Trinity Sunday — John 17.1-11, 17-23
I spent last week teaching and preaching for the Uniting Church in Sweden, a merged denomination made up of Methodists, Baptists, and Evangelicals. On Saturday, I had a few hours to myself so I went shopping in Stockholm’s historic district before heading back to Saint Peter’s Kyrka.
I crossed the crowded street from the old town into the city’s commercial district, and immediately I heard contemporary worship music playing from a portable speaker system— the praise was in English. When I made it to the other side of the crosswalk, I spied earnest-looking young people holding out pamphlets in the hopes that passersby would take one.
I ventured a few paces further into the pedestrian mall where I saw a woman with a microphone who was speaking into a bulky video camera braced on a man’s shoulder. Somewhere else on the block I could hear her partner preacher hollering about the wrath of God and hellfire for sinners. The woman with the microphone was wearing a brown wool pantsuit and had the looks of a news anchor. As I attempted to sneak past her, she somehow knew to switch from Swedish to English.
“If you died today,” and she gestured for her partner to aim his camera at me, “Do you know where you would spend eternity?”
I looked at her.
Next I looked at him.
Then I looked at my reflection in the lens of his video camera.
And then I smiled.
“Whatever else you want to say about Jesus,” I said, “You can’t say he doesn’t have a sense of humor.”
“Excuse me?” she asked.
She looked confused. Evidently her gospel-at-gunpoint approach had not yielded many comments about the LORD’s good humor.
I set my shopping bags down on the pavement.
“Jesus has a sense of humor— you’ve got to give him that,” I said, “I mean, I’ve come all this way to an allegedly godless, secular Sweden and the first thing that happens to me in my free time is that a street preacher tries to evangelize me. I had to come all the way to Scandinavia to find myself in a Flannery O’Connor story.”
She cracked a confused smiled.
“Yes,” she said and then tried to reignite her fire and brimstone, “If you died today, do you know where you would spend eternity?”
I bit my lip, adjusted the flat cap on my head, and I replied, “Heaven is not a place and therefore cannot be addressed with a where question. Heaven is a person not a place.”
She looked over at her cameraman to see if it registered with him how lucky they were to have stumbled upon such an odd sort of pagan.
“You must not be saved?” she said to me, “Because if you’re not saved…”
But I interrupted her, “Yes. Yes, I am saved.”
She nodded, yet still was not satisfied.
Thus her where question became a when question.
“When were you saved?”
I smiled and gave her the when and the where.
“When was I saved?” I asked.
She nodded, waiting.
“In 33AD” I answered.
“On a Friday afternoon on a hill outside Jerusalem— around teatime.”
I picked up my shopping bags. And as I started to walk away, it occurred to me that I should not have accepted the premise of her first question. After all, according to Jesus, not only is heaven not a place, neither is eternal life a future reality.
Of course, everything depends on whether Jesus can know truly what only God can know.
The Bible begins with the LORD issuing commands. “Let there be light,” God says. And strangely, before anything that has ever been is, the LORD’s command is obeyed. Someone who is other from God— but who has the power of God— makes it so, “And there was light.”
Later in the Bible’s first book, at Sarah’s insistence, Abraham casts out Hagar and Ishmael into the desert where the mother and child fall into despair and desperate weeping. According to the scriptures, a voice speaks to Hagar from heaven. Strangely, the voice at first refers to God in the third person, “God has heard the voice of the boy.”
But next, without any break in the revelation, the voice shifts into the first person and speaks for God, “I will make a great nation of him.” The voice who speaks a word of comfort to Hagar simultaneously speaks of God in the third person and in the first person. The voice is both one who is other than God and also one who is identical with God. Indeed he is God’s speech-act.
It is just as strange at the Burning Bush in the Book of Exodus. A voice first summons Moses to the bush that is ablaze with God’s glory but not consumed by it. “The voice appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush,” Moses testifies. But strangely, the voice next self-identifies as none other than the LORD himself, “When the LORD saw that Moses had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!”
