“The fullness of God’s Presence” II Cor. 13:11-13  5-18-08

                I was sitting in class with one of my friends.  The teacher was going down the roll, and my friend, George was paying no attention whatsoever.  He was trying to get caught up on his homework that he hadn’t done the night before, and then he was asking the girl next to him (whom George liked) about some of the questions on the homework.  Meanwhile our teacher continued to go down the roll and I (and the whole class) could see this coming.  Tommy?- “present”; Lucy? “here”; Eric- “present”; “George? [silence] George? [pregnant pause] GEORGE? Finally-after I poked him, “Uh, uh, uh, here ma’am.” The whole class broke out in laughter.  The teacher said, “George are you really present or not?”  “Oh yes ma’am, I’m fully present!”

“Well then, you need to BE fully present!” She said.

                Is it possible to be around and not be fully present?  Ask a wife trying to talk to her husband while he’s watching the game on TV if he is present.  Ask someone in the car when the other person has ear buds in their ears listening to music- if they are fully present.  There is a sense in which God is everywhere- he is omnipresent.  Yet there is a time when God is not fully there.  Some of you today are here in body but not in mind- you might be thinking about the baseball game this afternoon, or you may think, “Why do my parents make me come?”  Some of you here are not fully present, and to you God is not fully present either.  But if you seek Him- you will find Him the Bible says.  In the movie, “Prince Caspian” one of the characters asked “How can you see Aslan and I can’t?”  The answer was, maybe you weren’t looking. 

                Today is Trinity Sunday.  The Trinity is the way we describe the presence and experience of God for us.  We experience God differently in the Christian faith than others do.  In fact, the Trinity is not something forced on us by ancient church fathers, it is a description of how we experience the full presence- the attention if you will, of God. 

                The Deist, the Islamist and I believe the common American believe God is distant.  God wound up the clock and let it go, they would say.  Christians believe God is not just someone who wound it up- but the One whose power makes every second count.  Last Sunday during the Sunday School hour, Rodger Nishioka pointed out that most young people today believe God is present but God is distant.  He summed it up by that song that came out during the Persian Gulf War- “God is watching us from a distance.” 

                We believe God is at a distance- He is different from creation.  Yet Christians believe God is intimately involved, even intertwined and entangled in creation.  Jesus Christ, we believe is not just a good man, but God coming down to us.  He is the second person of the Trinity- coming down to let us know God is intertwined and entangled, even loving us.  Love is not from a distance.  The Muslim does not talk about God as love or God coming down for us.  They would say God is watching us from a distance.

The Christian would say, God is watching us, and more than that- caring for us, loving us, seeing us through the tough times of this problematic world.  Jesus said, “Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest.”  Jesus said, “In this world you will have tribulation, but be of Good cheer I have overcome the world”  He overcame the world not at a distance but in an intimate way.  God understand the sufferings of life, even death because He has been there.

                And then there’s the third person of the Trinity- the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit is God’s power and presence at work in the world.  The Spirit is the Spirit of Christ- coming down to us.  You remember Jesus said before he ascended- “I will not leave you as orphans. I will ask the Father and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever: the Spirit of truth” (Jn. 14:16-18).  The Spirit is not far away from us, but with us forever.  In fact, the Bible says something the Deist and the Islamist cannot understand- that God dwells in us by the Spirit.  The very words that are used of the Holy Spirit imply intimacy and immanence.  The word for “spirit” in the Hebrew is nephesh- the same exact word for breath.  Same in the Greek “pneuma” (from which we get the word pneumonia- which literally means out of breath). Pneuma (Spirit) means breath.  In John 14 He calls the Spirit the Counselor- which could be translated, Consoler, Advocate, literally- “the one who comes along side us to help.”  God is not so distant from us that He does not console us in our sadness, or guide us.  Nishioka talked about how many Americans believe today God is there only when we need him- mainly when we get in trouble, when there is a disaster, or when we need an answer.  It’s almost like we have  a push-button God.  We push “enter” and God enters into our lives, and then we want God to go away- but he doesn’t.  I believe our problem is what I call “The Pee Pie Problem.”  I used to play this with my kids when they were about two years old.  I have no idea where the words “Pee Pie” come from.  But the idea was when the two year old would put there hands over their eyes I would duck behind something and they would think that I wasn’t there- but I really was.  Every time they covered their eyes, they thought the world disappeared, at their control. I think we like to think that about God.  We like to think he is there when we need Him and then he disappears when we don’t want Him around- especially when we mess up or go our own way.  We must, we absolutely must learn that God is present with us.  For those of you who have computers, God is like the anti-virus program.  You may think the anti-virus program is there only when a virus or trouble happens.  But it is really there all along in the background, protecting, guarding, overseeing, even telling you if you’ve done something wrong.

