Trinity                                      John 16:12-15                                              6/3/07

                                                  "Give Up"
 

I don’t know about you, but I have days where I would just like to "give up"........and those are my best days.

Now, you needn’t try to remember the name of that anti-depressant you saw advertised. I’m already taking it anyway. Actually, I’m talking about a very different type of giving up, one that God wishes we’d all engage in.

Yes, right here, right now, God wants you to give up. But what He wants you to give up is the need to know and control. We all know that God is way beyond anything we can ever understand and that His power is supreme. Yet, at some level most people keep trying to figure God out. And this desire is based in the need to control God.

I’m not talking here of learning about God or trying to understand His attributes or finding out what His will is for us. Nor is it wrong to trying and put our experience of God into words. This is surely necessary both for our own spiritual growth and for our witness to others.

In fact, this is how the Doctrine of the Trinity that we celebrate today came into being. Believers of the first centuries were aware that God related to creation in different ways.

They knew that God had created all things. That was received from their Jewish religious heritage. But, now they also were experiencing God as Savior from sin and death. And that Savior had taught that when He left the world He would send the Spirit of truth to lead them. At the same time, they knew there could be only one God.

To complicate matters while people were trying to puzzle this out, some came up with theories that just did not ring true and if left unchallenged could become dangerous obstacles to the faith.

The problem was finally turned over to theologians who developed the doctrine of the Trinity. Just as an aside, Trinity Sunday is the only feast day devoted to a Church doctrine rather than a teaching of Jesus. While the three Persons of the Trinity are certainly mentioned in Scripture, no where will you find the word "Trinity" or any clear teaching related to the concept.

Even after the doctrine was developed the finest theological minds continued to struggle to clarify what "Trinity" means. The Athanasian Creed may have been one of the better attempts at this. God is made up of three Persons - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These Persons are equal in every way. But the Persons are not separate Gods, yet they make up God. My sem theology prof stated it as, "When the Persons of the Trinity interact in love, there is God."

Got that? I hope not, because it is supposed to be a mystery and a mystery beyond human analysis. The doctrine is interesting to think about and study, but it is really in the mystery that we meet God. Thus, we must ultimately give up our need to gain an intellectual understanding and our need to control through that understanding, if we hope to reach the heart of God.

In the end, our greatest hope for knowing God is simply allowing ourselves to experience the love of the Persons of the Trinity for each other and for us. The Father created all things for us to give us joy. The Son redeemed us so that we could live and die in joy. And the Spirit awakens and enlivens in us the truth that leads us to joy.

But again, we must give up. We must give up our definition of joy in order to know true joy. We must give up our misbegotten autonomy and accept the guidance of the Spirit. We must give up ourselves in order to receive God.

This can be scary. The Spirit may lead us to see things differently than we had in the past or we may feel the urge to take a risk, do something we’d never felt we could do. We may not know whether we are being led by the Holy Spirit at this point or by some other spirit. Thus, God tells us in Scripture to test the spirits. Read Scripture, consult people knowledgeable in theology and spirituality, and pray for discernment. If we are faithful in the giving up process we will come to know the truth.

When we discern the rightness of the path the Spirit is leading us on, we are again faced with the need to give up. We must give up what has been. We must take the leap of faith.

I remember all too well saying to my spiritual director when I was trying to discern what I felt as my call to the ministry, that I felt like I was on the edge of a dark abyss. It was scary in so many ways. But, she would assure me that God was there with me and would bear me up. And he did.

There have been lots of other abysses since then too. With each one God has given me His Spirit to lead me to the truth of what to believe, to help me follow the right path, to guide me to a more mature experience of God, and thus to greater joy.

But, it always requires letting go and giving up. Letting go of the death grip on the human need to control and giving up the insistence on going my way.

There’s a story I remember reading many years ago as a teenager. It was written by Rev. Herman Gockel. A father and his toddler son were taking a walk. The child determined to prove that he was grown up refused to hold his father’s hand. Everything was going well until the boy stepped on a small leaf covered hole in the path. He fell and skinned his knees. His father stood him up, brushed off his knees and comforted him until the sting went away. Then, the father suggested that they resume their walk. Before they had taken one step a small hand slipped into the safety of that larger hand.

This is what it is like to give up and let the Spirit guide us. We struggle, perhaps for many years, to walk on our own, show how big and strong we are, and then we fall. When we’ve fallen enough times we may finally be ready to give up that autonomy and slip our hand into the hand of God.

When we do, we discover what it is like to be in the presence of the Persons of the Trinity interacting in love. We come to know security, peace and joy beyond human understanding. Give it a try. Try to give up. Amen