Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Psalm 8; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20
Good morning! Today, the first Sunday after Pentecost, is Trinity Sunday — the only feast day in the church that, instead of celebrating a saint, or some important events in the life of Jesus, instead celebrates…a doctrine. A belief. And it’s a doctrine that is, for a lot of people, really, deeply weird.
And it’s not something that was easy to come by. Most of our feast days are pretty obvious. Christmas? Feast day! Jesus’ Baptism? Feast day! Hs resurrection? Huge feast day! All are attested in the Gospels and definitely deserve to be celebrated.
But…the Trinity? There isn’t a single passage of scripture that you can point at and say it definitely says that God is a Trinity of Persons. Sure, there are a couple (like today’s Epistle and Gospel) that mention all three persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — but those passages never say the three are one God. It took a couple hundred years after Christ’s death and resurrection to hammer that out, and there was a lot of excommunicating going back and forth between bishops over it.
Trinity Sunday is a Sunday that a lot of clergy (and lay preachers) don’t seem to like to preach on. They don’t like to preach on it because it’s so easy to fall into one of the views of the Trinity that have been denounced as heresies over the years. I’ll try hard not to do that. No promises, though.
So, why do we even need a doctrine of a Trinitarian God? I mean, it seems like it would be much simpler to put all our eggs in one basket, so to speak. It would be easier to just look at Jesus, right?
But we can’t do that, because that would give us an incomplete picture of our Deity. Because only in the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — or, if you prefer, Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer — do we get the full picture of God. The one God who, in one person, made us; in another person, put aside his godhead to redeem the whole world; and in the third person comes to us now to to lift us up and support us to work for God’s kingdom.
The Rev. Kara Slade, the Associate Rector of Trinity Church in Princeton, NJ, talked about it this way: we know the nature of God by looking at Jesus, through the power of the Holy Spirit.
And we may not understand how it all works — I’m not convinced that anyone really does — do we really need to have a detailed understanding of such concepts as perichoresis? That’s the Greek term that describes how the three persons “interpenetrate”. Interesting, but I‘m not sure it’s something the average Christian needs in their everyday life.
What I think really we need to take away from Trinity Sunday what it points to for each of us. What the idea of “One God three persons” means for us today. The lesson we can draw from a difficult theological idea. Does the doctrine of the Trinity have any real-world significance for us? Or is it just something for bishops to argue over?
The three persons in the Trinity are quite distinct. I mean, we have very different ideas when we think about God, or think about Jesus, or when we think about the Holy Spirit. We use different mental imagery. We have different ideas about their action n the world.
That right there, my friends, is diversity. Three distinct persons, each recognizable as an individual. And yet, the doctrine of the Trinity says they are One. And that is Unity. Unity of substance, and unity of purpose.
Maybe…just maybe, this is a picture of what we should be as the Children of God.
We are distinct individuals, aren’t we? You’d never mistake me for anybody else in here, and I couldn’t mistake you for anyone else ether. We each have different backgrounds, different talents, different callings, different ways of earning a living.
That, my friend, is diversity.
And yet, our Savior calls us to be one body in him. Maybe not one in substance, like the Trinity, but definitely one in purpose. And that purpose is really simple. We are to spread the love of God wherever we can.
We are called to be the body of Christ, to rejoice in our differences, to accept any who come, and to act as one for the growth of the kingdom of heaven. This is our calling and purpose.
But how are we do do that?
I don’t think it’s rocket science. But we need to do it every day, and we can use our thinking about the doctrine of the Trinity to guide us.
Every day, we can show the love of a God who created everything and said that it was good.
Every day, we can show the love of a Son who put aside his godhood to come and live among us and to redeem us after we had mucked up that good Creation.
Every day, we can show the love of the Holy Spirit who comforts us and guides us to do what is right.
See? Not rocket science.
Three persons.
Three ways of loving.
One God.
Amen.
Becoming Dominican 