“For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of sonship. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”  Romans 8:15-16

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

An article in the Wall Street Journal this week remarked on the large number of new federal agencies and programs being created as a part of the economic stimulus plan, all of them designated by fancy acronyms.  Not since Roosevelt’s New Deal, it remarked, have we seen so many new alphabet soup titles.  The whole stimulus plan, of course, had its start with TARP, the Troubled Assets Relief Program, which was designed to cover over all those investment mistakes made by the banks.  We also have SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and the Department of Transportation’s TIGER Team, the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery Board.  The whole package, theoretically, is being minded by the RAT Board, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which is designed to, well, sniff out rodents in the form of waste and fraud.  Confused yet?  Try following this recently weekly memo from the Commerce Department that outlined its economic recovery appropriations as going to NIST CRF, NIST STRS, NIST Health IT, NOAA PAC, NOAA ORF, NTIA DTACBP, NTIA BTOP, EDA EDAP, EDA S&E, and Census PCP.

Of course, acronyms are supposed to make things simpler for us, to boil down the complications of addressing every board, program and association by its cumbersome real name.  But I can’t help wondering if we might have a bit more accountability and transparency in our bureaucratic undertakings if we could be certain that the professionals, at least, really knew what they were talking about.

When I was living in England, it was one of my occasional complaints that I couldn’t understand the British mania for acronyms, which at least in common speech, (as opposed to the  never never land of government programs), puts us Americans to shame.  I learned quite a bit of English slang, but the acronyms were much more difficult because they rush by so fast in conversation and are almost impossible to guess.   Some of them also referred to completely different entities in American English.  I was rather surprised by the openness and vulnerability of British society when I saw a car with a sticker that proudly proclaimed its owner to be an AA Member.  I soon learned, though, that this referred to the Automobile Association and not Alcoholics Anonymous.  I was complaining to a friend who had some linguistics training about how barbaric and technical it was for his countryman to speak in such a way-what about that longstanding reputation for speaking the “Queen’s English?”  He told me that actually, the greater use of acronyms indicated a more advanced and sophisticated language, as opposed to old fashioned, clunky American.  Acronyms make language simpler, and they are usually more precise.  People who use them in regular speech are relying on a greater stock of common knowledge-you save the time of explaining the thing by simply giving the shorthand form of its official title.

I don’t know that he convinced me completely, but I can see that my friend had a point.  When you understand the reality behind them, acronyms are very helpful.  But to the outsider, they often seem only overly complicated and unclear. The same kind of dilemma besets us Christians in our use of the truth about God that we are celebrating in today’s Eucharist, the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity.  It is certainly a kind of acronym to call God “Holy Trinity,” and specifying that this means “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” hardly helps clarify things so much to a complete outsider.  The Holy Trinity is, of course, the doctrine that the One God exists eternally in three persons (or hypostases, to be precise).  The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are not separate gods, nor are they blended into each other.  Each of the persons has a special role in their common work of salvation, but they are not merely job titles.  Each of them is God, but neither is God by Himself, without the other two.

The doctrine is a complicated one, defined by the Tradition using all the sharpest and most precise tools of classical philosophy.  Most of the analogies commonly used to explain the Trinity: ice, water and steam, or intellect, memory and will or even dear old Saint Patrick’s three leaves of a shamrock break down under close examination, according to the theologians.  The Doctrine of the Trinity is true, and indeed, is at the very center of the Christian faith, and yet it is most difficult to explain plainly and directly.  St. Hilary of Poitiers, the great church father, wrote of the doctrine of the Trinity,

“Faith ought in silence to fulfill the commandments, worshipping the Father, reverencing with him the Son, abounding in the Holy Spirit.  The error of others compels us to err in daring to embody in human terms truths which ought to be hidden in the silent veneration of the heart.”

And yet, St. Hilary didn’t leave the doctrine venerated silently in the heart, but placed these words in his preface to a treatise on the Trinity dozens of books in length.  `

At the end of the day, the faithful, orthodox Christian must have a bit of sympathy for the outsider who seems befuddled by the whole idea.  We might even be able to nod patiently to  the Unitarians and the Muslims, who begin their profession of faith by saying that an idea so contrarily paradoxical and abstract can’t really be true, that it makes the church look like one of those acronymed government agencies.  The Doctrine of the Trinity, though, isn’t merely complicated for the sake of being complicated, nor is it merely some sort of esoteric knowledge useful only for the Church’s really sophisticated thinkers.  The Doctrine lies at the very heart of the Christian story of salvation and it shapes the life of every believer.  Though we often do not recognize it, all Christians live a Trinitarian life, and it is our project this morning to throw a bit more light on the shape and meaning of that life.

