Father says, "This is my Son, in whom I am well pleased. Listen to him, do what he says."

Then the Son and the Father send the Holy Spirit to the Earth, but Jesus says, "Actually, it's a good thing that I leave you because..." The significance of the doctrine of the Trinity is that community is built into the nature of God. God's life is an unceasing dance of mutual servanthood and joy and delight, with the Father, Son, and Spirit vying to outdo each other in submitting to each other and in self-giving love.

Trinity means that love is the foundation of reality, that God is too free to be one but too one to be three. God also makes human beings in His image, and Genesis states that "the two shall become one, one flesh." When my wife Nancy and I were dating, I quoted a poem from Shakespeare about the power of love, which said, "They so loved that the love in twain had the essence but of one, two distincts division none." This showed that even though two people are distinct, with two minds, two wills, and two hearts, there can be a kind of oneness, unity, connection, and wholeness together.

However, in our world, we don't experience this because of the event called the Fall. Early in our marriage, Nancy and I bought our first nice piece of furniture, a mauve sofa. We had three children at the time, and the number one rule in our house was to stay off the mauve sofa. One day, a red jelly stain appeared on the sofa, and she lined our three children up to look at it. The man at the sofa factory said it was never coming out, not for all of eternity. That was when we realized the consequences of the Fall and how it had broken our perfect community.

Nancy was in the room today, and we all experienced this lack of oneness, this division, this brokenness. Red state, blue state; I mean just ethnic tensions, gender, sexuality, everything is just—that's the mess at the core of our world's problem. But that's not what we were designed for. That's why it's so painful when we don't have it.

Now this Trinitarian God is three and yet one, Fred, um, joining together distinctness, joining together in love to form a greater oneness, a greater whole runs through all of the Bible, and it actually runs through reality, life in our world. I want to try to describe the way that it works in several different dimensions of life so that you can see why this notion of the Trinity is so beautiful and matters so much, and why in fact I think it explains the way that life works and the way that our world runs in a very, very powerful way, and so that you can arrange your life to be a part of this Trinitarian fellowship, this Trinitarian project.

So I just want to walk through a number of different ways in which we see this dynamic at work. If I lose you at all during this sermon, it'll be in the next five or ten minutes. Everybody stay with me, okay? So everybody stay with me for the next five or ten minutes, okay? Thank you very much; you make me a little nervous.

Go back to Genesis, the very beginning. We're told in the second verse, "Now the Earth was formless and empty, darkness over the surface of the deep." The chaos in the ancient world, the big fear was chaos. It starts with chaos, and then what God does is God begins to separate. So verse 4, God saw that the light was good. God created light; he saw that the light was good, and notice this: he separated the light from the darkness. So he begins to separate.

Now you might know, if you're a Bible person, but you follow that word "separate" in the first chapter of Genesis, you see it recurs over and over and over. The idea of something being holy was to be separate, come out and be separate. But that wasn't like a legalistic thing or a judgmental thing. When he separates something, he's making it purely itself so that it becomes utterly functional and useful and good and purposeful. He separates the light from the darkness, and then he calls the light "day" and the darkness "night." He doesn't call the light "light"; he calls it "day," and he joins them together, and that's the first day.

Then his second day, and over and over, God is creating time. See, and then he separates the waters from down below from the waters that are up in the sky so that there can be rain. God is inventing weather; that's a good thing. And then he separates the dry ground from the waters.

When a little child is born, Dan Siegel, a leading voice in neurology, talks about how when a little baby is born, first they're one cell, and then it reproduces, but it's identical cells. Then about four weeks in, the cells begin to differentiate; something says, "Come out and be separate," and so you have cells that have quite distinct functions, and then they're able to join together. Single cells—what happens is first there's differentiation, so like you have little neurons, and then they get linked together.

There is linkage; the biggest law in neurology is "cells that fire together wire together," and he says all of this combines to form integration, and that is Shalom. Neil Flanagan says Shalom is the webbing together of people, creation, and God in mutual harmony and delight. The people of Israel love Shalom, so that's this thread that happens over and over again.

Mihai Csikszentmihalyi, a great researcher who recently passed away, studies the nature of thought and consciousness. That stream that's going on in your mind all the time—his research involves an area called flow. The number one finding in his research is that the natural mind tends towards chaos. He studies artists and athletes and eventually everybody, and he finds out what happens is we begin to learn just discrete items, like these are the letters of the alphabet or these are the notes on a scale, so you separate, and then you learn to join them together so that you can read or so that you can play something, and then eventually people begin to experience what he calls flow, optimal existence.