During the exile in Babylon, God elects a priest to become a prophet on his behalf. And the LORD gives Ezekiel a vision as the context for his call to prophecy. God shows Ezekiel a heavenly prototype of the cherubim throne; that is, a vision of how the throne of God appears eternally.
And strangely, Ezekiel sees seated on the throne of God “a figure who has the appearance of a man.”
The man is charged with the same glory that constitutes the throne.
That is, the man is both other from God but also God.
The New Testament is no less strange. At the end of the Gospel of Matthew, for instance, the Risen Jesus claims for himself what only God can assert, “All authority on earth and in heaven belongs to me.”
The LORD tells Moses that he has summoned him to the Burning Bush precisely to identify which God he is and to reveal to Moses his personal name— a name too holy and too incomprehensible— too strange— to be uttered in the meantime. Not until the end of the Gospel, when the Risen Jesus commands the apostles, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the Triune Name,” does the strangeness of the scriptures finally have a name.
The church universal abides a theological maxim which originates in the early 400’s— a generation after the formulation of the Nicene Creed. Prosper of Aquitaine was a fifth century theologian and student of Saint Augustine of Hippo.
Prosper of Aquitaine engaged a bitter debate with Pelagians— those who opposed Augustine’s insistence that salvation is by grace alone and argued instead that God’s grace must be accompanied by cooperating human works. Against the Pelagians, Prosper defended Augustinian grace by appealing to a maxim.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
In English, “the law of prayer governs the law of belief.”
That is, what the church prays and proclaims is what the church believes.
Prosper pointed to the church’s intercessory prayers, particularly her prayers for the conversion and salvation of all people, especially unbelievers, as evidence that the church already implicitly confessed the necessity of God’s one way love.
You cannot pray for someone’s conversion and simultaneously hold that they must cooperate with God’s grace to be saved. Thus Prosper argued that, quite apart from any doctrinal debate, the church’s liturgical life already established the error of the Pelagian view.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
What the church prays precedes what the church believes.
Our praise and petition and proclamation determines our doctrine.
Not the other way around.
In other words, today is Trinity Sunday not because the Three Person’d God is the product of theological deduction or ecclesial negotiation but because the scriptures give us no other way to speak of God but as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
We identify Israel’s one and only LORD as three persons not by a feat of philosophy (“substance” and “being,” “begotten not made”) but because long before the church had either a testament or a creed, she was baptizing catechumens in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
Jesus has dispatched me to declare to you the entire forgiveness of all your sins. Only God dare utter such a promise; just so, we attest that Mary gave birth to her Maker and therefore we call the LORD by the name Father, Jesus, and Holy Spirit.
What the church prays and proclaims determines what we believe.
We pray to the Father, in the power of the Spirit, and by the authority of the Son. We do so not because this is a clever way to convince ourselves that we are not polytheists but because this is precisely the manner in which Jesus prays.
Not only is this the manner in which Jesus prays, it is in the context of such prayer that Jesus gives his most concrete definition of eternal life.
Forget the Romans Road— Jesus tells you what constitutes salvation.
He does so in prayer.
On the night he hands himself over, after he washes his friends’ feet at his final supper, when he is finished teaching them that he alone is the way to the Father, once he has promised the grace of the Holy Spirit— and promised that through the Spirit the Father and the Son will make their heaven in you— before he goes to the Garden of Gethsemane where he will be betrayed by a kiss, Jesus prays.
Jesus prays a prayer that takes up the entirety of chapter seventeen of the Gospel of John— twenty six verses in all. Jesus prays a prayer that expands but nonetheless follows the prayer he taught his followers to pray— only one petition is new. Unlike the LORD’s Prayer, however, the LORD’s LORD’S Prayer begins not “Our Father” but simply “Father.” The Son’s relationship with God is unique to him. Jesus’ relation to God is as simple as it is intimate.
As convoluted as we make God’s Triune Name, God is not complex to Jesus.
“Father,” the Son prays in the Spirit.
