This is my sermon for Trinity Sunday, May 26, 2024. We are using Wilda Gafney’s Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, Year B. The lectionary was Hosea 11:1-4; Psalm 130:5-8; 131:1-3; 2 Peter 1:16-18; and Matthew 28:16-20

As a people, we’ve been seeking the Divine -God – since the beginning of time.  Our earliest stories, including those we hear in the Hebrew Scriptures, are all about our search for that deeper understanding.  Some of the stories are troubling.  Others don’t make much sense to us today. Some are reassuring and offer glimmers – sometimes magnificent beams – of hope.  There are confusing and sometimes seemingly contradictory messages about our relationship to God and God’s relationship to humankind and all of creation.  There are even those stories that seem to be troubling, nonsensical, reassuring, hopeful, confusing, and contradictory all at once!

What all of these stories and messages have in common is an understanding that there is a presence  beyond our immediate comprehension.  The stories we hear and the stories we tell are our best efforts to capture or document our experience of that divine presence.  And we can only experience, capture, and document at a particular moment in time, from where we find ourselves and how we find ourselves in that particular moment in time.  Because God is largely unknowable – at least in the ways we usually come to know what we know- we ascribe all manner of traits and temperaments, all kinds of motivations and reactions to God.  All of this is to help us better understand that which we desire beyond all else – deeper relationship with the God who breathed life into us and all creation.

Today is Trinity Sunday, a day on which we can’t help but acknowledge that the nature of God defies not only the comprehension of human reason but challenges the capacity of human language.  And yet try to explain or define or illuminate we do, year after year after year, even as we acknowledge that God is undefinable, immeasurable, beyond comprehension, beyond comparison. 

We seem to forget sometimes that the Bible never explicitly defines or describes God.  Trinitarian theology, including the language “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” language that so many of us have grabbed onto and have been adamant that we do not want to let loose, grew from the early days of Christianity when people were trying to understand life with Christ in the post-resurrection world.  The traditional language of the Trinity and the underlying theology was not a neat and tidy gift that suddenly appeared from heaven, but rather a long – and I’m talking hundreds of years long – human process of study, reflection, conversation, debate, and, ultimately, compromise, one that was often ugly and violent.  There were power plays and schisms, exiles and executions. 

Trinitarian theology did grow from the well-intentioned efforts of people like us who wanted to be better followers of Christ and understood the need for some common understanding, though they perhaps couldn’t have understood or foreseen that their best efforts, the conclusions of that time, would limit that same desire for people many centuries later.

The question of how to explain who God is and how God works in and through creation is not a question that should ever be considered answered once and for all.  One of the greatest gifts of faith is that, in response to God’s call to us, we do what we can do in our particular time and place to broaden our understanding and deepen our relationship with God. And then, because we possess this annoyingly human combination of traits: the need to be certain and the need to be right, we find ourselves in all kinds of situations in which our focus shifts from seeking God to trying to define once and for all who God is and how God is present in the world.  We forget that religion and all that we do within it should be an active seeking of relationship with God, a means to an end.  Sadly, too often, we equate religion and religious institutions with God.  The icon- which should point us to God, becomes the idol – that which we worship.  And that is true of our theology, as well. We find ourselves stuck or tied to the past or others’ experiences in ways that are not helpful or life-giving or God-like. 

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 questions that matter most as we live our lives are:

• Do we believe (or at least hold open the possibility) that God is present with us in and through all things? and
• How does our faith in God always present prepare us and shape us each and every day so that we live into the image of God in ourselves and each other?

The theologian, Paul Tillich, writing his systematic theologyover 50 years ago, said it well: “Theology moves back and forth between two poles, the eternal truth of its foundations and the temporal situation in which the eternal truth must be received.”

My prayer for all of us on this Trinity Sunday, is that we open our hearts and minds to new and varied ways of experiencing the presence of God, who was and is and is to come. Let us not be limited by particular language or by the experiences of others before us who so faithfully did the same.  Let us invite the Holy Spirit to continually guide us along the paths that will help us live our lives as our brother, Jesus, taught us, so that all people ultimately come to know the fullness of God’s love. Amen.