In the first chapter of Genesis, you see this is chaos, and then God separates; he makes it purely, wholly, functionally, beautifully itself, and then he joins them together so that there can be—the big word for this is Shalom. This thread happens over and over again, found on Earth from the lakes and rivers and seas and so on, and he's inventing agriculture.

When we get so caught up in what we are doing, it's like we lose ourselves in it. We see this with a great surfer; it's like they are one on that surfboard with the wave, or a surgeon with a scalpel, or a musician playing. This kind of oneness also happens with a family when a little child is born.

Nominalism says everything is separate and there's no connection between us, and the only thing that matters is what we can measure and what we can see and what we can touch. The third one is the biblical worldview, and this one says that everything is separate but everything is connected, and that's the one that Jesus is talking about.

In Genesis, God separates the man from the woman, Adam from Eve, and then the two shall become one. When Jesus is commenting on this, he said, "Therefore what God has joined together, let no one put asunder." One of the ways that you can think about sin is that it is trying to separate what God has joined and trying to join what God has separated.

When our first child was born, something I was not expecting happened. She was just a couple of minutes old, and Nancy handed her to me to hold. I was holding this little lump of tissue, and she had one strip of red hair on her head like a mohawk. It was like I could see her entire future before my eyes without even thinking about it. I said to Nancy that this little child that I'm holding right here is going to grow up and become a woman, and then she'll begin to age, and this little red hair that we're looking at right now is going to get gray one day and then white. This little skin that is so smooth and perfect is going to get wrinkled and mottled, and then we'll die, and then eventually she'll die.

When a little child is born, there's this process that goes on where they become differentiated people. Those who study family systems will talk about becoming a fully differentiated person, where you're different than others and you don't have to live just being reactive to them. But then there has to be attachment. We would not survive, and we would not grow up if there was not attachment. All kinds of work around attachment theory exists. If there's no separation, then you have enmeshment, and that's not healthy. But if there's no attachment, no connection, you have disengagement and disconnection. That's not healthy. When it works right, then you have Shalom; then you have a family.

The same thing can be thought about governments. If there's no connection at all, you have anarchy; everybody's doing whatever they want to do. On the other hand, if everybody is forced to be one in a way that does not allow for differentiation, you have a totalitarian government. Philosopher Dallas Willard says there are three competing stories, big stories, that will try to explain reality, and we basically will choose which one we will live by.

One of them is kind of new age or the Nirvana story. The idea of this one is that nothing is really separate; yourself is just an illusion to be transcended, and everything ultimately is just one. You don't have your own separate soul; you're just part of one great soul, and eventually everything will just be one, nothing separate.

The second worldview is what might be called secularism, scientism, or phenomenalism. This one says everything is separate, and there's no connection between us, and the only thing that matters is what we can measure, what we can see, and what we can touch.

The third one is the biblical worldview. This one says that everything is separate but everything is connected, and that's the one that Jesus is talking about. Physicalism and the idea here is there's nothing but separateness; it's just particles, just a big bang, just a big explosion, just matter and energy. No great story to tie it all together, no grand narrative, no one. That's just all separatist.

The third story about how things are is the theistic story, the Christian story, where you have at the heart of everything a Trinity: Father, Son, and Spirit, two, three, to be one, but two, one to be three. And then he creates human beings, the two, but the two shall become one. And this separateness and then joining together and linking together, uh, in our government when it works right, you know one of its mottos is "E pluribus unum," which means "out of the many, one."

So for example, in that book of Ephesians that we just read a moment ago, when we think about the mess that our world is in and what Jesus wanted to do about it, in chapter 2, verse 14, it says, "For he, Jesus, himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one," there's that word again, "and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, broken oneness by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new community, humanity, out of the two, thus making peace and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross."

Over and over and over again, God has this plan, and we see it expressed in a remarkable way in John chapter 17. Jesus is praying, and as he moves on in his prayer, he says, "My prayer is not for his disciples, his followers alone; my prayer is also for those who will believe in me through their message," that's me, that may be you, "and then he says this, that all of them may be one. Father, just as you are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us."

You understand what he's saying, okay? This is you out here; that's a really bad stick figure, but this is you, and Jesus is saying, "Father, just as I am in you and you in me, we have this kind of oneness; may they be in us." You have been invited into the Trinitarian fellowship. That's a staggering thing, and the healing and the goodness and the beauty and the significance of that—I don't know what you have on your business card or your electronic card or whatever it is, but "member of the Trinitarian fellowship," that's pretty up there. That's his prayer; that's the Trinity's plan.