John reports that, so praying, Jesus lifts his eyes upward. That is, God establishes an other to whom he may address as God. Yet praying, Jesus does not simply petition his Father. Jesus tells God what only the latter can know if the former is a mere mortal, the arrival of his “hour of glory.” In other words, Jesus addresses God as an other from himself but then he proceeds to tell his Father what only God can know, “The hour has come. Glorify your Son; so that, your Son may glorify you.”
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
We confess that the name of the LORD is Trinity if for no other reason but that the prayer of Jesus gives us no other way to speak of God. Notice— verse six, Jesus says that his own name somehow manifests the distinct name of the Father; that what belongs to God simultaneously belongs to Jesus. “All mine are yours,” Jesus prays in verse ten, “And all yours are mine.” Next— verse eight— Jesus confesses that the words he has handed over to us are nothing other than what the Father has said to him.
But that does not mean Jesus is a mere a delivery device for God’s word; he is God’s word.
As Jesus prays in verse eleven, the Father’s name is Jesus’ own name, “Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me.”
God the Father’s name is also the name of Jesus. Meaning, he is the Son of that Father. Thus does Jesus close his prayer by affirming the irreducible union of the Father and the Son in their Spirit, “Just as you, Father, are in me, I am in you.” The one seated on the throne of God was “a figure who had the appearance of a man.”
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
Even more extraordinary than the fact that Jesus prays from within the Trinity, Jesus says that knowing the Triune Name constitutes nothing less than eternal life itself.
The author of the recent book Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth is a British novelist and poet. Previously an environmental activist, Paul Kingsnorth is a former atheist and self-described pagan. In a 2021 essay entitled “The Cross and the Machine,” Kingsnorth recounts the long and winding path by which he discovered “a truth I could surrender to.”
As a fifteen year old boy, Kingsnorth snuck into the old, medieval church in his neighborhood and decided to write in the visitor’s book. ““I WILL DESTROY YOU AND ALL OF YOUR WORKS! HA HA HA!” Then he signed it, “SATAN.” A few days later he returned to the church with his friends and scrawled in the visitor’s book, “DIE, NAZARENE! VICTORY IS MINE!” Growing up, Kingsnorth writes, there were two distinct flavors of Christianity, both of which he tried to avoid.
He writes:
“One flavor was the fusty old Church of England variety. You would see this when a vicar was invited to give a sermon at school. The vicar would be a slightly Victorian figure, an older man almost dainty in his manners, trying his best to speak in a dying tongue to a generation of kids…The second flavor was the trendy vicar. Unlike his predecessor, the trendy vicar had a clipped beard and wore jeans and sang folk songs about how Jesus was our friend, and gave awkward, vernacular sermons.
Despite his good intentions, the trendy vicar was much worse than the stuffy vicar. At least the Victorian sermons were in some way otherworldly, as religion should be.”
Despite the mandatory religious education classes of his schooling, Kingsnorth writes that the age of his upbringing imposed an altogether different faith, “Religion was irrelevant. It was authoritarian, it was superstitious, it was feeble proto-science. It repressed women, gay people, atheists, anyone who disobeyed its irrational edicts.” As a man in his forties, after dabbling in Eastern spiritual practices, Kingsnorth discovered a surprise. He wanted not to practice for himself but to worship an Other. “Something was calling me,” he writes, “But what?”
Or who?
Soon after, dreams besieged him.
He writes:
“I dreamed of Jesus. The dreams reminded me of something strange that had happened a few months before. My wife and I were out to dinner, celebrating our wedding anniversary, when suddenly she said to me, “You’re going to become a Christian.” When I asked her what on earth she was talking about, she said she didn’t know; she had just had a feeling and needed to tell me.
After the dream, it began to make sense. Suddenly, I started meeting Christians everywhere. An African man even contacted me to tell me he had had a dream in which God had told him to convert me. It kept happening, for months. Christ to the left of me, God to the right. The Spirit before me and behind me. Like C. S. Lewis, I could not ignore “the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet.”
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
What we do— or what happens to us— just is what we believe.
