Holy Trinity 2025

Sermon: Holy Trinity 2025

Texts: John 16:12-15, Romans 5:1-5, Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

Grace, Peace, and Mercy from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

On this day that we celebrate the mystery of the Triune God. It is also the day of bad metaphors. I believe there have been various attempts to make the Trinity logical, but 3 equals 1 has never been clean math anyways. What we affirm is that there are layers of understanding God, you can’t simply dismiss Him on the basis of the surface. We require to simmer in God’s own being, to pass through the layers of understanding, and reach the depth. And to do that, we need to get to know Him as He desires to be known and as He shows Himself in the dance of Trinity as some hymns describe it.

As with any relationship, you cannot really know someone by just asking about the weather, even though it can start in that way. We need to constantly meet each other in different situations, to witness the mystery of the human person in the prism of all kinds of life experiences. It is not different with God. We relate to Him as Creator, Redeemer, Renewer of our lives, and these different aspects enrich and deepen the bond of love between us. The gift for us is that God always comes to us first, He goes on ahead to meet us and open the door to enter into the glory of His very self. The journey into getting to know God, as with any other person, is that often we can never rationalize why we meet and why we flourish together. We can never rationalize what is precious about those we build relationships with, as the mystic Angelus Silesius once wrote: “the flower is without a why, it blooms simply because it blooms.” That, Beloved, is the sign of that gift of identity given by God; because we are, we are loved and precious.

Therefore, to harness the Trinity then with reason should not be the hinge of our embrace of this particular Christian belief. The triune nature of God is a relational mystery we are invited to enter into and to let it shape and transform our lives as we meet the God that is forever and ever. Even from the early days of Christianity, when this dogma was being articulated, they recognized it was difficult to grasp by the human mind, yet it was nonetheless the conclusion they were led to via the witness and experience of the Church. Much debate followed nonetheless to best explain God’s triune being, but in the end, I always end up with the thought expressed by the church father Gregory of Nyssa: We are ever moving towards God’s own infinite being, never grasping fully the depth of Him, yet always something more to be enjoyed in relationship. As Jesus said in John’s Gospel: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth”. God’s being is inexhaustible, and therefore we are ever being invited into deeper oneness within this God who expresses Himself in the relationship of three. We are led by the Spirit to know God more and more. We are invited not to some intellectual conundrum, but into an endless fascination with God’s own being. And His being, per our tradition, is best articulated in the relationship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That is God, and without much reason, we simply delight in His being that is without why, He simply is as He is.

There is a famous Puerto Rican expression that says “Dime con quién andas y te dire quién eres” which translates to “tell me who you hang out with, who you relate to, and I’ll tell you who you are”. This phrase encapsulates the reality that we are marked by the relationships we keep, we are molded by the people we keep around us. The fact that we worship and relate to God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, also marks us. People can see something of who we are by the One we worship. Paul says we exist and endure because of God’s love that has been poured over us and to which we have access to in Christ Jesus. Because we exist in relationship with this relational God, we then become identified with Him. Being the people of the triune God, a God that expresses Himself in the Love between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, then we have a particular way of existing marked by this love. In a world marked by fractured relationships, how important it is that we stand in the embracing love of the Trinity. That when people see us, they don’t see the divisions, but rather the unity and bond of many in one by God’s love. The world is currently very uncertain, terrifying even. But the fact we are here, rooting ourselves in the love and fullness of God’s own being, in trusting and building with Him the Kingdom where we all, in our differences, in our complexities become one in love, I believe that makes a difference. In this feast day of the Trinity, we promote that within the DNA of human beings there stands a need for deep relationship, because God Himself is a relationship in Himself, we reflect that image. We are called to peel back the layers of understanding and get to know the love that formed every one of us at the core. When that happens, it becomes more difficult to hate our neighbor, for we begin on the presupposition that God relates to others’ in the same way He does to us. That in the same way God wants to get to know us, He wants to get to know our neighbor. We are all bonded in some way by a God that is relationship.

So beloved, in this relational world we can never remain on the superficial layer, there is always more. In the same way God invites us to the more of His own being, He invites us to the more of the community. In every person, the image of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is present. Our hatreds impoverish us, while our relationships enrich our lives. So let us heed God’s initiative to build the relationships that enliven us, to be in the wavelength of the Trinity, an living embrace of the world. May we get to know others as God seeks to meet us, that we may reflect the pluralistic and communitarian identity of God in a world that often insists in isolated, rigid, and alienated identities. May we like Alyosha Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s novel, embrace the world without a why and to love and forgive it ecstatically from age to age, as we reflect the inner being of God, of a Father that loves the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit, shared with all. Let us pray.