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A Big, Large God
A sermon by Dr. Jim
Somerville
Pastor, Richmond’s First Baptist Church
Richmond, Virginia
June 7, 2009
Trinity Sunday
Isaiah 6:1-8; Psalm 29;
Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17
I was disappointed to see that “Holy, Holy,
Holy” has slipped to number two in our hymnbook. In the 1975 Baptist Hymnal it
used to be number one, and I would joke that it was “Number one on the charts
and number one in our hearts,” and for some people it really was. I remember
the way Gladys Hinson sang it, with her head tilted back and her eyes closed as
if it were a love song to the God who comes to us in three persons, the “blessed
trinity.” Some of you sing it like a love song, and those words roll trippingly
off your tongues, but there may be others among us who stumble over the idea of
God in three persons, and on whose tongues outside of church you would never
find the words blessed trinity.
You won’t find those words in the Bible,
either. A quick online search for trinity turned up no results—not even
one—but I found 968 verses that contain the word Father, 1,592 verses
that contain the word Son, and 498 verses that contain the word
Spirit. A few of those verses contain all three words. You may remember
the Great Commission, in which Jesus tells his followers to go into all the
world and make disciples, “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the
Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Mt. 28:19), or Paul’s beautiful benediction from
the end of 2 Corinthians: “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God,
and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you” (13:13). Even if
Trinity isn’t a biblical word it’s a biblical idea. Read through the entire
Bible and you will be convinced that we Christians really do worship one God in
three persons: Father, Son, and Spirit.
And so it isn’t out of place to have a day on
the Christian calendar when we take up this idea like you would take up a
precious jewel, turning it this way and that way, watching how the light bounces
off every facet. That day is this day—Trinity Sunday—and that’s what we’re
going to do—take a close look at this precious doctrine—but first I want to tell
you a story.
One of my church members in Wingate, North
Carolina, was a retired pastor named Joe Larrimore who became a real mentor and
friend to me over the years. Joe had an enormous swing at his house—a heavy oak
plank attached to two thick ropes looped over a limb some twenty feet above. It
was a man-sized swing, and Joe swore it was big enough for him. It makes me
smile even now to think of him, almost eighty years old, swinging away in that
swing with his head thrown back and his feet up in the air.
Joe invited us to a cookout at his house when
my daughter Catherine was just about two years old, and sometime during that
long, summer evening Catherine took a ride on that swing. I wasn’t there to see
it, but I found her just afterwards—her eyes bright, her cheeks
flushed—searching for the words to describe her experience. “Swing!” she said
to me, excitedly, clapping her hands together. “Big!” she said, holding her
hands apart. And then standing on tiptoe, stretching her arms up high overhead
she said, “Large!” “Was it a big swing?” I asked. She beamed and reached for
the sky again, “Big, large!” she said, breathlessly.
Sometimes that’s the best you can do as a
child—pile up adjectives until your dad begins to get the picture. To a little
girl this wasn’t just a big swing, it was big and large. You have to
stand on tiptoe, reach for the sky, just to talk about it. When theologians
talk about the Trinity—the idea of God in three persons—I often get the feeling
that they, too have reached the limits of language, that the best they can do is
pile one noun on top of another, speaking of a God who is Father, Son, and
Spirit all in one. “God is big!” they say. “Large!” And the Trinity is a way
to talk about that. The question for us, however, is not intellectual but
personal. We aren’t so much interested in how big God is, but whether God is
big enough to care about us—the little girl on the swing, the boy drawing
pictures on his church bulletin, the young man who drank too much last night,
the woman who thinks she may have found a lump. That’s what sends us to the
pages of Scripture, poring over those words, looking for evidence that God is
not only big and large but big enough, large enough, to care about us. What we
find when we get there is that often—like theologians and little girls—the
biblical writers reach the limits of language.
Look at today’s reading from Isaiah for
example: the prophet says that in the year King Uzziah died he saw the Lord.
Even if you hadn’t been paying attention before you would pay attention now.
“You saw the what?”
“The Lord,” Isaiah says.
“Really? What did he look like?”
“Well, he was sitting on this throne, high
and lofty, and the hem of his robe filled the temple.”
“The whole temple! Really?”
“Yes, but that’s not all. There were these
seraphs flying around, and each one of them had six wings: with two they covered
their faces; and with two they covered their, um, “feet”; and with two they
flew, and the whole time they were calling out to each other, ‘Holy, holy, holy
is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.”
“Wow. That must have been something.”
“It was. The pivots on the thresholds were
shaking! The place was filled with smoke! I thought the end had come. I said,
‘Well, this is it. I’m done for now. I’m a foul-mouthed sinner from a family
of foul-mouthed sinners and here I am, looking at the Lord of hosts.”
“Right, because ‘to look on the face of God
is to die’ isn’t it? I mean, he’s just too awesome, too holy.”
“Exactly. I was waiting for the death blow.
But then one of those seraphs took a live coal from the altar with a pair of
tongs. He flew to me and touched my lips with the coal. It hurt like you
wouldn’t believe, but somehow it did the trick. He said, ‘Now that this has
touched your lips your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.’ I was
so relieved, so grateful, that when the Lord asked ‘Whom shall I send and who
will go for us?’ I said, ‘I’ll go!’”
