Trinitytide Sermons, 2001 The Most Rev. John T. Cahoon, Jr. Metropolitan, Anglican Catholic Church Archbishop Ordinary, Diocese of the Mid-Atlantic States Rector, St. Andrew and St. Margaret of Scotland Anglican Catholic Church Alexandria, Virginia

St. John Baptist isn't a Baptist at all. He is a Jew. When we call him "Baptist" we mean that he is a baptizer. He baptized and preached to get people ready for the arrival of the Messiah of Israel onto the stage of human history. His baptizing people in the Jordan River culminated when he baptized Jesus, the Messiah himself, as the Father identified Jesus as his Son, and the Holy Ghost landed on his head in the form of a dove.

In the Prayer Book's calendar, John the Baptist is the saint about whom we hear the most. Two of the Sundays in Advent are devoted to him. The Second Sunday in Epiphany is about his baptizing Jesus, and we have today's commemoration of his birthday.

We give John the Baptist so much attention because he is so important, reasonably enough. He is the character who connects the Old Testament to the New Testament. That is not just a literary matter. What God does in the life of John the Baptist in the New Testament shows that he is keeping all of the promises he made in the Old Testament.

John shows that it is not possible to say, "The God of the Old Testament was such a mean old guy. I'm so glad he got replaced in the New Testament with sweet, gentle Jesus." John is the connector cable. His life shows that the same God who got things going in the Old Testament is acting consistently in the New Testament.

We celebrate John's birthday today because of the intimate connection between his conception and birth and the conception and birth of Christ. The archangel Gabriel tries to sell the Virgin Mary on the idea that she can become pregnant without sleeping with a man. His proof that God can do anything is that her cousin Elizabeth is six months pregnant after a whole life of seeming to be barren. That makes John six months older than Jesus, hence a birthday six months before Christmas.

The difference between their conceptions and births is that the virgin conception of Jesus is an unprecedented miracle. The conception of John the Baptist is a more garden variety Old Testament miracle. The woman becomes pregnant in the normal way, although she has never been able to conceive before. That connects John to Sarah's conception of Isaac when she appeared to be too old, and to the conceptions of Samson and Samuel.

The New Testament connects John to the Old Testament further by saying that he is the fulfillment of two distinct prophecies. One is in today's epistle from the prophecy of Isaiah, written hundreds of years before Christ. It says, "The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, 'Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.'"

The other prophecy is from Malachi, written several centuries later. It is the one Jesus himself uses to describe John. "Behold I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee."

Today's gospel describes John's circumcision. Circumcisions took place on the eighth day of a boy's life -- symbolizing a new beginning and reflecting the fact that the clotting factor in blood reaches its apex when a boy is a week old. The circumcision was also the day of naming.

Both of John's parents insist that he be called John, ignoring the custom that a child be named for a relative. When Gabriel told Zacharias that he and Elizabeth were going to conceive a child and name him John, Zacharias doubted it -- even though "John" means "gift of God." Gabriel struck Zacharias dumb, thus beginning one of the happier pregnancies in history -- nine months when the father could not speak.

When they tell the rabbi to name him John, God recognizes that Zacharias has capitulated and now believes, so he lets him speak. He sings what we know as the New Testament canticle "Benedictus." The "Benedictus" weaves together Old Testament prophecy and New Testament reality -- acknowledging John as the one whom Isaiah had spoken about, and praising God for fulfilling promises that were two thousand years old.

Zacharias says that God was going to keep his promise to deliver his people from their enemies not with the political and military victory many expected, but by forgiving our sins. Deliverance is conceived of as rescue from our sinful nature, rather than the defeat of any external enemy. Getting our sins forgiven is the crucial matter.

Zacharias does not sing about how all that was going to be accomplished. He knew that it was coming, and he knew his son was going to be one of God's crucial instruments in making it happen. He was going to be the one who brought the Messiah into public -- the ultimate advance man.

Let us relish the last words of the song of John the Baptist's father: "To give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remission of their sins, through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us, to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace."

If you want peace, if you want the tender mercy of God to shine on you, if you want to be saved, if you want to enjoy the full benefits of the lives of John the Baptist and Jesus the Messiah, then you must repent and confess your sins. There is no other way to do it.

Trinity Sunday entered the church calendar in the tenth century. It took the place of an octave day for Pentecost. The usage of the cathedral in Salisbury, England, at that time also provided that the summer Sundays be numbered after Trinity. That practice was popular in Northern Europe in the Middle Ages, and was, quite obviously, different from the Roman practice of numbering those Sundays after Pentecost.

The Roman custom has now prevailed everywhere except among 1928 Prayer Book churchmen. We are different on this matter, and I, for one am proud of our traditionalism -- which some might call perversity. St. Thomas á Becket was especially fond of the feast of the Trinity, and we honor him by perpetuating it.

This is one feast of the year that is not about an event or a person, but about a great truth. The great truth is that God reveals himself to us as trinity -- threeness. He is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. All three persons are God. All three persons work together. Each person has an element of distinctiveness from the other two.

It took the church a good bit of time to formulate this doctrine, or this understanding of how God shows himself to us. The Trinity is mentioned in several rather oblique ways in the Bible, but there is no explicit statement or working out of the doctrine.

The Trinity, of course, did not come into existence in the A.D. period. If God is Trinity, he has always been Trinity, and so the church was able to begin to see evidence of Trinity in the Old Testament. The Father is the easiest one to discern. He is the one who creates and sustains everything that is and makes things happen.

The Son, the Word of God, is the means by which the Father speaks the creation into existence ("He said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light"). The Son is also the manifestation of God in the world -- walking in the garden in the cool of the day, wrestling with Jacob, talking to Moses from the burning bush. The Spirit is what moves across the face of the waters at the beginning of creation, and then quite specifically seizes the prophets and speaks through them.

Jesus, of course, says that he is God in St. John's gospel, and, as in today's gospel reading, says if we are to be caught up into the life of God himself we must be born again of water and the Spirit. In the many gospel readings we heard after Easter, Jesus told us about the relationship among the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and what we could expect the Holy Ghost to do when he came -- as he did last Sunday.

The most practical way to begin to apprehend the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is to reason from your own experience. We know that God is somehow out there. He is the one who has set things us, he is the direction toward which we are pointing. But we also know that God is somehow down here -- inside us -- motivating our prayers, keeping us going, bringing us together in the church, talking through the Bible. Then we know that there is something connecting the out there to the down here. That is roughly what we are getting at when we say that God is Trinity.

St. Augustine says that the Trinity is like a loving relationship. There are two parties to the relationship, and the love between them forms a sort of third entity. The Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father back. We are in the Son because we are baptized. The love that flows between the Father and the Son through us is the Spirit.

Dorothy Sayers says that if God is the creator, the Trinity should have something to do with the creative act. She says that before one, for example, bakes a cake, one has an idea of what the cake will look like when it is finished. That idea corresponds to the Father. The actual baking of the cake -- bringing the idea into the material world -- corresponds to the Son -- God made flesh. What one gets from the cake -- the taste, the pleasure -- is like the Spirit.

Neither of these images of the Trinity is perfect, and no human explanation of the Trinity can ever be perfect. The main point is that God is not alone -- his very being is social -- he is self-giving love. He calls us, individuals that we are, into communities of self-giving love -- friendships, families, churches. That is how we can reflect his being and his name.