There's a place that I like to go to be quiet, a place of solitude and prayer. It's a place that I imagine many of you might be familiar with, Jamaica Pond in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood where my family and I live. It's a beautiful place. It's a place that I like to go and sit on one of the benches, a particular bench there, and look out on the beauty, take in the beauty of the surroundings.
I was there recently on a fall, one of these beautiful fall mornings we've been having. I hope you're enjoying them as well. I was sitting there on the bench and looking out on a beautiful scene, the beautiful water, watching birds wheel through the air, against the contrasting sky with gray and white clouds and blue shining through. As I sat there taking in the trees and the water and the whole scene, I just felt my heart and my spirit lifted.
Maybe you've experienced this before in moments of quiet, out in nature. The beauty and the stillness fill you and refresh you seems to feed you. In that moment I felt my heart consoled. I felt my heart lifted to worship God who is giving this moment, this beauty. But there's something else in this scene, something else I became aware of, the steady hum of traffic. It's just out of reach where you sit at Jamaica Pond over on the J-way, but it's close enough that you can hear it pretty much anywhere where you are on the pond.
And as I became aware of that hum, I started to think about the people passing by in those cars. I've driven that road many times. It is far too fast and far too narrow for any sanity to happen. It is constraining you. Everything in your attention needs to be on the road. There's no looking up. There's no considering the beauty that is just next to you. Your focus is ahead. I wonder if you feel like this in your life sometimes. I know I do. Life is too fast. It is too demanding. The lane is ever narrowing. The car behind you is honking for you to go faster. There's no time to raise your view and look over at the beauty to take in what is beautiful. There's no margin.
As Dave mentioned at the beginning of the service, we're in a series that we've been calling First Things First Sundays, this series where every first Sunday of the month, we're coming back to the words of the Nicene Creed as a jumping off point of our reflection on Scripture. We're pausing our Walkthrough Philippians, so we'll continue that next week. We're coming back to the Creed.
On the very first Sunday of this series, last month, Dave considered the first words of the Creed. We believe. This morning, we're going to take a look at the next two words, One God. For those who like looking ahead, we'll be done with the series sometime in 2035. I'm kidding. It's going to take way longer than that.
This morning, we'll consider these words One God, but I also want to draw our attention to a structural element of the Creed to zoom out a little bit. You can see the Creed printed here. If you skip forward in your... The Creed consists of three stanzas, three movements. The first here on your left is concerned with the Father. The middle stanza, the largest of the three, is concerned with the Son of God, Jesus. And the last of the stanzas, on the right, is concerned with the Holy Spirit.
So, if we take these words, we believe in One God. In the context of the structure of the Creed, that statement might sound something more like this: We believe in One God, in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That is a statement of the doctrine of the Trinity. You can take it down. You don't need to read the whole Creed right now. A statement of the doctrine of the Trinity.
No sooner are those words out of my mouth than I know many of you, maybe most of you, feel as though a math problem has just been plopped down in front of you. A little logic puzzle to try to figure out how can it be that One God can also be three persons, One God in three persons. How does that work?
And while I want to give my love to all of you who I know love that math problem, logic puzzle feel, I want us this morning to consider more of the invitation of the doctrine of the Trinity. If you want to talk about the logic of it afterward, please come. We can talk. But I want to make sure that we're not like, when we consider the doctrine of the Trinity only through this logic puzzle sort of view, we can become a little bit like a food critic who has lost all love of the taste of food and all sense of its nourishment.
We can get so caught up in the dissecting of this aspect and that aspect that we no longer are nourished by or enjoy the flavors. So this morning, that's what we're going to focus on. We want to understand the meal that the doctrine of the Trinity is, to allow it to nourish us and to bring us more into the reality of God.
I think that the doctrine of the Trinity, this statement, One God in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit can actually be for us something of a signpost on that busy road. It can be something that says, turn off here, come into, enter into the mystery and the beauty that you were made for. In order to receive that invitation, we want to come with our hands open to receive nourishment, to receive a meal.
We're going to do this this morning from our gospel text out of Matthew 3 verses 13 through 17. If you want to turn there with me, I would love to have you follow along. Matthew chapter 3 verses 13 through 17. This text is the baptism of Jesus, perhaps a familiar text to some of us, and maybe not to others.
As we open this text, I want us to see as we walk through it, two main motions going on here. The first is a motion of revelation, of revealing. There's a deep revealing nature to this text, but it is also a deep text of invitation. We're going to handle both of those in turn, revelation and invitation.
So first revelation. Here at the baptism of Jesus, there is a deep reality being uncovered, being opened up. It says that as Jesus came up out of the water, the heavens were opened. We get a feel of the curtain being pulled back. Something new is being seen. Something is being revealed. We should feel excited. What is being revealed? Often when something is revealed in our lives, something new that we didn't know before, what it does is it upends. It overthrows our previously held notions.
