I've had several thoughtful and positive comments on my sermon on Trinity Sunday, so I thought I'd share a portion of it here. It's important!
I'm excited about being part of God's church because of who God is and what God is doing in us. No church is perfect. Last time I checked, it's full of people. And no denomination is perfect. All of them are struggling, but the church is the gift that God gave us, a gift of not only witness for God but for the "with-ness" of God.
And as we talk about the Trinity, I think it's important to address some misinformation that you will find out there in the world. Some opponents of the United Methodist Church say that the UMC is going to somehow abandon core doctrines like the authority of the Bible, or the resurrection, or the virgin birth, or the lordship of Christ, or the Trinity. You name it, I've heard it. Nothing could be further from the truth, and I'm going to tell you a couple of reasons why.
First of all, one method of rhetoric is to take outlying examples - something somebody said, somewhere, in a 12.5 million person denomination - and then you exaggerate it, take it out of context, wrap it into a narrative of the infidelity of the whole, and use it as justification for leaving.
It's a method of rhetoric. But it's an untruth, because second, our core doctrines of the United Methodist Church can not be changed. They're part of something called the Articles of Religion. They are in a constitutional section of our Discipline and were written by Wesley's very own hand, as he adapted them from the Church of England. It would take a 3/4 vote of all lay and clergy members of all annual conferences everywhere, throughout the entire world, to change those core constitutional doctrines.
And the very first one reads like this:
Article I — Of Faith in the Holy Trinity
There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body or parts, of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the maker and preserver of all things, both visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there are three persons, of one substance, power, and eternity—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
You can not be more clear, and that's "A Number One."
