As most of you know, I spent several years before I was called into the ministry working as a chef.  During that time, I discovered that one of my favorite cuisines comes from right here in the United States.  They call it Cajun food and I love it.  As I learned to cook Cajun dishes, I was taught that almost all their food begins with a sauté of celery, bell peppers and onions.  In fact, these three ingredients are so essential to the flavor that people down in the Bayou call them the Trinity.  If you were to ever come across a true Cajun cookbook, you’d find the Trinity listed as an ingredient with little explanation as to what it is.  You see, it’s just a given, no further description is necessary.

One time, when I was working at a restaurant, it was my task to make the soup du jour.  I planned on making a great gumbo.  But I got pressed for time.  Instead of dicing up all the ingredients of the trinity, I just chopped up a bunch of onions and went with it.  I left out the celery and the peppers.  Turns out, those Cajuns know what they’re doing.  When the Executive Chef tasted the soup, he said, and I quote “something’s missing.  Fix it!”   You see, the Trinity of celery, onions and bell peppers is so important in forming true Cajun flavors that you’ll never find a dish that contains anything less than all three of its parts.  When I tried to shortcut the process, it just didn’t work out nearly as well.  It’s the melding of the three ingredients that creates something which transcends the individual parts.

I can think of no better way than this to describe how our Christian Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit saturate our life.  We experience God in three ways and we feel it permeate us, enriching our lives with depth and taste, each part contributing its own unique flavor to our soul.  Perhaps because the idea of one God in three persons is so difficult to grasp at times, we’ve seen through the centuries a tendency to overemphasize one of the persons above the others and things got out of sorts.

For many of the early years of our nation, Christians in America focused upon the almightiness of God the Father.  The sermons of Cotton Mather and others all dwelt heavily on God’s power and His ability to punish us.  Read “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” and you’ll see what I mean.  What passed as Christianity was little more than a cowering fear of God’s wrath.  Christ’s love and humanity wasn’t particularly talked about nor were the gifts of the Spirit.  Then, Christianity in America probably overcompensated by focusing too much on Jesus Christ to the near exclusion of God the Father and the Holy Spirit.  What a friend we have in Jesus.  And we do.  But by overemphasizing Christ’s humanity we lost touch with God’s power and God’s Spirit working within us, calling us to lead righteous lives.  So, we lost touch with the Holiness of God and how God provided us with a partner to help us obey Him.  After all, Jesus was our friend and friends don’t really expect that much from one another.   Friends let one another slide, right?

Finally, after that era, American Christianity moved to an unhealthy fixation on the Spirit.  In fact, the gifts of the Spirit are so good for us, they say, that little room was left for God the Father and God-in-Christ.  We hear people telling us from tele-pulpits that the spirit is going to anoint us, the Spirit is going to give us high-paying jobs and money and power.  It’s the Spirit, they say with little care for Christ’s teachings on poverty and humility.  And again, we’re out of whack.

It seems to me that when we fail to embrace each individual part of our Christian Trinity, our faith becomes imbalanced.  We’re to treasure each of the divine persons and their work in our lives equally.  If we don’t, we miss the glorious mystery of our Triune God.  We’ll discover the spiritual flavor in our lives to be weak and tasteless.  You see, it’s the recognition that God is operating in our lives not just in ONE way but in THREE WAYS that leads us to a sense of amazement which fills us with God’s joy. 

Methodist bishop Will Willimon suggests that through the Trinity, “we experience God in three ways:  as something beyond us; something among us; and something within us.”  God is beyond, among and within us through the three persons of the Trinity.  Our three Scripture readings today do a wonderful job illuminating this.  In our Isaiah passage, we witness the divine vision of the prophet Isaiah.  He encounters God the Father, resplendent upon His throne with six-winged seraphs soaring above Him that otherworldly entourage chanting “Holy, Holy, Holy is the LORD Almighty, the whole earth is full of His Glory.”  The mere voices of the seraphs shake the Temple, filling it with smoke.  No doubt, this is one of the key ingredients in the Trinity, THIS portrait of God the Father presented to us by the prophet Isaiah.  Our God is a God of power and amazement, able to call angels and seraphs to His side.  Holy and Almighty is our God.  This is God beyond us.  Beyond our capability to fully understand.  Beyond our ability to contain.

In our reading from the Gospel of Matthew, we see a picture of God the Son.  God among us.   John shows us Jesus Christ, the One who came from the Father’s love to give us eternal life.  Our God chose to live with us, to share our experiences so that we might be brought closer to Him.

And best of all, He’s a human.  A carpenter, a humble teacher – a servant who’s brought us eternal pardon from our sin.  In the flesh, Jesus taught us about salvation, about loving one another, about sacrifice.  And yes, Jesus Christ is very much our friend.