SPEAKER_01 0:00

Good day, and welcome to North Raleigh United Methodist Church behind the scenes podcast, where we sit down weekly and discuss this week's scripture and sermon. My name is Kevin Van Hall. I serve as your host and moderator. Joining me today is one of the senior pastors here at North Raleigh, Laura Johnson. Hi, Laura.

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Hey.

SPEAKER_01 0:15

Thanks for coming. Welcome back.

SPEAKER_00 0:18

So glad to be here.

SPEAKER_01 0:19

It's the trade-off between you and Kevin. Last week, Kevin was here and we were talking about the Pentecost. And it was Pentecost Sunday, and we had birthday cake and more red.

SPEAKER_00 0:29

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 0:30

So that was the birthday or the birth of the church that we want to say that because all the apostles sitting around after Jesus is gone, and the Holy Spirit finally comes upon them. And we went into the whole discussion about the Holy Spirit, which we are sort of going to continue today with today's podcast being Trinity Sunday.

SPEAKER_00 0:50

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 0:51

So does Trinity Sunday always come after Pentecost Sunday?

SPEAKER_00 0:54

Correct. In the church calendar, Trinity Sunday is always that Sunday after Pentecost Sunday.

SPEAKER_01 1:00

Excellent. So today or this coming Sunday will be Trinity Sunday in the church. Laura will be preaching, and we're going to talk a little bit about the Trinity, of what it is, and where that theology explanation came from. And you're going to explain it all to me, we all can understand it much clearer.

SPEAKER_00 1:23

No pressure.

SPEAKER_01 1:24

We're going to be in Matthew, and going on in Matthew is we're actually going to go backwards in time. Now last week we were reading about how the Holy Spirit comes upon the disciples, and that's in the Luke, continues his story in Acts, and this is where the Holy Spirit comes upon them in Acts. We're actually going to go back to the ascension and what Jesus instructs every or all the apostles to do before he leaves. So even though Trinity Sunday is after the Pentecost, we're going to go back in time just a little bit and read from Matthew. So that's where we are at the end of Matthew in chapter 28. But before we do that, how about a word of prayer?

SPEAKER_00 2:01

Let's pray. Bless us as we talk through these scriptures and this deep theology. Might your name be glorified and might we grow in our awe and wonder of you. Amen.

SPEAKER_01 2:16

Amen. Well, first of all, Laura, why uh Matthew?

SPEAKER_00 2:20

Well, so on Trinity Sunday, the scripture choices in the lectionary, which are appointed texts on a three-year cycle, are often the texts that highlight when the three members of the Trinity are named. So in this case, Jesus specifically names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And so that's what's highlighted on Trinity Sunday is helping us understand that our theology of the Trinity has its roots in Scripture, even though it's we've had to embellish it or not embellish, but we've had to make sense of it because it's it, there's not a direct teaching in the Bible of this is what the Trinity is. We've had to kind of study the scriptures, interpret them, and gain this understanding through our logic and our conversations with one another.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

Okay. So Trinity Sunday, we're discussing the Trinity, which is a theology that has come after the Bible was written. It's adopted by most churches. Uh the Catholic Church uh and the early fathers developed this, and as Methodists, we've continued on to this belief, correct?

SPEAKER_00 3:26

That's right. So the Trinity is one of the core theologies of the Christian church. So the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed both list the Trinity as the core tenet. And so that's one of the standards by which we classify who's who's identifies as a Christian and not.

SPEAKER_01 3:45

Okay. And as Lauren mentioned earlier, just to clarify that again, when we talk about the Trinity, we are talking about, we think of it as a like I've just taught it like a triangle, you know, and then there's God the Father, there's Jesus, the Son, and then there's the Holy Ghost or the Holy Spirit.

SPEAKER_00 4:01

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 4:02

Three separate, but one. And I'm going to ask you how that is, but we're going to read Matthew's chapter 28, verses uh 16 through 21st before we begin our discussion.

SPEAKER_00 4:15

All right, here we go. Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshipped him, but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always to the end of the age.

SPEAKER_01 4:56

So we're reading this on Trinity Sunday because it mentions baptizing in the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. But I was always taught in that this passage is called the Great Commission.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

It sure is. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 5:09

What's the Great Commission first?

