Trinity Heights Church Podcast Trinity Heights Church

In part 2 of our 3 part series on the Trinity as Community, we explored how Trinitarian ideas intersect with contemporary discussions in art and science.We proposed that God as the Trinity is the foundation of our reality. This might seem to contradict contemporary scientific understandings, which focus on string theory, quantum fields, and the Big Bang.Today, science is our primary tool for explaining the universe, often sidelining religion. Modern culture sometimes views rejecting religion as enlightened.However, discarding religious concepts is not straightforward. For example, early in Einstein’s career, his equations suggested the universe was expanding, implying a beginning, which conflicted with his belief in a steady-state universe. He introduced a "fudge factor" to his model.In 1929, Edwin Hubble’s observations confirmed the universe's expansion, leading Einstein to embrace the Big Bang theory, admitting his initial resistance was philosophical, not scientific. Interestingly, the Big Bang theory was proposed by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian Catholic priest, who accepted a universe with a beginning.Thus, the Christian concept of the Trinity informs both art and science. God’s triune nature, a community in himself, is fundamental. His personal nature underpins all reality, predating matter, energy, space, and time. This contrasts with the contemporary view of an impersonal, random universe. The Trinity shows that absoluteness and personalness are inseparable in God.From this perspective, arts and sciences are distinct yet complementary. The sciences rely on God’s absoluteness, while the arts draw on his personalness.Often, we feel compelled to align with one over the other, but a more complete human experience might come from embracing both aspects. Reflecting God's image involves acknowledging the importance of both his absoluteness and personalness, recognizing that questions about human nature are as significant as scientific inquiries.
 
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Oftentimes, Christians and Skeptics alike view the concept of the Trinity as a kind of Christian mythology, a strange part of the story, off to the side, mysterious and nebulous.
 
And, as a result we struggle to understand just how fundamental and essential Trinitarian Theology has been throughout the ages with many early Christians and theologians coming to the conclusion that the Trinity is in fact the embodiment of love itself as a foundational element of the universe. A wild claim and one that we'll be peeling back the layers of in this three-part series.
 
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In this episode, Chris Lawrence delivers our reflection.
 
A week after Easter, we see Doubting Thomas standing alone, out of sync with the rest of his friends, unable to bring himself to believe, unable to match the energy of their ecstatic belief.
 
Yet, we see that he was not ostracized.
 
Thomas wasn’t left behind to figure things out for himself. Instead, Jesus shows up on his behalf, embraces the humility of God and presents his body, the very proof Thomas had asked for
 
Thomas shows us that in these Easter and post resurrection stories, it’s not always easy to JUST BELIEVE.
 
With Easter a week behind us, it’s quite possible that there’s been enough trouble in the world and maybe enough stress and struggle in our own lives, that the good news of Easter begins to fade.
 
Perhaps for us the dazzling shaft of light illuminating the empty tomb has quickly lost its mystery and now all we’re left with is a dark cave. 
 
Whatever our post-Easter headspace might be, we see that Thomas, full of doubt, was not sacrificed for the majority as if he was expendable. He’s an integral part of the post-Easter story and his position deserves to be considered.
 
And so, we read his statement, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” - John 20:25 
 
And, we find that his challenge was met.
 
The resurrected Jesus showed up on Thomas’ behalf as the physical embodiment of new creation, even as he bore the marks and scars of the old world; remnants of a struggle not to be glossed over. In Jesus, God is “caught up in the struggle” and his wounds speak to anyone and everyone who has ever endured suffering. 
 
And yet, Jesus is not only God’s commitment to physical reality, but also God’s commitment to time. As Jesus presents his scarred body to Thomas, he not only embodies the humility of God, he also embodies the patience of God.
 
It is a beautiful thing that Christians can be people of a particular patience. In a world which often seems to only know violence and retaliatory response, the Christian can pause, and this is a rare gift in the sort of world in which we inhabit.
 
