God's Trinity and Our Trials

 The following is an adaptation of the sermon I preached on Trinity Sunday 2024. One of my refrains during that service was that clergy can be wrong. I stated this as a way to introduce one of the functions of reciting Creeds during our liturgy (as a corrective to any wayward points in a sermon). It just so happened that I feel like I whiffed on my sermon and left out any major connection to Jesus Christ (yikes!). So me writing and posting this is an opportunity to amend my words.

The 20th century theologian Karl Barth is reported to have said that an exegete or preacher must prepare his sermon with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. Following this advice, in preparation for my sermon on the doctrine of God's Trinity, which was to draw primarily on Moses' encounter with God at the Burning Bush, I decided to search the internet to see how people were hearing/interacting with this revelation of God. In doing so I stumbled upon the following quote from a contemporary atheist writer, Trevor Treharne. Treharne wrote: "Billions of years ago God was creating universes and life; thousands of years ago he was creating angry floods, sin-saving human sacrifices and audible burning bushes. Today he occasionally appears on a piece of toast. To state that God has become reclusive over the years would be an overwhelming understatement."

Treharne wants to draw our attention to the apparent problem of God's absence in our lives, at least in the sense that we are not constantly stumbling on burning bushes or pieces of toast adorned by the face of Jesus. Treharne is clearly not wanting to buttress our faith with his comments. However, he helpfully draws our text of the burning bush into just the kind of arena in which the doctrine of God's Trinity was to be worked out by the early church. This is because the problem of God's absence, while an annoyance which can be addressed in finely worked through logical arguments, is particularly scandalous in those seasons of our lives in which we are acutely suffering. When you are struggling with suffering, a common question, particularly for believers, is 'where is God?' In the early church knew this question as well. They worshipped the Crucified One, Jesus Christ, who had himself cried from the cross 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'; they proclaimed this One as Lord, and then saw their brothers and sisters led off toward martyrdom. This was the context in which the doctrine of God's Trinity was forged and fought through. 

Our text from Exodus 3 bears witness to the setting of trial and suffering as well. The verses preceding the lectionary assigned reading is one that fitly summarizes the suffering of Israel in Egypt. However, unlike Exodus 1 which initially reported this, Exodus 2:23-25 focuses on God: "During those many days the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel—and God knew" (ESV). The cries of the people are of the burden of their slavery as well as the agony of losing children to the genocidal machinations of a pharaoh intent on their destruction. This is the context in which the book of Exodus introduces its foundational revelation.

All this to say that the burning bush relates to us that the revelation of God's Trinity is intended to somehow meet us in our suffering and sorrow. Whereas this doctrine can seem like one that is fit only for ivory tower study rooms, far away from the troughs of life, Scripture counters this by giving its word to us amidst real suffering and loss. By implication, there is an invitation for us to flee here, to who God is and how He relates to creation in the midst of our trials. For here we find the comfort of God's presence, the promise of His justice, and the revelation of His and our agency in creation.

In what follows I want to focus primarily on the modes of God's being in relation to the world. In this I want to explicate how the doctrine of God's Trinity is the answer to Treharne's accusation, which many of us can even attest to, of God's absence in our world. By focusing on God's modes of being I need to differentiate myself from the ancient heresy known as modalism or Sabellianism. To my understand (I am open to correction) what made modalism a heresy is that it understood these modes of God's life (Father, Son, and Spirit) to be temporary, exclusive, and not eternally true of God's being. That is to say, God would be at one time Father, and then in the incarnation He became the Son (and was no longer wearing the 'mask' of Father), and then after the Ascension took up the mode/mask of Spirit among us. So these modes are for a time, and are therefore temporary; they are exclusive in that while God is wearing one such mode/mask He is not existing in the other modes; and finally they are not eternally true because they only tell us of how God shows up in the world and not of God's being, there is something else, some other 'god-ness' behind these masks. The doctrine of God's Trinity handed down to us from the early church is that the one Lord God exists eternally as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; He is always Father, always Son, always Spirit, and that these exist in hypostatic union with one another, such that they define God's being. There is no additional God or 'god-ness' that is behind the Trinity. What I am seeing in the text of Exodus 3 is just this latter doctrine; there is no differentiation nor switching between these modes. Rather, as I will point out, God affirms that He is always the present companion with Israel, always the judge standing apart from the actions of the world, and always the divine agent who comes to effect change within creation. Hopefully I have avoided heresy, but others may charge me otherwise.

