Trinity Sunday, 5/26/2024

Sermon: Trinity Sunday, 5/26/2024, House of Prayer, Hingham, MA
Text: John 3: 1-17
Grace, Peace, and Mercy from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

God as Trinity, (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) is a distinguishing feature of Christian belief, but it is also for many one of the most confounding. 3 in 1, 1 in 3, the math does not necessarily add up. Yet, much struggle and work has gone in church history to affirm the Trinity. Not because the early Christians were being deliberately complicated. But because they knew, that they wanted to worship God rightly. And to worship God rightly, they yearned to understand how God reveals Himself in both lived experience and in the witness of the Scriptures. So the question was: who does God say He is? How does He manifest Himself to us? The New Testament never mentions the word Trinity. Yet, if we look at our readings today, there are three persons by which divine action is taking place, three persons that point towards God acting. First we have God the Father, the Lord whose glory fills all of the earth, the one who sent the Son because He loved the world so much. Secondly, we have the Son, by whose being lifted up sins are forgiven and eternal life and love, the inheritance of the promise as Paul calls it, are given to human beings. And thirdly, we have the Spirit. The spirit that renews and bears witness of Christ’s life in the believers, it is the agent that moves us from living in the flesh and death into living in God’s Will. It is said in the tradition that the Spirit fills the believers with the love that characterizes the Father and the Son. So there we have it: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The early church recognized this pattern and painstakingly developed what we now declare in the Nicene Creed. They saw God the Creator, and of course that is God. They saw Jesus, and they saw God in action among us, they experienced the workings of the Spirit, and they recognized God. It was a marvelous revelation they encountered, they had experienced as we can also experience, a glimpse of the ineffable grandeur of God’s own Being. Now how do we preach that? How do we express that experience of those connections into words? That is where things start getting dicey. No less as your preacher, this is one of those doctrines that there is a 75% chance that one might misrepresent the doctrine of the Trinity simply because words fail to capture the experience of the faith. I’ll be upfront about it: once you start trying to makes analogies about the trinity to try to explain it, it’s a slippery slope into heresy my friends. There is this great video called St. Patrick’s Bad Analogies. And it’s about St. Patrick trying to teach the doctrine of the trinity to two Irish barbarians who are mysteriously very perceptive about theological heresies. So St. Patrick says: the trinity is like the clover leaf, three leaves that yet correspond to one single plant. And the Irish Barbarians respond: “That’s partialism, Patrick! A heresy which asserts that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not distinct persons of the Godhead but are different parts of God, each composing 1/3 of the divine” And they take down one by one each of Patrick’s attempt to explain the Trinity until Patrick just gets fed up and declares: “The Trinity is a mystery which cannot be comprehended by human reason but is understood only through faith and is best confessed in the words of the Athanasian Creed, which states that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in unity, neither confusing the Persons nor dividing the substance, that we are compelled by the Christian truth to confess that each distinct Person is God and Lord, and that the deity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit is one, equal in glory, coequal in majesty.” The Irish twins respond: “Why didn’t you just say that Patrick? Quit beating around the bush, Patrick!” And they thus converted to Christianity. All this to say, as many in the long history of Christian preaching have admitted: there is simply no good analogy to explain the Trinity. It’s its own mysterious thing. It’s God being the infinite God that He is. It escapes our human reason, but not our spirits however. As Jesus tells Nicodemus about the Spirit: “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.”

We might never reach the end of understanding God, but we are nonetheless invited to go to the depths of His very identity as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and that itself will provide us with a lifetime of wonder. I’ve only lived 29 years, and it has been evident to me how out of my depth I still am concerning the Trinity. It is indeed a reality you can’t just grasp intellectually in one sitting, nor even one sermon. Our relationship to this Triune God is an ongoing journey of contemplating the depths of this God. With reason alone, I can say with all certainty how difficult it has been to understand the Trinity. However, there has been one avenue of understanding for me that has truly given me a glimpse of God as Trinity, and that is through Art. One of the most moving depictions of the Trinity I’ve seen in art was done by El Greco in Spain. However we can conceive or point towards what God is as Trinity, I can always point to that depiction as hinting a profound sense of God’s identity. The painting shows God the Father holding in His arms the dead body of God the Son, while hovering above them is God the Holy Spirit. And surrounding the Trinity is the striking color of golden light, surrounding such a moment in glory, the light emanating from the embrace of the Three. The tenderness and significance of that embrace, that whatever we can say of the Trinity, it is that God’s own being is precisely that movement of loving embrace that saved humanity from bondage to sin and death. As Paul said in our epistle reading today: “joint heirs with Christ–if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.” Part of our trinitarian thinking is that in us we bear Christ through baptism. In Christ, when God the Father sees humanity, He sees God the Son. So in contemplating this embrace, we could even venture to say, God the Father embraces us in the same way, like Paul says, we can declare: Abba Father! Because we have received the spirit of adoption.

The core I’ve come to grasp regarding God’s own self-disclosed identity as Trinity is that in Himself, God is pure relationship. He is not a static being, easily encapsulated and analyzed. He is a dynamic of love ever flowing. The triune God is the God who gives us Himself in His own Being as Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier of our lives. The Triune God is the God that acts for us, on our behalf. And perhaps it might be difficult for us to understand the fullness of the Trinity, but we can rest assured that even in our lack of understanding of this doctrine, God approaches us, He comes close to us and we experience Him acting for our sake as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He is a relating God that even in the mystery of his trinity, He is a Father to us, He looks for us and is in solidarity with us as the Son, and he puts the breath of life upon our lungs as the Spirit, renewing us into a life according to His goodness. When approaching these mysteries of the faith we might feel like Nicodemus, not being able to understand God in Jesus Christ. But through faith, it is possible to inhabit a much grander world, God’s world. We know this God is ever with us, we recognize in His Word the salvation of our lives. It is a matter of trust, a matter of faith, to walk alongside this God not on our own terms, but on His. Do we trust Him, as He reveals Himself to be? As CS Lewis would point out, not as someone we can box in and dominate, but rather in His wild creative fullness? We were made to inhabit the love that the Trinity exudes. Perhaps we can’t grasp it now, but if we persist in the love that exists in our relationship to Him, we will understand the greater life we are being called to. Truly, we must join in the dance of Trinity.

Let us pray: O God the Father, O God the Son, O God the Holy Spirit, fill us with your expansive joy and love. Bring to our lives the dynamic power of your triune-self. Let us praise you where You show up to be. Take us to a life of the Spirit, a life of true freedom and renewal, where we might be able to exist in the love we were meant to live in, the love that exists in You. In your name we pray, Amen.