This is my sermon from The Day of Pentecost 2024, a day that included a very special baptism. I offer it with the usual disclaimer that I don’t use notes when I preach so it is “more or less” what the congregation heard. We are using Dr. Wilda Gafney’s, A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church. The lectionary was Isaiah 44:1-8; Psalm 104:1-4, 10-15, 27-30; Romans 8:14-27; and John 14:8-17.

Today, in addition to being the day of Clara’s baptism, is the Day of Pentecost, the day we sometimes refer to as the birthday of the Church because it’s the day when God’s Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples as they were cowering in an upper room (or so we’re told in other parts of Scripture) not quite understanding how they were going to go on living life in the ways they had felt compelled to when they were sitting with Jesus, breaking bread with Jesus, healing with Jesus, and doing all the things they had been doing with Jesus for the three years of his public ministry, at least as far as we know it.

The Day of Pentecost is the day when the Spirit enlivens them to live their lives as Jesus would have them live, without needing the physical Jesus with them, living their lives with the understanding that to follow God’s commandments – to love one another as we are loved, to free the imprisoned, to give food to the hungry, clothing to the poor, shelter to the unsheltered, sight to the blind – to do all of those things that Jesus told us are part of how we love God because we show our love for God in the ways we show our love for God’s people.  That’s the day -today, Pentecost – when the disciples accepted the Spirit in their lives in a way they hadn’t before and the Church as we know it today, for better or for worse, was born.

What is also remarkable about this is that, in the reading from Acts we’ve heard in other years, we’re told that there are throngs of people outside, people from all nations and all languages, people who didn’t know each other and didn’t understand each other and would’ve thought they had very little in common, and suddenly they could understand each other.  This was possible because what the Spirit does for us is enliven our very core.  She enlivens the very essence of who we are as children of God.  When we live our lives with that essence as the wellspring, then the things we think divide us don’t because we’re not looking for obstacles, we’re looking for life, we’re looking for love.

Paul says to us that we don’t necessarily even need to know what we need or what we want or what we desire, because God’s spirit already does.  When we don’t know how to pray -whether it’s for ourselves or the problems of the world or for our friend or whatever it is- when we don’t know how to pray, when we open ourselves to the Spirit, the Spirit does it with us, and for us, and in us. 

And that really is how we should live as the Church, as the Body of Christ.  Not so much focused on what we think or what we want or any of that, but rather on what we discern God would have us do or how God would have us be in any circumstance or any moment in time.

Today, in just a few minutes, we’ll be baptizing Clara, who, at the ripe old age of seven, wants to be baptized.  Now, she was about five and a half when she said to her mother, “we need to start going to church.” I’m not sure she even understood what church was, but, lo and behold, we now have two new families in this parish because a five-and-a-half-year-old listened to what I can only imagine was the voice of God, even though at five and a half, she probably wouldn’t have thought it was the voice of God.  But she knew that she wanted to come here and be a part of a church community.

Today we are baptizing her and as we do this we will be invoking the Holy Spirit, not to come and to be a part of her for the first time, or a part of us for the first time, but to welcome her, to welcome her in the spirit of adoption we just heard about, to welcome her into the household of God in ways that we believe will shape her life, will inform the ways she lives her faith, will help us be a better church than we could have been yesterday.

The Spirit is with us. Today the Spirit, who is capable of doing things and doing new things at the same time, will be doing the same things she always does: being present in our midst, nudging us to invite her into our lives and our hearts, and she’ll be doing a new thing.  She’ll be making us different than we were yesterday because, in addition to Clara being welcomed, we will remember our call to be welcoming.   

You will have a spoken part.  I’m going to ask you a question and I expect a faith-filled, resounding, “We will!” in answer to that question.  In that moment, I invite you to open your hearts, maybe to more than where they are in this moment, to where the Spirit is calling you. I invite you to listen to how the Spirit is nudging you to live your faith in ways that are as bold and as forthright as a five-and-a-half-year-old making the decision that coming to this church, to being part of a community of faith, was something she just needed to do.