So, to the text. First, Exodus 3 and Moses' encounter with the Lord God in the burning bush reveals to us the comfort of God's presence with us in our suffering, that is, it reveals to us that God is the Holy Spirit who is present throughout creation. We can see this revelation of God in the verses quoted above from Exodus 2, but also in the Lord's speech to Moses in Exodus 3:7f, "Then the Lord said, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings." God knows and sees the suffering of Israel, and He knows them apart from any report from Moses. Moses does not need to inform God and then ask what God intends to do about it. Rather, the Lord already knows for He is present with His people. 

In the movie, Horton Hears a Who, the people of Whoville live on a tiny speck of dust, which is floating through the vastly larger world of Horton, an elephant. As the dust floats past Horton, the elephant hears the cry of those on the speck of dust. Horton then has to defend the existence of these Whos on the dust to his fellow inhabitants of his world. In order to do so, the Whos have to muster every voice and use every instrument to amplify their voices. It is only with the greatest effort that a small amount of sound is finally able to break through the barrier and others can hear of their existence. 

I draw on this movie to point out to you what is not in Exodus. Sometimes we may have this sense of God's distance from us, particularly in our suffering, and that we have to muster enough voices to pray for us in order to break through the cosmic barrier in order to get God's attention. But there is no such sense in Exodus 2-3. God hears, knows, and sees without any implication of distance or barrier. He is there with Israel, present fully in the world and fully aware of their suffering. 

Through the rest of the revelation of Scripture, we learn that God is present in the mode of being as His Spirit. God is always everywhere in creation, enabling life, and knowing all that there is to know about everything and every person. So one answer to the problem of God's absence raised so helpfully by Treharne, which the burning bush reveals to us, is that God is here always. While we may not see Him in a bush or some toast, He is here because the Holy Spirit is God.

If we only had the doctrine of God's Spirit, if God was mono-modalistic, then we would be trapped in hopeless fatalistic pantheism. For then it would be that God was fully identified with everything in creation, and therefore everything that happens is part of the divine will. We would have to say to any suffering in our lives, "I guess this is what God wills, better get used to it." But this is not what Exodus 3 reveals to us about God's presence in and relation with creation. Even as God is present throughout creation and knows of all of its doings, God is not to be fully identified with creation. Rather, He is apart from it and fulfills the sovereign role as judge of those actions which take place within it. And this promise of justice provides hope for us.

God says to Moses from the bush, "and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites" (Exod 3:8). The Lord sees, hears, and knows of Egypt's oppression of Israel and here He judges that evil. He has come down to deliver Israel from the Egyptians. The language of coming down opens up for us this distinction between God and creation. Yes, God is fully present in creation, but He is not to be fully identified with it. He stands apart from it, not defined by it; rather, He defines it through His just decrees in creation (cf. Prov 8:22-31). And here He makes known that He finds the actions of Pharaoh to be contrary to His will. 

As Christians we hold on to the hope that the evil and suffering we see in the world does not have the last word, and this is where the doctrine of God the Father answers to our suffering. God is love, He loves His creation through His Son, and desires that all things come to share in that love. Obviously that is not the case right now. Scripture attests to a future time when the Lord will judge all that falls short of God's will and those things will be purged from creation. This promise of God's justice offers comfort for us in our trials. Even though we are afflicted, we are not to knee-jerk identify that suffering with God's will. He stands above and outside of our moment, even while He is present with us, and as our loving Father, He judges any wickedness in creation. Because of this we are then free to acknowledge evil as evil, and to hate it as such, for it is apart from God's will for His people. In many ways, this word of comfort comes to us in the form of God's absence; because God is not to be identified with every action in our lives, we can speak of the hope of future judgment. Because God is our Father we can endure the trial.

Exodus 3 reveals to us a God who is at once present amidst the trial and suffering in our lives and yet stands apart from it, not to be identified with it, thus offering us the hope of justice. However, if God was only thus defined in such a bi-modal way, we would be left in a paralyzing paradox. We would be forced to only say, 'God is here but He is not doing anything about the troubles of the world until the end.' Moreover, we would have no way of knowing what the will of God is, what the standard is by which He will judge. This bears a striking similarity to the God of the Deists, who affirmed God's role in creation (although they wanted a strict separation between God's creation and the natural laws which maintain that creation) and His future judgment. What would be lacking is the revelation of God's agency in the here and now, and any role that His people have amidst creation. The bi-modal god is passive and would form passive victims. The God Who is Trinity is one who is active and forms a people with agency.