Look at the way Isaiah piles up his words:
high, lofty, holy, holy, holy, the hem of his robe filled the temple. The
footnote in my study Bible says, “The image is that of a God too gigantic to be
contained in the temple.” God is big, Isaiah says, large! But look what he
does with his bigness and largeness: he stoops down to forgive the guilt of a
foul-mouthed sinner like Isaiah and give him a whole new purpose in life. And
what about Psalm 29? We didn’t read it today but it is one of the suggested
texts for this Sunday. Why don’t you turn there with me? Psalm 29, “a Psalm of
David,” who says, “Ascribe to the Lord, O heavenly beings, ascribe to the Lord
glory and strength.” He’s telling the angels in heaven, the cherubim and
seraphim, to break forth in praise to God.
I can almost picture him, standing on a
hillside high above the Mediterranean, looking down toward the coast to see what
his old enemies, the Philistines, were up to when he saw a thunderstorm moving
in over the water, the dark clouds piling up on top of each other, the lightning
flashing forth, the thunder rumbling loud and deep, the waves tossing this way
and that. In his head he began to compose a psalm:
The voice of the LORD
is over the waters;
the God of glory thunders, the LORD, over mighty waters.
And then, as the wind began to pick up, as it began to bend the trees on the
slopes below him, up and down the coast as far as he could see in either
direction, and as another clap of thunder boomed he thought:
The voice of the LORD
is powerful;
The voice of the LORD is full of majesty.
The storm began to move inland and off to his right, toward Lebanon and Syria,
and the wilderness of Kadesh beyond, and everywhere the trees were dancing in
the wind, bending to the point of breaking. And then there was another flash of
lightning and another clap of thunder, and David thought:
The voice of the LORD
breaks the cedars;
the LORD breaks the cedars of Lebanon.
He makes Lebanon skip
like a calf, and Sirion like a young wild ox.
The voice of the LORD
flashes forth flames of fire.
The voice of the LORD
shakes the wilderness;
the LORD shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.
About that time the wind reached him, up on that hillside overlooking the
ocean. It rattled the limbs of the oak tree he was standing under, stripped the
leaves from its branches. David held on for dear life, thinking:
The voice of the LORD
causes the oaks to whirl, and strips the forest bare;
and in his temple all say, "Glory!"
He himself might have been saying, “Glory!” or maybe some other choice words as
the winds whipped around him and the storm raged. But even in the midst of all
that he was blessed with a sense of peace, thinking:
The LORD sits
enthroned over the flood;
the LORD sits enthroned
as king forever.
Listen to the language of this psalm! The voice of the Lord is powerful,
thundering over the waters, breaking the cedars, shaking the wilderness,
flashing forth flames of fire, causing the oaks to whirl and stripping the
forest bare. God is big, David is saying—large! He rides the storm clouds like
a chariot; he sets his throne on the raging sea!
Two weeks ago I heard
Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann say that it’s a funny place to put a
throne—on top of the flood, over the chaos—but he also said this is a psalm that
speaks to people whose lives are in chaos, it tells them that when they are
being tossed to and fro like waves in a storm God is there: his throne is over
the flood, and, as Brueggemann put it, he tells the chaos to shut up! That’s
what a big, large God can do for the people he loves. And so the psalmist
concludes,
May the LORD give
strength to his people!
May the LORD bless his
people with peace!
And he has. In our Gospel lesson for today
John tells us about a God who loved the world so much he gave his only Son, so
that whoever believed in him would not perish but have everlasting life. And
when some of those early converts had trouble believing that God could love them
that much Paul said (in Romans 8), “It’s true!” He said, “Do you remember when
you were baptized, when you came up out of the water and said the word Abba?
(apparently that was part of the ritual in those days). Well, it’s a word that
means “Father.” It’s the word Jesus used. And when you used it after your
baptism it was a way of saying that because of what Jesus has done for you God
is your father. The Holy Spirit—the same spirit that made it possible
for you to say ‘Jesus is Lord’ before you went under the water—made it possible
for you to say ‘God is Abba’ afterward. It was that spirit bearing
witness with your own spirit that you really are a child of God, and you know
that God will not let his children perish.”
Yes, these writers are saying, God is big and
large, but look at how God uses his power: he uses it to forgive our sins; to
calm our storms, to be our Abba. This is what it means to talk about God
in three persons: it means that God is able to relate to us in more than one
way. When we feel that our lives are completely out of control we need the
Father whose throne is over the watery chaos. When we’ve done something so
wrong we see no way to make it right we need the Son who saves us from our sin.
When we feel lost and alone we need the Spirit that whispers in our ears, “You
are God’s beloved child.” It takes a big, large God to do that. It takes
Father, Son, and Spirit.
And maybe that’s why we sing “Holy, Holy,
Holy” in church.
Maybe it is a love song to God in
three persons:
Blessed Trinity.
—Jim Somerville © 2009
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