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On Easter Sunday we celebrated the miracle of Christ’s resurrection and explored the implications of his crucifixion and return from the grave, often misunderstood to be the way that we might go to heaven when we die and leave this world behind, a world destined to end. Stephen stated that, “it may come as a relief to some of you to know that while it is true that the Easter message is at the heart of Christianity, it is not about the end of the world and how we can go to heaven.”John begins his gospel with, “In the beginning…” which theologian N.T. Wright jokes is like saying, “I just wrote a new and original symphony,” only to have the symphony begin with the famous opening of Beethoven’s 5th, because that’s exactly what John is doing: he starts his gospel by evoking the very first verse of the bible in Genesis: "In the beginning…"But this is John’s way of saying, “this story of Jesus, this good news that I’m about to tell you is a new creation story” and at the end of John’s Gospel, you find that, like in the account in Genesis, John begins to count the days. In the Genesis creation story the author lists the days of the week; John suddenly becomes obsessed with the days of the week. He keeps reminding us in the middle of all of this calamity - the trial, crucifixion, and death of Jesus - which day of the week it is. The resurrection of Jesus is not meant to be understood as an odd event in the world; the resurrection is the beginning of a new world and points to the way the world is going to be. We are meant to look at the resurrection of Jesus Christ and see new creation.Because, we have all had hopes and dreams that we’ve lost or will lose. We all have something in us that’s been broken or will be broken. We all have people we love and care about, friends and family who will be taken from us and who we'll one day be taken from.Yet, the resurrection is a promise, that just as God has reclaimed Jesus from the grave one day he will reclaim all of creation, he will do this for creation and he will do this for you and for me. He will restore us to each other.  And, there is no greater promise than that.He is Risen.
 
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Like us during an election cycle when hopes ride high that if we can get the right person elected they will make the world a better place, the crowds had high hopes for Jesus when he entered Jerusalem. They hoped that King Jesus would banish the Romans who taxed them into poverty and executed them when they complained. The Pharisees offered a solution to the Roman problem: we need to follow the Torah with precision so that when we revolt God will guarantee our victory over Rome. But the Sadducees had quite a different solution: we can’t beat this superpower so the solution is not revolution but cooperation. Which agenda would you have supported: emancipation or survival? As is often the case the political solutions were out of touch with reality. How can the Sadducees talk with a straight face about ‘surviving’ to a people whose friends and family are being crucified? But then again how can the Pharisees talk about emancipation when going up against an unimaginably strong superpower? The chasm that usually exists between political & political reality is often because we haven't understood the depth of the problem we're up against. That was certainly true of the people in Jerusalem that day who externalized evil in the form of the hierarchies over them. Evil is "out there" and embodied by someone else. But Jesus refuses to offer simplistic solutions that were philosophically, theologically naïve about the problem of evil. He won’t let them externalize evil and locate it outside themselves and in someone else. Right after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem he goes to the Temple and turns over the tables of the money changers. A symbolic act, a type of prophetic street theater, which said ‘look, it is at the heart of your institutions, it is in your parties and partisanship, it is in your political ambitions that evil resides. It’s all much closer to home. Jesus recognized that the disarray in Israel was symptomatic of a greater disarray in the created order and in humanity as a whole, a problem that was well outside the scope of the small political ambitions of the people which couldn’t possibly deal with the reality of evil as long as they externalized it in someone else.
 
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Luke chapter 9 and uses the phrase, “He set his face towards Jerusalem.”Luke is referring here to Jesus and his resolute focus on the holy city with the direction of Luke’s gospel hinging on these words. Once Jesus turns his face towards Jerusalem, everything that follows falls in the shadow of this idea.The city of Jerusalem in Jesus’ day was many things. But most importantly, Jerusalem was the site of the holy temple and was understood to be the exact place on earth where the God of the universe had chosen to meet with his people. Jerusalem itself was seen as being the literal embodiment of the pulling together of heaven and earth. Right after Jesus “sets his face towards Jerusalem," he and his disciples are met with aggressive inhospitality as they pass through a Samaritan town. The Samaritans hated the impenetrable institutions and inaccessible hierarchies surrounding the temple and they rejected the temple in Jerusalem as the sole seat of God’s power, instead declaring their own Mount Gerizim and the temple on it as their personal center of religious life. The disciples get their feelings hurt when the Samaritans are not hospitable toward them and ask Jesus, “Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” Jesus rebukes them and they continue on to another town. Jesus does NOT rebuke the Samaritans. He confronts the disciples for adopting an all too familiar posture, a holier than thou attitude that declared, “We are the chosen few and those unsophisticated, uneducated, unclean Samaritans, they should all do us a favor and die.”Jesus understood this insidious demonization of the Samaritans. He also understood the Samaritan’s inhospitality to be a forgivable misunderstanding.Jesus' slow march to the holy city was not to reinforce the elitist hierarchies of the temple. It was Jesus expanding the presence of God for all, with the site of the temple shifting from the physical building onto Jesus’ own body. And so Jesus himself becomes the physical embodiment of the pulling together of heavens and earth and ultimately makes himself available to the Samaritans, Jews and everyone alike.
 
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