SPEAKER_00 5:11

So each gospel has a commission. Well, maybe Mark doesn't, but Matthew, Luke, and John have a commission in which Jesus passes on the mission that he lived with to his followers to carry on when he ascends into heaven. And so it's Jesus giving them their marching orders for how they are to live as a family, as a body, while he has, while he's ascended until he returns again. And so this is called the Great Commission because it's telling us that what Jesus wants us to do is to go into all the nations and make disciples and baptize them and teach them all that Jesus has commanded. And the promise, of course, is that while we do that, Jesus is with us always through the power of the Holy Spirit, as we talked about last week with Pentecost.

SPEAKER_01 5:58

Right. And so you said baptizing. But as he didn't just say go baptize them, he said baptize them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So he's that's right.

SPEAKER_00 6:07

Because baptism was not, it was already a practice in those days. It was a it was a ritual of purification. And so Jesus is offering or commanding a different type of baptism in the name of the of the triune God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Um and and so Christians in the early days after Jesus ascended in the church, Pentecost happened, the church began, they were doing that. They were they were going to all the nations, they were proclaiming all that happened to Jesus, his death, his resurrection, they were talking about the Holy Spirit, they were growing these churches. And eventually, as the churches grew and became more formalized as opposed to little pockets of house churches or whatever, there needed to be some kind of organization. And with organization, there needs to be some kind of agreements as to what unites us, hence how the Apostles' Creed came about and eventually the Nicene Creed. It was Christians coming together and saying, let's make sure we're all on the same page about how we've understood God at work in our lives and the stories of Jesus and how we understand who God is in light of what Jesus has accomplished.

unknown 7:17

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 7:18

So it's an evolution of uh the Jewish uh tradition, monotheism, which is countering all the polytheism at the time. That's right. With all the other pagan worships we could talk about with all the multiple, multiple different gods. Jewish tradition is monotheism, there is only one God. So in order to stay with that monotheism way of thinking of things, and yet you have three separates God, Jesus is God, and the Holy Spirit as well, you have there has to be a way that all three of them are combined because there can only be one God, monotheism. Is that where the whole Trinity theology starts?

SPEAKER_00 7:59

Oh, correct. Yeah. So the early Christians are like, we are monotheistic. We are we are people of one God. Um and if you read the gospels, especially when Jesus talks about my father, you can understand how there'd be some confusions among Christians of like, wait, I thought you were monotheistic. Why are we talking about the son and the father? In fact, that was some of the early accusations that the Jewish folks posed against the Christians was, but there's only one God. How can you have how can there be father and son, right? And so so they had to um they had to kind of write down a theology to help Christians understand how this works. And and and I think another thing to name here, the earliest church leaders who helped put all this together, what they would say first and foremost, which echoes a lot of their Jewish brethren, is that God is a mystery. That if you have words that define God, you're not defining God because God is beyond our definition. And so I think they all went into this very humbly, recognizing that they can help help give us imagination to understand how God works. But anytime we think we've got God figured out, we're just lying to ourselves or we're making an idol because a human cannot figure out God, because God is God and we're not, right?

SPEAKER_01 9:28

Yeah, God is God and I ain't. There's also a way of uh bringing in the Holy Spirit. If we want to talk about uh Jewish tradition, talking about God and He's gonna send a Messiah. And if you want to claim Jesus is the Messiah, then they're still just the two. But Jesus brings in the third character, No and the Holy Spirit.

SPEAKER_00 9:44

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 9:45

As well.

SPEAKER_00 9:45

So and and these early Christian theologians, they kind of they searched all the scriptures and and in looking back on what they now know about Jesus and the giving of the Holy Spirit, they were able to find hints of of it throughout Scripture. So if you look at the story of creation in Genesis 1, it begins with a formless void, and um the the Spirit of God is hovering over the waters, and God speaks with the word of God, which is another word for Jesus, creation into existence. And so even at the very beginning, you can see the Trinity in that first story of creation once you have eyes to see it.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

Right. Or the plural uh got we make in our image.

SPEAKER_00 10:27

In our image, that's right.

SPEAKER_01 10:29

So there's the plural there. So a lot of people want to give the original um part of uh the Trinity uh theology to Tertillian, who uh existed uh around 160 to 220 uh CE, and he developed the uh Trinitas, which is Latin for Trinity, which is uh it says uh one substance and three persons.

SPEAKER_00 10:50

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 10:50

So this is where we start developing, no, they're individual, they're separate, that's right. But they're one.