And since the revealing that's happening here, the revelation that's happening here is about the nature of the person of God, I want to ask you a question before we look at what's revealed here. I want you to think about a question: What do you believe God is really like? What do you believe God is really like? Maybe you're here this morning and you're saying to yourself, I don't really even believe God is there. Maybe think about this question. If he was there, what do you think God would be like?
If you have some good theological answers that are popping into your mind, I want you to go deeper than that. I want you to consider not what is the right answer to that question, but what do you really believe God is like? I think that no matter how much we have those right theological answers to hand, we're all walking around in this world with various kinds of assumptions, various kinds of gut-level down-in-our-bones beliefs about who God really is.
Maybe down deep on that gut level, you know God loves you, but really you think of him as a disappointed parent. He loves you, but he's saying, come on, let's try a little harder. Do a little better. Get it together. Or maybe down deep God is for you a distant friend, a friend that you had a great season with 10 years ago and it really changed your life. Maybe you even talk to that person regularly, but it's really mostly about reminiscing about what happened back then. It hasn't been a whole lot of new relational ground being broken today.
Or maybe you think of God as just a bright ball of light, an impersonal force out there whose light shines and it's bright and it feels nice, but doesn't know your name. A force that might better be called the universe. What is God really like? What do you really believe God is like? With this in view, we want to open up this revelation, this picture of who God really is. I wonder if it will speak to that gut level sense.
Let's look, beginning with verse 16. And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water and behold, the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him. And behold, a voice from heaven said, this is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased. This is anything but a static picture. What we have here in this revealing is a dynamic moving picture of the person of God.
All three persons of the Trinity are here in view. The Son is rising out of the water. The Spirit is descending and coming close. The Father is speaking. It's a dynamic relational active picture. And the picture is of a God who is moving toward humanity, moving down descending, as Dave talked about last week, coming down into our context. This Trinity, this unity in dynamic Trinity is pictured here, but there is a flavor. We get a sense of this relationship. What is the relatedness going on in the dynamic dance of the Trinity?
The Father speaks and defines their relation. This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased. This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased. At the heart of the Triune Fellowship is a heartbeat of love, of powerful love given between the Father and the Son shared in the unity of the Spirit. And we should see importantly, we should know first of all that this is not actually first of all love for us. That's often where we start.
When we talk about the love of God, we mean the love of God for us, love of God for humanity. But what's pictured here is first the love of the Father for the Son. The love that is shared within the Triune persons before the beginning of time. Can you conceive of a reality that has as its heartbeat, as its dynamic beating heart, a God who is unity in Trinity, swimming in the reality of the beating heart of love?
What is at the heart of the universe? This reality we inhabit is not a detached mechanistic force, but is rather the beauty of a dance of love. That dance of love is what has breathed the entirety of what we experience in the goodness of God and the goodness and the beauty of creation. To truly know this would be like entering another world. To walk around in your days and to actually experience and to say this world is a world that consists that has as its heartbeat the beating and beautiful heart of the love of God shared between and within his Triune person. Would be like entering into a new world.
Like in the Chronicles of Narnia when Aslan opens the door to Narnia and they step into a new and big world to know this indelible reality that at the heart of all things is the heartbeat of love. I wonder if your imagination, your hoping heart might actually allow you to believe that that gut level feeling, that gut level picture of God that you carry around, be it distant, be it angry, be it uninterested, is actually wrong. Immersively and beautifully wrong that we might discover that that is not who God is, but that this is who he truly is.
When I was in high school I had an experience of my heart and mind being rewritten, revised on a particular topic. Not on the nature of God, that for me and my story came later in college. But in this season, in high school and specifically my senior year of high school, my mind and heart were rewritten about the nature of Mrs. Beale. Mrs. Beale was a teacher in my high school and she was the most feared teacher in my high school. She taught senior AP English, which if you knew anything as an underclassman at Mary'sville High School, you knew that senior AP English taught by Mrs. Beale was the hardest class in the whole school, harder even than AP calculus.
Mrs. Beale's senior AP English class was so scary that I have a memory of walking by her room as an underclassman and kind of like looking in the door, trying to get a peek of like, what's it really like in there? And my gaze as I looked in the door, I looked above the door and there was a paper that had been printed out with flames on it. And over the flames was written the words from Dante's Inferno, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." Struck fear in my heart.
But fear, fear does it was when I was a senior, I entered that door. I walked through that door into Mrs. Beale's senior AP English class. And it still brings a smile to my face to remember what I discovered that year. In many ways inside that door, it lived up to the reputation. It was hard, a lot of work. It was a challenge, a place of digging into difficult texts, a place of learning and growing as hard as that can be.
