This morning, we celebrate Trinity Sunday, one of the seven celebratory Sundays of the Christian Year. It comes each year on the Sunday after Pentecost and it is a day to celebrate, consider, and puzzle over the Triune nature of God. How it is that we worship one God, yet understand our God to be Three persons, co-equal and co-eternal.
Ordinarily, we preachers do our best to wax eloquent on the nature of the trinity to explain the unexplainable, to make understandable that which cannot be fully comprehended. And that is where I started on my own sermon preparations this week – but that is not where the sermon ended up. Instead of talking about what the Trinity is, we are going to talk about what the trinity does – not by what their job or specialty might be but rather how the trinity, working together, bring peace and love, knowledge and hope, to those called by God to be a part of God’s realm.
Many of us have been occupied this week with graduations – from high school, colleges, and even from the confirmation class. As I have attended a few of the celebrations that mark these accomplishments I have observed that it is not what is easy that is being celebrated, but the hardships that have been overcome that have made the most important impressions on everyone. It is not those things that came easily, but those that required hard work: awards for academic achievement, most improved athlete, merit-based scholarships that invite them to new life experiences.
Nowhere did I see proudly displayed a plaque or certificate that proudly stated: ‘Breezed Through Elementary Algebra’ or ‘Slept Through Spanish I’. Even though we might have done just that, those are not the things we remember with fondness and pride and those are not the things that have caused us to grow and stretch our visions of ourselves and so enabled us to go and do more.
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Paul writes that we have been justified by faith– it’s already been done – there is nothing left to do, nothing else to work for. We already have it and because we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through Jesus Christ whose atoning death made it possible for us to receive the grace of God in which we stand.
But this is not the end. Like that class we reluctantly admit we slept through, or that grade that came too easily, it seems too cheaply won, too easy to be worth something. We fail to recognize the value and the sacrifice of Christ because we find it so hard to understand all that it cost to give us this great gift of God.
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But Paul writes that we can boast – can be proud - about in our hope of sharing the glory of God (v 2). We are invited by God to join in the relationship of loving care shared by the Trinity. For we who call ourselves Christians, the end of time has arrived because we have God in our hearts. We enjoy the salvation of God. We have the gift of the Holy Spirit.
But Paul is not done with us yet. And so, he says we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance. Some Bible translations say that suffering produces patience. That ‘suffering’ is not meant for us to think that God wants us to be miserable. We cannot measure our faith by what we deny ourselves, by the rules we try to keep in an attempt to make us holy people or even by the calamities that might befall us. Experiencing suffering means that like the athlete that spends hours practicing a pitch, a basket, a serve or a stroke and goes home tired and aching without accomplishing their goal but resolved to try it again the next day, we boast in our sufferings that call us to battle sin and injustice, that urge us to choose what is right rather than what is easy, that lead us to step out of our comfort zones to follow the mission of God into a world lost and hurting.
Suffering produces patience – the ability to keep on trying when all seems lost, to fall down and get back up and go again, to come back again and again because we know that eventually we will prevail with God’s help.
Endurance, or patience, produces character. Character is what I saw in the young people who celebrated their graduations. Character that had already experienced suffering, hard work and the patience to keep on keeping on.
Already their character has begun to produce hope in their lives. Each of them looked forward to a new chapter of their lives. Each of them, confident of their achievements, their ability and their determination, looked forward to where they will be in September and the live calling they will prepare for. None of them has sent away to one of those internet-based diploma mills that promises a diploma for only a small fee. Each of them looks forward to the hard work and learning they will face as they move further along into the world of adults.
We wish them well. We pray for their success. We want their lives to be as joyful and hopeful as they are this weekend. But we know that lives like that are rare indeed and I think that lives like that are just a little bit empty because they have never faced the challenges or the sufferings that have produced patience and character.
Earlier this month I had conversation with one of the other pastors here in town. He confided his belief that God calls to ministry those who have been broken by the world – those who have experienced the sorrows of the world so that they can be fully empathetic with those to whom we minister. Although there might be some truth in his statement, there is more. All those who have experienced sorrow in their lives – and have come though those sorrows with patience and have cultivated character - are perhaps more aware of their utter dependence on God and more sure of the hope we have in Christ.
The hope that Paul is writing about is not the hope of a desire or a wish. This is not doubtful hope of those who ‘hope’ for a sunny day, of those who ‘hope’ to win the lottery. Those kinds of hopes are really fantasies – mere wishful thinking. We all hope to live to be healthy centenarians, but few of us will suffer through the work that will help make it possible.
Our hope in Christ is different than hoping for the lottery. Our hope does not disappoint us, because …
This is one of the largest becauses in the Bible. Real hope does not disappoint, but fantasies always do. We all have fantasies that everything will go well with us, that we will all live until our hundredth birthday, and experience no illness or tragedy. Fantasies disappoint us. And so does wishful thinking. I wish that I would succeed in all I do; that my marriage would succeed, my kids would succeed, that my work would succeed, and that my life would be one continuous success. And such wishful thinking always disappoints. Fantasies disappoint; wishful thinking disappoints, and so do dreams. My dream is that we human beings can live in perfect peace and harmony with no more war, no more starvation, no more ethnic strife. I have all these dreams which are forever disappointing.
But our hope in Christ does not disappoint because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.(v 5).
We who boast about our own accomplishments stand condemned. We who place all our hope on ouselves will be disappointed. But we who place our hope in God are not disappointed because this is not something of our own doing. We do not boast about our own accomplishments, we boast in God. We do not place our hope on our own accomplishments, we place all our hope on God.
Later in Romans, Paul will write ’all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purposes.’ All things. God can take all things, including the most evil and the worst suffering, and transform those things into good.
The good news for us this day is that hope does not disappoint because the love of God is poured into our hearts. The love of God that places the welfare of the other above love of self. The love of God that has no limit - that like the trinity has no beginning and no end. The love of God that through the power of God’s Spirit empowers us to face suffering, learn patience, live with character and rejoice in our eternal hope.
Let us so go and live, share and do through God’s grace.
Amen.