“It turns out,” Paul Kingsnorth confesses, “that both the stuffy vicars and the trendy vicars were onto something.” For whatever their faults, each made an extraordinary claim in naming God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Looking back on his life of unbelief, Kingsnorth insists, “I didn’t become a Christian because I could argue myself into it. I became a Christian because I knew, suddenly, that it was true…Someone inhabits me.”
That someone is, in fact, three persons.
“And this is eternal life,” the Son says to the Father in their Spirit, “that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”
I had picked up my shopping bags from the Stockholm pavement and I had started to walk away. But then I repented— literally. I turned around and I walked back to the pant-suited street preacher and I apologized.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Sorry?” she repeated as though she suddenly didn’t recognize the word.
She furrowed her brows and looked at me and then she looked at the camera.
“I’m sorry,” I said again, “My answer to your questions. It may have been correct but it was cute. Because I was judging you— your message and your methods.”
She looked defensive, like she was about to argue with me. So I held up a conciliatory palm and admitted, “I was wrong. I might still disagree with your methods and your message, but I was wrong about you. You are not the weird ones; we are.”
She looked me over.
And then she looked over at her cameraman.
She looked confused.
“Think about it,” I said, “If eternal life is not somewhere far off in the future but starts here, is accessible now— in the knowledge of God’s Triune Name— then you are absolutely right and rational to be out here shouting that news to anyone who will listen to you. We are all beggars, and you know where to find bread! Of course you’re out here. It’s all the rest of us, who amble blithely by such a claim, that are actually insane.”
“Maybe tone down the brimstone,” I said, “But otherwise— yeah, you’re on to something.”
And I gestured to all of the hundreds of shoppers about us, myself included, “We’re the crazy ones— not you.”
Here is what Jesus says eternal life is.
Not where.
Not when.
Jesus refuses both of the street preacher’s questions because Jesus does not share her assumptions.
“This is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”
Know.
Present tense.
Not will know.
Not shall receive.
Know.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
Follow the prayer all the way down and you discover something astonishing.
Eternal life is not waiting for you somewhere ahead.
Eternal life has already found you.
For on that same night, before he prayed this prayer, Jesus made a promise. He promised the Holy Spirit. He promised that through the Spirit the Father and the Son would come and make their home in us.
Not above the clouds.
Not at the end of history.
In us.
And Jesus keeps his promises.
The Father and the Son have made their heaven in you.
You may not always feel it. You may doubt it. You may run from it. You may forget it. You may spend years trying to silence it.
But the life of God has laid hold of you, and the God who has taken hold of you does not let go.
You have called God “Father.”
Perhaps confidently.
Perhaps desperately.
Perhaps through tears.
Perhaps through clenched teeth.
Perhaps not for a very long time.
Yet every time you have uttered that name, you have been drawn into the prayer of Jesus himself.
Every prayer gathered into his prayer.
Every cry gathered into his cry.
Every whispered “Father” received by the Father who receives the Son.
You have been living inside this promise longer than you knew.
And because the Father and the Son have made their home in you through the Spirit, there is nowhere you can go where eternal life is not already present.
Not in grief.
Not in failure.
Not in sickness.
Not even in death.
For death may interrupt your heartbeat, but it cannot evict the God who has chosen you as his dwelling place.
The life that inhabits you is older than creation, stronger than sin, and more stubborn than the grave.
So come to the table.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
Here at this table the church confesses what she has always confessed:
That Jesus tells the truth.
That the Father has answered the Son’s prayer.
That the Spirit has come.
That eternal life is not merely promised here.
It is given here.
The bread you are about to receive is not a reminder of a distant salvation.
It is the hospitality of the Triune God.
So come.
Come with your doubts.
Come with your fears.
Come with your unfinished prayers and your unanswered questions.
Come because the Father desires you.
Come because the Son has made a place for you.
Come because the Spirit has brought you here.
We are all beggars.
And here is the bread.
The body of Christ.
Given for you.
Eternal life has found you today.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