SPEAKER_00 10:56

That's right. So the language he used was um homoousia, which is Greek for one essence. And so the the way to think about it is um the essence of whatever makes God God, which is we do not have because we are humans, that God essence is shared by the one God. Um and God's essence is different from God's activities, right? We know God's essence, parts of God's essence through how God acts in the world, but God's essence is always God's essence. Just like, you know, I know who you are because of your behaviors and your words, right? I don't know your soul. We don't know another person's soul, we know who they are through their words. And the same thing is with God. And so God's essence is this homoousia, he says this one essence that is shared. Um, but then the Greek word for person is um the hypostasis. So like these got these three personhoods, or the um, they're like this distinct personhoods within this essence. And this is where you have to lean into the mystery, right? Like we don't fully understand God. But the idea is that each of those three persons never acts outside of the other person. So it's not like, you know, in my family, we there's four of us. We're one family, but we all have our own mind, we all have our own will, we all have our own hopes and dreams. In the Godhead, there's three persons, but there's one will, there's one essence. There's one, it's not just their one family, they are one in it in essence. But they're still distinct in their personhood. And so they are always acting in concert with one another. The language that has you been used is paracuresis. Careesis comes from choreography, so think of like dance. And so it's this idea that the relationship between the three of them is always kind of moving in tandem together, sharing this one essence.

SPEAKER_01 13:01

But if they're sharing that same essence, they're all one. Um, they know each other's will, they know each other. But to contradict that just a little bit, I'm gonna bring up uh what we just read in verse 18 when Jesus and He Jesus is one that says this, he goes, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. That says someone else had it, i.e. God, and he gave it to me, to where if they're all the same in one, he would have already had it, would he not?

SPEAKER_00 13:34

Well, I mean, I think that's within the personhood of like their distinct actions in the world. That was not his action to have at that point in time until afterwards. But going back to Jesus, I think one of the things that fascinates me about the Trinity is that when we think of Christmas, we think that that's when the Son of God was born in that manger. But what the Trinity teaches us is that the Son of God coexisted eternally with the Father and with the Spirit. So there wasn't ever a time when the Son of God was birthed. Um He was he he came from the Father, but has always been. And same with the Holy Spirit.

SPEAKER_01 14:16

Well that's the difference between Luke and John, right? Luke's Christmas story starts off with the birth, and John's story starts off in the beginning was the word.

SPEAKER_00 14:23

That's right. Exactly. And so so the Christmas story is when the eternal Son of God limited himself into a human shape, right? And so so maybe that's part of this idea of all authority has been given. It's like in Jesus' Jesus as as a resurrected human has now this new authority. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 14:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:47

Well, I mean, we Jesus also says God and the Father one and one, he's in me and I in him, and everyone's like. But he also says you take this bread bread and eat it. This is my body, give it to you.

SPEAKER_00 15:00

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

That's again that's another one of those mysteries going, uh, are we doing cannibalism here? That's kind of weird, hard to accept as well. It's just beyond, like you said in the very, very beginning. Some things are just gonna be our beyond our comprehension.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

That's right. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 15:14

It's not only words can't uh describe a God's even so don't even try to make an image of me.

SPEAKER_00 15:18

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 15:19

Because it's it's not right.

SPEAKER_00 15:21

You can't well, it's why when Moses asked for God's name, God said, I am who I am. Like you don't get a name, I exist, right? Um, and I think when we approach the Trinity, that's the kind of attitude we need to approach with. If God exists, how can we interact with God? And I think the Trinity helps us understand how God is for us. Um and so this idea is that the each of the persons of the Trinity we have interactions with. And so we can think of the Father as like that benevolent parent who's always looking out for us, always um mindful of us. We have the son who is our savior, but also our our friend, who understands everything we're going through because he's been there before as a human. And then we have the spirit, who we talked about in Pentecost, which is the the God that lives within us, that guides us, that directs us, that transforms us from the inside out, right? And so I think Trinity helps us understand how God is both um other, like beyond our imagination, but also closer than our own souls. Right, right.

SPEAKER_01 16:35

The spirit as in the wind, God's wind of power, love that can come and descend and enter us and bring us uh God's message or power or gifts, so often we think of.

SPEAKER_00 16:48

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 16:48

That's the uh I've heard explained as that's God's uh power, that's God's love, it's God's will. It's the Holy Spirit that comes that can come to us and come into us. Um where you want to think of you can't like in the beginning in the Old Testament, you can't see God, you can't look at God, you'll be annihilated, but God can send the Holy Spirit upon you as one way that you can receive from God. So this is not the easiest way of understanding God, is it? And and the early church struggled with this as well. They try to define it many times. Nicene Creed, it comes out in 325 um when they try to say um define it that with the with the Father, the Son was you want to say begotten, a begotten being. And it it it gets expanded again in Constinople um in 380 when they formally tried to define the full definity of what the Holy Spirit is. There's that hard understanding of what the Holy Spirit is, more or less to the understanding the three as well.

