This is the manuscript from my sermon today, Trinity Sunday. It is, essentially, the product of my preparation for preaching. I preach from the aisle and there is no denying the Holy Spirit moves a bit differently in that space than she does in my study in front of a computer. Still in all, this is the message shared today.
If you’d like to read the lectionary, you’ll find it here.
Today is Trinity Sunday, the day we celebrate God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, God transcendent, incarnate, immanent. Trinity Sunday is a day in which preachers are wise to exercise great caution. Although a core tenant of our faith and something we say and pray all the time, the Trinity is not all that easy to understand. Thus, it is not all that easy to preach. It is a topic on which it is easier than most to veer into heresy – those statements about the nature of God that do not, despite the best intentions, adequately or accurately explain the Godhead.
There is a fun Youtube channel called, “The Lutheran Satire,” which I commend to you if you have any theology or liturgy geek in you. Featured on this site is a bit called “St. Patrick’s Bad Analogies.” ( You can check it out here.) “Bad” though the analogies may be, this bit contains one of the best explanations of the Trinity:
“The Trinity is a mystery which cannot be comprehended by human reason but is understood only through faith.”
It goes on to reference the creed attributed to the 6th Century theologian, St. Athanasius, who offered the best non-heretical description we have, which includes: “that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one, the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal.”
So, one of the most comprehensive, non-heretical, and easiest to understand descriptions of the Trinity clearly is less than clear. The nature of God defies not only the comprehension of human reason but challenges the capacity of human language.
God bless St. Athanasius for his theological brilliance and for his timeless writing about the Trinity. I mean that most sincerely. God bless St. Athanasius and all who strive for clarity and deeper understanding of this crucial aspect of our Christian heritage and understanding. God bless them because, despite their theological brilliance, extraordinary ability to lend language to this reality, and best efforts at explanation, we remain confused.
Yet, they lead us to the place we need to be.
They lead us to the place the disciples find themselves in today’s Gospel, wrestling with the question:
How are we to understand life with Christ in the post-resurrection world?
You see, as interesting as it may be, as important as it is, for most of us the question isn’t whether or not we can explain the Trinity. The question that matters most to us as we live our lives is: How does our faith in God always present prepare us and shape us each and every day? How are we motivated and challenged? How are we assured, comforted, and consoled?
In today’s Gospel, part of John’s Farewell Discourse, the disciples are preparing for a crisis of sorts. Jesus has told them yet again that he will be leaving them. They are scared. They are uncertain. They are in need of assurance, comfort, and consolation. Jesus is telling them, in language that is about as clear to us as is St. Athanasius’ description of the Trinity, that the future they envision and hope for is possible even as they prepare to live life in Palestine without him. Jesus is reassuring the disciples that God has been, is, and will always be present with them, even as they lose their beloved teacher and friend. Jesus is telling them that the real experience of God is not in restricted to life with the incarnate God.
Jesus is telling them and us that life with God is life with God because God is God.
In a sense, Jesus is preparing his disciples to be the people we are. We are people of faith who believe in God’s presence. We believe, not because we experienced the incarnate God up close and personal, but because we know God through the power of the Holy Spirit working in and through us. Jesus is encouraging the disciples to move from believing in that which they can see and hear and touch, the human Jesus, to belief in the immanent presence of God, the Holy Spirit.
So what does it mean to be a people of faith who believe in the God no one of us today has ever seen in the flesh, as it were? We may find ourselves – sometimes or often- experiencing the same kind of crisis the disciples faced. We may find ourselves in need of assurance, comfort, and consolation, though for different reasons. The obstacles we face, the challenges to our faith, come not from anticipating the loss of the incarnate God, but from the consequences of our own flawed humanity, despite our faith or lack of faith.
We are faced with different questions, different concerns, though they are no less compelling. How do we maintain our faith in a world in which there often seems to be so little that resembles God’s dream for God’s people? How does one maintain hope and faith when all around are examples of injustice, violence, lack of compassion, divisiveness? When one hears of examples of such things in the name of God? In the name of Jesus? For example, how can we bear to hear of pastors calling for the death of some of our brothers and sisters because of their gender and sexual identity, saying it is in Jesus’ name? How do we bear the reality of children being in held in what are tantamount to concentration camps on our border?
It would be easy to take this in the direction of calling attention to ways we can make the kinds of changes in the world that need to be made to move closer to God’s dream for the world. But this is not a sermon about answers. This is about living in and with the questions, embracing the mystery, embodying faith. It is about understanding that how we live with those questions, reveling in the mystery, informs what we do and how we move deeper into the heart of God.
This is about putting ourselves in a place similar to the place the disciples found themselves. It is about committing to active relationship with God, to life with Christ, in the absence of what we think we might need as reasonable and reasoned people to justify or explain that commitment. It is, in the language of the traditional aphorism, knowing that “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
And that is just another way of saying that we believe in the presence of the Holy Spirit, who is one with God and Jesus, whether or not we could maintain that claim in a court of law or in a field of scientific inquiry. We are to trust that relationship with God is not static or stagnant, a kind of theological “one and done.” God has been, is, and will always be at work in the world at all times for all time.
When he wrote about the nature of the Trinity in Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis likened it to a dance, with pulsating energy and beautifully intricate, intimate movement. That description resonates deeply with me, a former classically trained dancer. When you are dancing well, fully present to the experience, the music, the rhythm energizes you from the inside out. It takes every ounce of discipline you have not to explode willy nilly, to embody in graceful ways the energy and excitement within. It takes on a life of its own deep within and compels you to move with it.
Today is Trinity Sunday and we are celebrating the mysterious, confounding Trinitarian Godhead, who is known to us through our faith. We are celebrating the promise God has made, makes, and will continue to make to be present in the world, to be present with all people, for all time, in ways known and unknown, obvious and less clear. We are celebrating the grace that is given us to awaken to the power of the Holy Spirit working in and through us, inviting her to compel us to go into the world to be the best God created us to be. Jesus and countless martyrs since were willing to die for this truth. It is the holy mystery of love that is well worth living for.
