Last Sunday, eight of us were baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. We did so in obedience to Christ’s command and with the growing recognition that with baptism we enter into newness of life. Baptism marks with symbolic action what we embrace in faith: in the death and resurrection of Jesus new life erupts, a new creation amid the familiar contours of the world. In baptism we celebrate the power of forgiveness and the freedom to live and serve as children of God in the world. In the deep solidarity of love, Christ has made us his own, and in baptism we say our small yes to God’s big yes: we acknowledge God’s gifts as given to us, and we step into the story of God’s love for us as we step into the water and let ourselves be immersed in it.
Eight times it was my privilege and joy to speak the words, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” It is but one name, because these three, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are one. This puzzling declaration is not an invitation to speculation; it is an invitation to enter the mystery of the divine life as participants through Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit – as those eight young people did last Sunday.
C. S. Lewis spoke about prayer both as an illustration and as a way to enter the mystery of the triune God. Imagine, he suggested, “an ordinary simple Christian” who says her prayers. She does so with intention, because she wants to “get into touch with God” and because she trusts that God hears her prayers. But as a Christian she also knows that “what is prompting” her to pray “is also God,” God inside her, so to speak. And she knows that all she knows of God, she knows because of Christ, the Word of God in human flesh. And Christ is present with her, praying for her, praying with her. “You see what is happening,” says Lewis. God is the one she seeks to address with her prayer. God is also the one nudging her to pray. And “God is also the road or bridge,” the way along which she is drawn in her desire to address God. Thus “the whole threefold life” of the triune God “is actually going on” around and within her, Lewis contends — and as she prays, she is being caught up into a fuller kind of life,” which is to say, into the very life of God, three in one, one in three, while still remaining herself.[1]
Paul also writes about prayer in today’s passage from Romans, and he does it to assure his audience of their status as children of God and heirs to the promises of God. “How can we know we belong?” he imagines believers in Rome asking him, and he responds,
When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.
Jesus Christ is the one human being who lived faithfully in relationship with God, and he fulfilled the calling all of humanity had failed to live out, due to the power of sin. Christ is the heir to God’s promises, because Christ was faithful even unto death, and therefore God raised him up, the firstborn of a new creation, beyond the reach of sin and death.
Jesus’ relationship with God was personal and intimate. He addressed God on familial terms as Abba, and the community of believers remembered that intimate address and continued to use it in the original Aramaic after Easter. It was, according to one scholar, “so precious, venerable and distinctive as to resist the absorption into Greek that was the fate of virtually the entire remainder of the tradition.”[2]
Jesus’ relationship with God was personal and intimate, yet it wasn’t exclusive. It included all whom Jesus claimed as his siblings and embraced in boundless love, and all whom the Risen One continues to claim through the Spirit, whom Paul calls the spirit of adoption.
Paul was aware that the believers’ confidence that they were indeed children of God could be shaken in the trials besetting them. And so he told them, “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ we’re not just mouthing words – it’s the Spirit of Christ bearing witness with our own spirit that we belong to the household of God – and as members of God’s household we are co-heirs with Christ to the promises of God.” We are claimed and sealed, sanctified and destined to be glorified. In other words, what Christ has done and what God has done in Christ was for us and our salvation.
“So then, brothers and sisters,” our passage from Romans begins, “we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh — for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” This sentence is strangely incomplete – we are not told to whom or what we are indebted: “not to the flesh,” Paul says rather emphatically, leaving it to his readers to finish the sentence: We are debtors, not to the flesh, but to Jesus Christ, to the Spirit, to God.
Paul didn’t have a doctrine of the Trinity, but he loved God and he knew Christ, crucified and risen, and he was led by the power of the Spirit. The doctrine of the Trinity came much later, emerging from worship and study and conflict, and it continues to unfold through the theological work of the church, in conversation the biblical witnesses, with philosophers and mystics, poets and musicians, and believers of other faiths. God is three in one, the church confesses: the Holy One of Israel whom Jesus called Father, the Son who became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, and the Holy Spirit who has been poured out on all flesh. God is not a principle or the ultimate unifying theory of everything, but a personal, relational reality.
God is persons and nothing else. There is no waxy residue of divinity that is not wrapped up in these three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That’s who God is.[3]
And by the grace of God, we are adopted into this interpersonal reality to be in communion with God forever, to know as we are known, and love as we are loved.
Paul writes, “all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.” Our status as children of God is not determined by the world’s usual markers. In Paul’s day, things quickly got complicated between Jews and Gentiles in the churches, and to this day they continue to be complicated between male and female and non-binary folk, between rich and poor, cis and trans, preppy and punk, and I won’t even attempt to paint a full picture of all the ways we have come up with to draw each other in or push each other out. Paul insists that our core identity as followers of Jesus is affirmed in our baptism: each of us a child of God, and all of us siblings of Christ. All our other identity layers still matter, but they no longer determine how we relate to each other. All those sharp lines we draw fade in the light of our new and true status as siblings of Christ, children of God who are led by the Spirit of God. We don’t need a Sunday to lift up the doctrine of the Trinity. What we do need are frequent reminders of our true identity as children of God, because we are often fearful and forgetful and ungrateful.
We are God’s children on the way, led by the Spirit into the fullness of our inheritance like Israel in the wilderness: no longer slaves, but not fully free yet either. In his letter to the Galatians Paul writes, “you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another.”[4] Self-indulgence is another way of spelling “according to the flesh.” Led by the Spirit, we are no longer slaves to our self-seeking impulses and fear-driven desires; we are human beings made in the image of God who are being remade in the image of the Son of God, the truly and fully human one.
We are debtors, brothers and sisters and fellow-siblings of Christ, debtors not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh, but to God, to live according to the promise and purpose of God. We are debtors, that’s the central point made about us here. We owe all that we are to God: our life, our freedom, our hope. Paul uses the language of obligation again in Romans 13:8 where he writes, “Owe no one anything, but to love one another.” That is the whole point of the debt we owe to God: we can’t pay it back, but in paying it forward we become more fully who we are.
[1] Mere Christianity, 4.2; my thanks to the good people at https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/lectionary-commentary-for-trinity-Sunday for the lead.
[2] Brendan Byrne, Romans (Sacra Pagina), 250.
[3] Richard Lischer, Open Secrets. A Memoir of Faith and Discovery (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), 80.
[4] Galatians 5:13