                While there are people who think God is way out there-at a distance- there are also people who cannot distinguish between God and anything else. Classically we call these pantheists, but sometimes polytheists, of even panentheists.  It might begin lightly with saying that because God made everything there is a little bit of God in everything.  It is one thing to say God’s fingerprints are on everything.  It is another to say God is everything.  The New Age religion is the fastest growing religion in America.  They will say things like “I am God” and “You are God.”  In the end if everything and everyone is God, then there really is no all-powerful God worthy of worship.  If everyone makes an A- then the meaning of an A is gone. 

                It is really ironic that the two fastest growing religions in America are New Age religion which says God is everything-(super immanent if you will), and Islam which says God is way out there (super transcendent if you will).  Let us not think too highly of ourselves like we are god, nor too lowly of ourselves as if God is too distant to care.  Of course there are always those who say, “Well how do you know?”  “How can you possibly say one way or the other?”  On our own, without any revelation from God, this would be rhetorical question implying- no one really knows.  But faith in the Trinitarian God also implies faith that God has revealed Himself to us.  He has not left us alone to figure out the unsolvable secret of the universe- which is God.  He has not left us silence.  He has spoken. 

The means of grace point to the fullness of the presence of God in the trinity. 

THE WORD- God enables us to hear it by Creation- But God speaks by creation- the heavens are telling the glory of God (Ps. 19).  The Son is the living Word- the logos;  The Spirit is the one who inspired the scriptures and inspires the interpretation of it.

PRAYER- we pray to the Father through the Son by the Spirit.  The Spirit helps us in our prayers.  The Son has taught us how to pray, and said say, “Our Father.”

FELLOWSHIP- God made us in such a way that we need other people to love;  The Son promised where two or three are gathered together there He is in the midst of them.  The Spirit is the power and presence of God among us- the tie that binds us together

SERVICE- We serve because in God’s creative providence we have an opportunity;  The Son calls us to serve by his example and words- “as much as you’ve done it to the least of these, you’ve done it to me.” The Spirit gives us power to serve.

On and on-  The trinity is not some secretive thing that keeps us from knowing God- the trinity is a description of how we know God- the fullness of His presence. 

I invite you to know God fully by the power of the trinity.  Amen.

                Basically we believe in the trinity because that is how we have experienced God.  Some talk about the trinity’s oneness by saying if you look at a braid of hair it is made up of many hairs together intertwined- yet it is all hair.  Or if you look at a tree and see the trunk, then a big branch, then a little limb- they are all different- the trunk is not the limb, yet they are all the tree.  The Father is different from the Son and Spirit.  They are distinct but one substance.  Or maybe we think about the sun- the sun is not the light coming from the sun, nor is it the heat coming from the light- yet it is all part of the sun.  Som find it helpful to think of H2O as ice, water, and steam- all different yet the same substance.  These may or may not be helpful to you.  In the end the trinity is a mystery because God is unique and no analogy, though helpful, can fully describe Him. 

                I believe that God is present to us in all His fullness in the trinity. One of the great images of the presence of God is the love of God- God so loved us that he sent his Son.  The Son loved us enough to come and die.  The Spirit loves us and comforts us and consoles us, praying for us.  The Love of God is the attention of God- the full presence of God- and we experience that in the power of the Trinity.

            C.S. Lewis said that when we have problems with the trinity it is because we see God in flatness and not fullness.  [Holding up a piece of paper the size of the Bible]- you may look at this and think this paper contains the Bible.  It does.  But we miss the fullness, the three-dimensional-ness of the Bible if we don't see the whole book [Holding up the Bible].  God is not flat like a square, but more like a cube- fuller, richer. 

We need to experience the full presence and being of God. 

                There are times when we are not fully present.  I invite you to be fully present to God, and let His full presence give you grace and peace.