But it was also a place of laughter, a place of enjoyment, a place where day after day Mrs. Beale put before us beautiful art and amazing snacks that I now understand as an adult were bought out of pocket by my public high school teacher, every day, every day. It was a place Mrs. Beale's room was a place of gift. It was a room that had a view out onto a bigger world, a place where I was introduced to new ways of walking in the world.
Do you believe that there is a door where you might risk entering and find a new world opening up before you? Where is that door? Where can it be found? This text in Matthew 3 offers us a revelation, yes, but it also offers us an invitation, an invitation to risk and to find. John the Baptist who sat courtside for this amazing revelation was right there with Jesus baptizing Jesus. In seeing this revelation, he has a palpable awareness that there is one person of the Trinity who is not in the place he's supposed to be in.
When Jesus comes to John for baptism, what does Jesus say? He says, or what does John say to Jesus? He says, no, no, no. I'm not supposed to baptize you. You need to baptize me. You see, John had proclaimed a baptism for the repentance of sin, a way of becoming right with God, washing clean our sins, all the ways that we have broken God's ways, all the ways that we have centered the world on ourselves, have sacrificed others' good for the sake of our own pleasure or power or gain, all the ways that we have insisted on our way over God's way and have caused havoc.
That's what John had proclaimed, come and be washed clean of these things. And so when Jesus comes to John saying, baptize me, John knows who he's talking to. And he says, you don't need this. You don't need the baptism that I'm proclaiming. Your relationship with the Father is already right and the revelation that is unveiled shows that. In seeing this picture of the baptism of Jesus, we need to not lose the incongruity that was so palpable to John. It might be a familiar, if you grew up in the church, the baptism of Jesus, it's a familiar scene.
But don't lose the incongruity, the deep tension here. Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, the eternal Son of the Father, is standing in your place. Standing in our place is standing in the place of sinful humanity. Is standing there in solidarity, in association with those he has no reason. He does not need to associate with. He is without sin. His theme in Jesus' life and ministry is fully lived out only at the cross. In the cross, Jesus takes our place in a final and definitive way, holding nothing back, dying a shameful death for us, experiencing estrangement from the Father for us, taking on our sin for us.
This text of Jesus' baptism offers us an amazing invitation. And that invitation is to see that the Son of Man, the Son of God, has stood in your place. And so you, if you will follow him into that death, which is baptism, you can stand in his place. You can enter in to that place with Jesus and hear the words of the Father spoken not just over him but over you. This is my beloved Son. This is my beloved daughter, in whom I am well pleased.
Where is that door? Where do we enter in? Jesus says in John 10 verses 9 through 10, "I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture." A beautiful place, refreshing, feeding, a pasture. The thief, Jesus continues, only comes to steal and kill and destroy. "I came that they may have life and have it abundantly."
I don’t know where you are coming to this morning from. I don’t know what exactly you are bringing into. What that assumption is that you are carrying about who God is. Maybe you’ve crossed that threshold of the door many, many years ago, but you’ve just been hanging out in the foyer. Feels like, yeah, I just haven’t gone all the way in. Maybe you’re standing outside and you’re looking in the window and you’re like, is this really the door I want to go in like I was with Mrs. Beale’s class? Is that really where I want to go?
Hear the invitation of the Spirit to enter by the door of the Son and find what you are looking for, what you are longing for. No matter how fast your life is going, no matter how constrained those lanes feel, see this revelation and pull off the road. Sit at the foot of that majesty, not just observing it but stepping into it by the door of the Son and find what you are looking for, what your heart is longing for. You were made to feast on this reality, to sit and behold the beauty of God and not to just stand far from it but to enter through the door and come within its loving embrace.
Hear the invitation of the Spirit: enter by the door of the Son and come into the embrace of the Father this morning. I know it often seems like a frightful door. It seems like a scary door. And if you are standing here looking at it and saying, you know, I don’t really want to go there. I don’t want to walk through that door. I want to offer you, well, really at the end of the day is the only thing I can offer you, which is my own experience.
I stand witness, my life stands witness, my heart stands witness to the reality that to walk through that door, to walk with the Triune God within the love of the Triune community, that I have experienced in that a love and a joy and wonder in my life that I believe, I am convicted I would not have known otherwise. There is a beauty in walking with Jesus in the light of the Father that has fed and nourished me through hard seasons, through encouraging seasons, through dry seasons and seasons where I feel uplifted.
That invitation that comes just by the Spirit to walk through the door of the Son and enter into the embrace of the Father, it is where we can find and know true life. Perhaps in this season, as you are speeding along in the rush of traffic, you feel like you just have to stay in that lane, keep it moving. The road seems so hard to get off. It feels so fast, so constraining. But there is a great mystery just off of your periphery.
Hear these words as an invitation to pull out of the flow of traffic and to sit with them, to enter into His life. We believe in one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.