The key lies in our two New Testament passages.  The word “Trinity” you might know, does not appear in the Bible.  The clearest Trinitarian statements in the Bible, like Jesus’ command to baptize “in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” and  Saint Paul’s blessing, “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit”-they don’t actually explain very much on their own.  Instead, we must trace our doctrine of the Trinity through the language that Jesus uses to describe his own mission, and the way that Saint Paul describes the prayer life and the destiny of the believer.  Both of these passages are very rich and complex, so we will only be able to touch on a few things, but the doctrine of the Trinity is still clearly taught by both.  I don’t usually suggest this, but it might be helpful for you to take out your lectionary sheet to help analyze the passages a bit more clearly.

First, our lesson from Saint John’s Gospel. Jesus is visited by Nicodemus, who wants to know who He is and what mission He has been given by God.  First, Jesus responds to Nicodemus’ question about what lies behind the work He has been doing.  He describes the action of the Spirit.  To become part of the kingdom of God, he tells Nicodemus, one must be born of water and the Spirit.  The Spirit is the source of new life, the one who guides the believer, blowing him along according to his own will.”  By Spirit, Jesus obviously doesn’t mean himself, and he doesn’t mean the Father either, the great Source, the ruler of heaven.  Jesus is talking about a great force, a presence of God active in the life of a believer, the Holy Spirit that he would soon pour out upon the apostles and which they would pass on to the new believers.

In the next paragraph, he moves on to talk more specifically about his own mission and task.  Jesus isn’t merely a human being used by God to introduce this kingdom of the Spirit.  He is the Son.  First he talks about the one who has “descended from heaven, the Son of man.”  The “Son of man” title was one often used to describe the great Messiah promised to Israel.  Jesus was saying that He was this son of man, who had come down from Heaven.  And then, a few verses later, he makes this truth even more explicit.  The Son of man he says, is also the Son of God.  “God so loved the world, that He sent his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”  There is then, God the Father, who has sent forth His Son to save the world.  The son is begotten of the Father-that means he isn’t simply one designated by the Father for a particular task or raised up to goodness for a time only.  He alone has come from God directly.  What the Father is, He is also-he is as much God as the Father is God.  When we speak of God, then, Jesus is saying, we must speak of a Father, whose love has sent forth the Son to save the world, and the Son’s work is brought to life by the Spirit.  Each of them is God, “co-equal and co-eternal” as the Creed says.  Each of them, in turn, has an integral part in this work of salvation that determines the destiny of the world.

Saint Paul picks up on the same themes from the other direction when he describes the experience of the believer in our Epistle Lesson.  Again, like Jesus when he speaks to Nicodemus, Saint Paul begins from our experience of the Spirit.  All Christians, he says, are led by the Spirit of God, and the mark of the Spirit’s work is fellowship with God.  Saint Paul describes our fellowship in a very particular, very intimate way.  We have received, he says, “a spirit of sonship.”  The term is an important one, and our inclusive language Bible translations entirely miss the point when they turn it into “the spirit of childhood” or some other milk and water, PC equivalent.  The Spirit brings us into the same kind of deep fellowship with God the Father that is the natural possession of the Son.  We are loved by the Father, just as the Son is loved by Him, and we can address him as Abba, as “Daddy,” the tender term of intimacy that Jesus used when speaking to His Father.  We also share in all the gifts that the Father bestows on the Son-we are fellow children and heirs with Him.  Just as the Son receives life from the Father, so we receive eternal life from him.  All the riches of heaven, the glorious promises made by God to His people through the ages, they all belong to us as well, because the Spirit has brought us into the fellowship of God’s family.  We are indeed “children of God” not because of any goodness or accomplishment of our own, but because the Spirit has brought us through the Son into all the blessings of fellowship with the Father.

We see here the pattern of the Trinity’s great mission of love.  The Father’s love sends forth the Son to save the world, and together, they send the Spirit to bring that salvation to us.  The Spirit then leads us back through the Son to the Father.  The love within the Holy Trinity launches the work of salvation, and does not stop until it has brought the objects of that love back within its warm embrace.

That beautiful and perplexing term “The Holy Trinity” stands in as our summary of that whole story.  No One of the divine persons has done the work on His own, but together they have brought the fullness of life and blessing to us all.  Only by speaking of God as Holy Trinity can we affirm the full story of salvation.  Only this acronym, the precious heritage guarded by so many faithful teachers through the ages, can do justice to the truth that has saved us and holds the promise of all our hopes.  So pray to God boldly using our blessed acronym, rejoice in its truth, ponder its meaning.  It is a source of blessing and joy for all the faithful now and for all eternity.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.