We don’t tend to get all excited about a doctrine of the Church.  Just to use the word doctrine sort of begins to kill the joy of the Living Word, yet part of what the Living Word does is it teaches.  Doctrine is what we are called to believe, what defines us as Christian rather than something else, a follower of Jesus Christ, rather than someone else.  We learn doctrine from the Bible.  In different places, the Bible speaks of God as Father, as Son, and as Spirit.  Jesus names all three when he tells his followers to go, make disciples, and to baptize them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit (Mt 28:19).  Jesus speaks of God as three yet one, one God.  Trinity.  You won’t find that word in the Bible: we need some word to identify what God is telling us about His nature.  God tells us He is in trinity.

In this life, in this world, with our limitations, we are never going to understand this about God, but we can begin to contemplate it, meditate upon it in prayer and awe.  God invites us to.  As we contemplate this amazing, confusing reality, the truth of it begins its holy, life giving, life-making work in us—and in others through us!  God is a life-giver.  God, in trinity, is a life-maker.  This is what the Bible teaches.  This is doctrine.  The Bible teaches us what to believe; what we believe matters: the Bible teaches the way of life.  People are on their way: this way, that way, any way—it’s like we’re stuck in Lake Jackson, no way!  In trinity, God has us fenced in by grace.  It’s not so easy as it was to go our own way, now, thanks be to God!  Now, as disciples, we are called to keep our eyes, hearts, and feet on God’s way.  Fenced in by grace, guided by truth, shepherded by love, we stumble yet we are preserved, protected, kept for the joy of eternal life in the presence of God.

It’s not as if God hasn’t given us ways to begin to contemplate the mystery of the Trinity, one yet three, three and one.  I had an egg for breakfast just this morning.  An egg is one thing, yet it is also three: shell, white, and yolk, separate, yet one.  The shell is not the white, nor does it sort of blend into the white.  The white is not the yolk, nor do they blend one into the other, yet shell, white, and yolk make one egg.  One and three.  We like ice in our iced tea, especially now!  Leave ice out long enough, and it becomes liquid.  When you want hot tea, you boil the water and it becomes steam: ice, liquid, and steam, yet each is water, the same water.  In a different state, yes—no analogy is perfect, after all—yet the point is that God gives us ways in creation to begin to contemplate the mystery and the truth of the Trinity: one and three, three yet one.

Doctrine speaks to our minds.  Doctrine produces informed, enlightened minds.  Doctrine, what we are taught in the Bible to believe, also makes its appeal to our hearts.  Faith is all about the heart?  Faith is as much about the head—people seem to overlook that, sometimes.

Love is a good thing, right?  I love love: I love to see love; I love to feel love, true love, holy love.  People are very confused about love.  Scripture is plain that sin takes love and messes with it.  People love, but we no longer love the right things in the right way.  We confuse appetite, craving, with love; we confuse lust with love: all those songs on the radio about “love”?   Yeah—lust.  Love gets hijacked.  We see it all around us.  The mind, unrenewed by God, won’t resist this hijacking; rather, the unrenewed mind participates!  I once heard Boy George say on some talk show—maybe Oprah—that any love was good love.  The audience wasn’t having it.  This was many years ago.  I wonder, if he said that on the same show today, whether he wouldn’t be given a standing ovation.

How do we learn love?  We need examples.  I suppose psychologists, maybe even biologists, would tend to agree that human beings are “hard-wired” for love.  Sharing, rejoicing, giving—I believe these are all characteristic of love.  When we love, we extend these to another.  When we love another, we share with this other; we rejoice in this other; we give to this other.  Love is other-directed.  Love requires another.

What about self-love?  You’ve got to love yourself, right?  That’s the greatest love of all, right?  I say that’s misusing the word.  And I never liked that song, anyway.  Having regard for yourself, taking care of yourself, not intentionally seeking to harm or destroy yourself—yes, we can call that love; I would rather call it sanity, of health.  It’s a sign of a serious problem when we cease to have regard for ourselves, when we cease taking care of ourselves, when we intentionally seek to harm or to destroy ourselves.  It is a love problem, but it isn’t that we are failing to love ourselves—“Just love yourself more and you won’t do such things!”  “He loves himself more than anyone—he’s so healthy!”  What?  A love problem is at the heart of this problem: not being loved, not being loved in true, good, and holy ways.  We forget that we are loved.  We forget that God is love.  It’s not very difficult for sin to snare us.