SPEAKER_00 17:52

Well, and the Eastern and Western Church, one of the fissures that broke them was over how to understand the Holy Spirit. So in our creed, the Nicene, the Western Church, which we come from, um, says um that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, and that clause and the Son is what the Eastern Church never got on board with. They were like, the Spirit comes from the Father, not from the Son. Um but we the Western Church remembers Jesus saying in John, breathing on the disciples saying, Receive my Holy Spirit. So so we have this understand that the Spirit also comes from the Father or from the Son. And so it, I mean, it's it's splitting theological hairs, but it literally split the church back in the fourth century.

SPEAKER_01 18:45

Well, yeah. Well you well, you mentioned it. I was gonna bring it, so we'll bring it up. Let's talk about it. How the Holy Spirit is mentioned. Luke talks about it, Jesus says, stay here. The Father is gonna send you the Holy Spirit, and then they receive the Holy Spirit in Acts, and that's the Pentecost that we celebrate in the church. But if we go back to Matthew, he doesn't necessarily specify that God is gonna send or he's gonna send the Holy Spirit. Anyone's gonna receive the Holy Spirit. He just says, go out and baptize in the name of the Holy Spirit. Same thing in Mark. Mark doesn't mention the Holy Spirit either. And then John says there's nothing about waiting for God to send your Holy Spirit. Jesus, before he leaves, breathes on them and they receive the Holy Spirit.

SPEAKER_00 19:29

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 19:29

So there's four gospels and all of them with a different story.

SPEAKER_00 19:32

And that's why lots of books have been written on this. Yes, right. I mean it's part of the mystery, right? Of how how do the three persons of the Trinity interact? How do they interact with us? How how does Scripture help us better understand that? And it's I mean, it's literally split churches apart. But the Eastern and Western Church, even though they were split apart that one line in the Nicene Creed of and the Son, they still believe in the Trinity. It's just a matter of how they understand The Son, really. Or the Holy Spirit.

SPEAKER_01 20:09

Yes, the Son, really under authority of God, the Father. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 20:13

That's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 20:14

So in the church, even we had the Eastern and Western Church, and we can even go fact further to the church in Alexandria, uh early days of the church. Remember, northern uh Africa was very much Jewish and Christian in the early days. We think of Africa so much as being Muslim, that doesn't come home till 600 AD when Muhammad comes around. And there is a split and a division as well. Then their whole understanding of Jesus is is He's God, is He's the Son. If He's God and He can't be killed on the cross and causes So we've been struggling with this for a long time.

SPEAKER_00 20:48

And I mean in the early church, there were lots of um, you know, there were lots of drag out fights. If if you read some of the early church fathers as they're arguing over the divinity of Christ and the Spirit, like it sounds like as angry as some like angry Facebook posts. Like they have some they have some like zingers at one another, and you're like, wow, okay, even back then. Um but I mean they they got very adamant about what you know what everyone can agree upon, what quote unquote is orthodox, so that they can make sure um the church can be unified around it. And so some of the when it comes to the Trinity, one of the heresies that's what ended up being called people who didn't fit with the general church leader population, right?

SPEAKER_01 21:40

Exactly and brought forth a different belief or understanding.

SPEAKER_00 21:42

Exactly. So there were some heresies that were like Jesus was not divine, he was just a human. Around the Trinity, one of the heresies was that um the members of the Trinity that they're not separate persons, it's just one God who operates in three different modes. So like Like, think about water. Water can be liquid, it can be fog, it can be ice, right? It's the same substance, three different modes. That would have been named as a heresy in the early church because they were adamant that no, this Jesus the Son is always Jesus the Son. He doesn't just transform into the Holy Spirit when he wants to be the Holy Spirit, that they're separate persons within the same essence. And so there like you can read there are so many different rejected notions of what Trinity is. You can look those all up. It's an interesting read, but that's one popular one that existed. That still exists, I think, sometimes.

SPEAKER_01 22:44

Right. So but we'll go back to this Sunday, Trinity Sunday, and our celebration in the Methodist Church. So we'll zero back into how Wesley probably wanted to do it. His background being the Anglican English Church was I guess they didn't have a problem understanding the Trinity. So in America, we have a melting pot here. So many different people with different beliefs want to come here and start their own religions. So it's not unlike uh to find so many different beliefs and understandings in this.