At the burning bush God reveals Himself to Moses and He does this by His Word. This mode of God's being bridges that mode of God's being which is always presence but whose presence is otherwise hidden from our eyes (Israel is unaware that God is with them, as is Moses), and that mode of God's life by which He stands apart and judges creation to be righteous or wicked. Without the Word Moses would not know of God's presence nor of His plan. But by the Word of God that changes. God speaks, and creation comes to know. It is the Word of God who is the mode of God's life by which God brings about change in creation. Genesis 1 reveals this as well; all is formless and void until God speaks. Now in Exodus 3 God speaks to open Moses' and Israel's eyes to God's presence and judgment.

The Gospels contend that this Word of God took on flesh in Jesus Christ. Christ is the climactic revelation of God by which we become aware of God's true nature and way of being in relation to us and all of creation. The affirmation of Christ as fully God affirms for us that there is not god lurking behind Jesus with more to show us later. Jesus if the Word incarnate, who reveals to us the Father and the Spirit, showing us that God is present and that God is judge, the God is Spirit and that God is Father. Not only does He reveal but He also brings about change in creation. It is by the Word the world was created and by that same Word which it is being redeemed, through the death and resurrection of Christ, the Word-made-flesh.

The affirmation of Jesus as the Word of God incarnate is the place where, I believe, we are most tempted toward modalism. For Jesus was an historical person with a birth date and death date. Did God's mode of being as Word, agent of transformation, only begin at Jesus' birth and cease at his death? If so, then we are left with modalism. However, notice that a similar logic is at work in Exodus 3, and indeed throughout Scripture. The Word of God enfolds a burning bush around God's being so that it becomes an instrument of revelation. So too the Word enfolds human words around Himself in order for Moses to hear and understand. And now that same Word is enfolded in the words of Scripture in order that we might see, hear, and know of God's person and presence. Additionally, in the mission of Moses the Word conforms him to God's purposes. Moses becomes the bearer of the Word to the children of Israel and to Pharaoh. Moses is not Christ, for Moses sins, indicating for us that the Word and Christ are not be identified in anything like the doctrine of two natures. Christ, on the other hand, is the fullness of God incarnate, while at the same time fully human. Even so, the Word had been taking on flesh in lesser ways before the incarnation, and is doing so even now.

We pick up and read the words of Scripture affirming that they are the Word of God. That is, God continues to reveal Himself by His word, continues to be an agent of transformation in our world and lives. The Word speaks and shapes our lives, both personally and corporately. The Word alerts us to the presence of God by the Spirit and the judgment of God our Father. And it transforms us from passive victims to active agents in creation. The Word takes on our flesh, as we affirm Him in faith and seek to embody this Word in our lives. 

We enact this in the Anglican liturgy through the Eucharist, and bread and wine become something of a burning bush, something more than ordinary bread and wine through which God seeks to prick our curiosity and draw us into an encounter with Him. We ingest this sacrament and so we ourselves become bearers of the Word, burning bushes who have the revelation of God's being and nature, His presence and judgment, even as we are not burned up. Thus, we are given agency to effect the transformation of our own lives and that of our world toward the will of God. This agency calls for humility and patience. The work of God in Exodus is in accordance with God's mysterious ways and timing (why is Pharaoh allowed to harden his own heart? How can he resist the Lord? Why did God take so long to act and take ten plagues to effect Israel's salvation?). Even so, as we look to Christ and to the Word in Scripture, we are enabled to see God's presence, knows God's judgment, and be at work with the Word in our world.

This is how the church answered the challenge of God's absence, an absence Trevor Treharne has brought out so helpfully in relation to the burning bush. As we struggle we can know that God is always present by His Spirit. We can also know that God our Father does not will the evil in the world. And we can know that God the Word is at work in the world to bring creation into line with God's Fatherly will. This is who God is, the One God who is always the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. By this doctrine we can be comforted and also drawn into participation in the divine mystery of God's presence with us.