God is love.  How?  It may not be a question for you, but it could be for the hundreds and the thousands around you who are dying for lack of a life-giving Word.  Many people know about God, about Jesus.  God is love: that’s good news.  Is God love because He loves us?  Hasn’t He always been love?  We haven’t always existed.  Who knows how many aeons it was before God created us?  Scientists conjecture that the earth is some 4.5 billion years old, and that beings we would recognize as us appeared some two hundred thousand years ago, give or take a few thousand years.  Was God love only once we were created?  No.  God is love and has always been.  In love, God created.  In love, God saved—and saves!  In love, God sustains us, moment by moment—us and all creation.  It doesn’t take long to get very deep, with God!

If, like me, you just love love, then you’ll love that our God is three Persons and one God, is Trinity.  Love is other-directed, going to and coming from another.  This is the nature of love, and, in the nature of love, we perceive something of the nature of God: there are three others in the Trinity, our one God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Some theologians speak of the Holy Spirit as the love between the Father and the Son.  To my ears, that gives short shrift to the Spirit, makes the Spirit a bit less than a full Person within the Trinity.

In my observation, love of oneself is narrow, vulgar, and unhealthy: “Yeah, he really loves himself” is hardly a compliment.  The love of two is exclusionary: the two lovers want the rest of the world to go away, so they can just be only with one another.  Intoxicating, but intoxication, to be perfectly candid, is self-poisoning.  The love of three—that’s something quite different, inclusive at its very heart.  The love of three sees others, reaches out to others, shares with, gives to, and rejoices in others.  Not the self-absorbed, self-consumed “love” for oneself, not the “Oh, make them all go away!” love of two intoxicated lovers, but the full-hearted, compassionate, rejoicing love of three.  God is love, as one God in three Persons.

Of course, God creates!  Of course, He saves!  Of course, He keeps us, preserves and protects us!  God in three Persons loves others, rejoices in others, shares with and gives to others.  This is what I hear Paul saying to the Christians in Rome.  We have been put right with God through faith.  We have peace with God through Jesus Christ (5:1).  The door is open.  The invitation extended.  The promise given.  The way is clear.

It is Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of the eternal Father, who “has brought us into this experience of God’s grace, in which we now live”; through him “we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand” (5:2).  Christ truly is the mediator, bringing the truth of God’s love to us, and calling us to the truth of God’s love.  In, through, and with Christ, we can now “boast of the hope we have of sharing God’s glory.”  We call that boasting faithful living.  Faithful living is joyful; faithful living has a mind, heart, and hands and feet for others—we boast as we tell others about Christ and share him with others.

Paul says that we can now even boast of our troubles (5:3), which sounds strange, until we contemplate the ground upon which he can say that.  The ground is love; the ground of love is our God in trinity.  In our troubles we rapidly discover our own innate, fundamental inadequacy—alone, we can’t endure.  We have also found, to our grief, that, in our troubles, another can abandon us.  In the company of three, however, we are held, we are helped.  In company with three, we can boast even of our troubles, because, held in the love of three, “we know trouble [indeed, sufferings] produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope” (5:3-4).

Hope.  If you hope in yourself, you hope in a mirage—always promising, never delivering.  You must hope in another.  I recommend God.  Hoping in God is called faith.  Our faith in others has been disappointed—mine is disappointed every time I foolishly glance through the news.  We may think of troubles, of suffering, as extinguishing faith, but Paul says the endurance that produces character produces hope—we hope in one in whom we have faith, one whom we know will come through for us, no matter how great the obstacles.  Wishful thinking?  Any atheist would tell you so, with that angry sneer they can’t control.

I’ve just spoken of hope and of faith, but I’ve left out something, and you know what it is, I suspect: faith, hope, and . . . love.  Paul tells us this hope we have, faith-born hope, “does not disappoint, because God has poured out His love into our hearts by means of the Holy Spirit, God’s gift to us” (5:5).  The Son brought us this offer to enter into, to participate in, to be sustained by this holy, eternal love of God, this Trinity who by His very nature is love.  How do we accept the offer?  Why do so many reject the offer, even sneer at it in anger?  What makes me any different?  What makes you any different?  Are we better?  Wiser?  Stronger?  Richer?  Poorer?  Holier?  The Spirit, beloved.  It is the Spirit that pours this love into our hearts, pours it: it isn’t a drop, not a trickle.  This love is poured, like water, like wine.  When we baptize today, remember this.

One calls, the other beckons, and the third?  The third opens our ears, our eyes, our minds, opens our hearts, and we are changed, and we are held.  We are loved; now we know it.  If you know it, share it, give it, rejoice in it.  Doing this, you reflect the nature of God.  As you live in this love, you have it in you to offer the heart of God to others.  Offer Him.  Endure.  Hope.  Love.

Now to the One who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.