Wesley Menke
Grace Lutheran Church
30 May 2021
Holy Trinity
Do you ever feel different? Do you feel as though you don’t fit in, or that the world is changing around you and you stick out in a crowd as someone who is different than those who are all around you?
Once I had a roommate who wasn’t different at all. This was in college. He majored in something that a lot of other people majored in. He had a couple of different girlfriends and was very smooth. He had the cool clothes and the cool music, and a cool car. One time we were just hanging out and talking on a Friday night. He had his current girlfriend with him. He said to me, “You know what Wes? You are so normal! You are the most normal guy I have ever met!”
I said to him, “Excuse me? You think that I am normal? No sir. You have it entirely backwards. I am different. You are normal!” We then began an argument as to who was more normal. I went to church. He said that made me normal. I said that it was just the opposite. Most people in college don’t go to church, therefore I am not normal. The conversation proceeded along those lines for a while. Finally it was decided that “normal” and “different” are very subjective concepts. We decided to accept each other just the way we were, as two normal and yet different guys.
What is normal anyway? We all think we know what normal is, but it is totally relative to what we think is normal! If there is anything I know, it is that God is 100% without a doubt, NOT NORMAL! God is different!
God is different!
The Father is different from the Son. The Son is different from the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit is different from the Father. Yet God is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Therefore we must say that God is essentially different. God is not internally consistent. God is not uniform. God is different.
Sometimes people like to ask me about the Trinity. They say, “What’s the deal with the Trinity? I don’t get it!” A family member once asked me when I was in seminary, “When did they invent the Trinity?” That one made me laugh. It’s funny to think about inventing the Trinity because on the one hand it is a very honest question. You can study the history of the church and in fact lift up dates when the doctrine of the Trinity began to take shape in the Christian mind and discourse. On the other hand, the doctrine of the Trinity itself would argue that the Son and the Holy Spirit are co-eternal with the Father. That is, that the Trinity has been the Trinity since all of eternity.
Christians are monotheistic, but other monotheistic religions understandably struggle to understand how we believe that the Father is God, that Jesus is God, and that the Holy Spirit is also God, but that there is only one God. If it sounds confusing, that is good, because it should sound confusing. The whole point is to disrupt your mind from thinking that you can understand God. You can’t! God is far beyond your understanding.