Now, getting down to brass tacks, how do we do that? So now we move from this has just been kind of the overall big picture of the Trinity and why that idea matters so much. It is not some abstract, uh, irrelevant, uh, obscure theological idea. It means that love, self-giving love, and community is at the heart of God. It is the deepest foundation of reality, and so we're invited now to enter into that.

Make every effort, Paul said, to keep and maintain the unity of the Spirit, not to create it. You don't create it, Echo Church; you don't create that. He created it. We're just—how do I submit myself? How do I align myself so I become one of those kind of persons who so loves that loving twain had?

It may be a difficult and painful day for many of us on Father's Day. We may have difficulty thinking of God as a father due to our earthly issues. But the invitation is to enter into a personal relationship with the God who cares for us and loves us with perfect love. Jesus taught us to not worry about our life, what we will eat or drink, or about our body, what we will wear. He said that if God takes care of the flowers of the field, which are here today and gone tomorrow, will he not much more clothe us? We can live as one who has nothing to fear, not even death.

A personal story to illustrate this is when I was with my two young children at a hotel pool. I had warned them to be careful around the pool, but the older one was jumping to me. Suddenly, the younger one slipped into the water, and I immediately reached in and pulled her out. When she came out of the water, she said, "Oh Daddy, I drowned!" I replied, "No honey, you didn't drown. Your daddy was right there all the time."

This Father's Day, make God your father and let Him become a part of your family. Seek first His kingdom, and you can live as one who has nothing to fear. Jesus says that with God watching over us, this world is a perfectly safe place for us to be. Paul says nothing can separate us from the love of God, and nothing can take us out of here. In moments of great pain and heartbreak, we can be reminded that we do not have to be afraid. The Psalmist talks about the Lord being compassionate and gracious, and how far He has removed our transgressions from us.

John Wallace, the president of Azusa, was speaking at a commencement and invited three students to a gathering in his office. Someone had found out about their plans for after graduation and decided to do something special. He told them that because of the generosity of this person, their debt had been forgiven. The first student had $70,000 forgiven, the second had $90,000 forgiven, and the third had $120,000 forgiven.

God as our heavenly Father means that our guilt and shame can be so powerful and cause us to hide from each other. Before sin, Adam and Eve were naked, vulnerable, transparent, and fully known without shame. Being part of a church can help us find people in appropriate, wise, and healthy ways.

We live in a universe created by the Trinitarian fellowship, and we are invited to become children of the heavenly Father. This is a belief and a job, and we must decide to play the game. To do this, we must trust more and more, be transparent with each other, and have a place where we don't have to hide or pretend. We can just be and know that we will be loved. We have nothing to lose, nothing to fear, and nothing to hide. We can find our identity in this circle and die to our ego and agenda, making our desire the ultimate driving factor in our life.

First John 3:1 says, "See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!" This is a real invitation to understand the love the Father has for us. In our day, people will sometimes talk about believing in a God of love, even if they are critiquing a version of Christianity they don't like or don't understand. The claim that God is love is an idea that came from little Israel and Jesus.

I remember when I was a little kid growing up in Rockford, Illinois, I used to play a game called "Daddy's Home." When it got to be about five o'clock, the front door would open, and I would go running down the steps and take a flying leap with my arms out. I knew my dad's briefcase would be set down, and his arms would be open wide, and he would grab me. Every day was "Daddy's Home" until one day my mom told me I had to stop playing the game. She said it wasn't because my dad didn't love me or wouldn't always be there for me, but because I was 27 years old, and eventually human arms get weak and tired.

When we think about this image of God being a Father, it's a really important one. Behold the love the Father has lavished on us! This means that now I'm safe in the arms of my heavenly Father.

I want to put God in charge of my life now, starting with my body, my desires, my ego, my money, my family, my work, my reputation, what other people think of me, my health, my time, my social media experience, and what I fill my mind with. I'm surrendering and making this living here, growing into this the ultimate priority of my life. If you want to do that, the focus shifts towards Jesus and being a follower of His.

I want to give you a moment right now if you never have, and you're ready to make God your Father. I'm leaping into His arms, trusting Him to forgive my sin, to guide me and walk with me each day of my life, and to be with me in this world and the world to come.

Thank you, Blessed Trinity, for creating life and the world to be such a marvel. Forgive us for the ways that we break in ourselves. Thank you, Heavenly Father, that we might be your children. I pray for everybody listening to these words that that might be a reality in their life. In Jesus' name, amen.