SPEAKER_00 23:30

Aaron Ross Powell But let me name so Wesley, John Wesley was unique in his day and age because he did a lot more digging into Eastern Orthodoxy and Eastern traditions than most British clergymen at the time. And he adopted a lot of Eastern theology. And our view of sanctification, this idea that the Holy Spirit works within us to make us more like Christ, is an Eastern theology. It's called theosis, that we become like God. Wesley really revived that from the Eastern Church and brought it into the Wesleyan movement and it's part of our theology now. So I mean that's not necessarily Trinitarian, but it's an interesting fact of like how he really did try to merge the two worlds in a lot of cool ways. Right.

SPEAKER_01 24:16

So we can get into uh some other discussions about that as well, uh the split uh how the Catholics view it. I was raised in in the Catholic Church very strong in the Trinity. Um so there's really not a big separation in in appearance or beliefs in those two churches. Um the Holy Sacrament. Baptism is still a holy sacrament in both. That's right. And this is what Jesus commands us to go out and and to do.

SPEAKER_00 24:42

And in Catholics, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Baptists, we all baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

SPEAKER_01 24:48

Yeah. And but some could question, well, can you baptize a baby that can't accept it and accept and have the Holy Spirit come upon them, where some want to believe it, no, we after you confess your sins and you accept God Jesus, then you can be baptized and receive the Holy Spirit. So can a baby receive the Holy Spirit, be baptized, receive the Holy Spirit? What do we believe in our Methodist church?

SPEAKER_00 25:14

Aaron Powell We absolutely believe they can. We believe in provenient grace, the fact that before any of us can even be aware of the Holy Spirit or open to the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is working in us or working to draw us towards God. So for us, baptism is not necessarily like a profession of faith so much as it is a inclusion into God's family. So that's why we baptize babies because we believe that we never fully we're never we have never fully arrived where we can fully claim God. We're always growing towards that. And so at what point, if we were practicing what Baptists call believer's baptism, when you have to come to a confession of faith, and like at what point is that um how old do you have to be? Yeah, how do you know you've reached it? What if you have a developmental disability? Can you ever get baptized? But we believe in God's provenient grace that says everyone's welcome in God's family. Um, and we hope that through your journey of faith, as you're baptized into Christ's church, that the church, the Holy Spirit will work through the church to help you grow in that profession of faith and eventually be confirmed potentially to make that profession of faith. Or if you're not confirmed, as an adult, to say, you know what, I really want to keep growing in this and take it seriously, which is another form of profession of faith. Like we we believe in a series of professions of faith along the way that we're always growing deeper in our faith.

SPEAKER_01 26:42

Well, Laura's going to be preaching this Sunday on the Trinity and goes hand in hand with a little bit about what Kevin was talking about last week in the Holy Spirit. Uh I think sometimes we think of uh God, Father, and Son in Jesus, and we leave out the Holy Spirit and their Trinity, there is tree Trinity being three. There are three in the one, and Laura's gonna explain it all, and then we'll all walk out Sunday with a better understanding.

SPEAKER_00 27:08

Or more questions than answers. But you know what? That might not be bad either.

SPEAKER_01 27:13

It's not. I don't think we're ever gonna be completely questionless. Is that that that's such a a term or word that you're always gonna have some little bit of doubt, probably or question inside of you, and I think that's just the way it is.

SPEAKER_00 27:28

Can I read you this quote from um an Eastern Orthodox bishop? He said, It is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder. And I love that idea of that. We don't have to have it all figured out. The the invitation is to be living in wonder.

SPEAKER_01 27:56

Well, it's accept the mysteries of God. Just accept it. So well, thank you so much, uh, Laura. Enjoyed the podcast today. Look forward to the uh um sermon on Sunday, and we want to thank everyone out there for uh listening to our podcast, continuing to uh listen to a podcast. Uh starting uh next week um or after this coming Sunday, this coming Sunday being the 31st of June, summertime, and a new series.

SPEAKER_00 28:24

That's right. It's um called I Am. And we're gonna be looking at Jesus' seven I Am statements in the Gospel of John to help us better understand who Jesus is and what he says about himself.

SPEAKER_01 28:36

Oh, better understanding, more questions answered.

SPEAKER_00 28:38

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 28:40

All right, so please join us then. So until then, may the love of Christ be with you always. Goodbye, everyone.

SPEAKER_00 28:46

Bye.