John 16:12-15
The readings for Trinity Sunday can be found here, although you’ll find this to be an occasional sermon, meaning I focus on the occasion of the Feast of the Holy Trinity rather than any one text
There are lots of jokes among preachers that this is “curate Sunday” or “associate Sunday” or “seminarian Sunday,” a sort of liturgical hazing that both gives a weary senior pastor the day off from preaching and puts the new preacher through the theological wringer. The joke is predicated on the idea that preaching on the Trinity is difficult, even impossible to accomplish without straying into heresy, so we might as well give it to the new guy. I get that this makes for good teasing of seminarians, but I also believe every preacher should have the opportunity to preach on this Sunday as often as possible, if for no other reason than to have a moment to remember that our books, our years of training, our degrees, our prayers will never place us above anyone else, nor are they meant to. My seminary degree does not grant me a magical key to unlocking the mysteries of the interior life of God. At the end of the day, all of us are here to listen to what the Spirit has to tell us, and by God’s grace to bring that teaching with us when we leave. By that same Grace, I am able to overcome my perfectionism long enough to state the fact that the Trinity is a mystery, and I do not understand it. I can tell you what the creeds say about it. I can tell you what the authors and theologians and poets and hymn writers say about it. And I can describe to you ancient and modern icons and sacred art that depict the Trinity. But the mechanics elude me, and my attempts at drawing boundaries around the image of God will always fall laughably short. And none of that will tell any of us why we should care. None of it will teach us why the Trinity matters to us in our day to day lives as Christians. And it does matter. It really does.
We spend so much of our time convinced of our ability to understand, to reason, to figure things out. We say we are doing our own research, and sometimes we mean clinical or archival research, but often we mean Googling and reading the research or opinions of others. We believe that if we can just know enough, we will be able to get by. We will be able to do our jobs and fulfill our duties and be good enough. If we understand enough, if we know enough, we will be good Christians, good parents, good partners, good friends and coworkers and citizens. Our attempts at certainty bring us comfort, they allow us the illusion of control.
The doctrine of the Trinity just flat out refuses us that comfort. The relationship of the triune God, the three persons in one deity, the plural monotheism, defies our every attempt at understanding. Our analogies don’t hold up. Our creeds are simple, basic, the bare minimum facts upon which diametrically opposed factions of Christianity could agree in the early days of the church. Even within our creeds, there are differences of opinion over pronouns and prepositions and translations that have divided the East from the West for centuries. There are scholars who spend their entire careers wrestling almost exclusively with the Trinity. They write papers and books and give lectures and without fail someone somewhere accuses them of heresy, and that someone is often technically right. I have preached on Trinity Sunday every year of my preaching career, meaning this is my fifth or sixth time in a row. I have personally never heard or given a sermon on the Trinity that satisfied me and I am not so filled with the hubris of a young preacher to claim that this one will satisfy you.
The humility it takes to admit that we do not understand, that we don’t get it, is a necessary ingredient for the life of faith. It is also a hard sell, a bitter pill to swallow. We end up in intellectualized and divisive debates about the mechanism, with no room or energy for the graces of the mystery itself. I believe the Trinity defies our understanding because a God we can fully understand is a god we have created, not the God who creates us. A god that fits in our boxes and bends easily into our metaphors is an idol of our own design, a deity small enough to tuck into our back pocket, ready to be pulled out when we want to be on the right side of an argument. We might pick a person of the Trinity to be our personal protector- some Christians lean so far toward God the Father they may forget the Son altogether. Others fixate on Jesus to the extent that they dismiss the Holy Spirit’s very existence, or treat the Spirit like Almighty God’s afterthought. We might decide that the personhood of God is irrelevant, and approach scripture as the sole source of God’s wisdom and inspiration, freezing our faith in time and place. Our Triune God is too big for that, and in our heart of hearts we know it, or none of us would be here. Our God is both a god of community and a God in Community. As bearers of this God’s image, we are drawn ever back to one another in a human reflection of the divine dance, complete parts of a complete whole, unique persons unified within our differences, created, redeemed, and sustained by Love.
That is why the Trinity matters, even as we admit we do not understand it. The Trinity matters to our lives as Christians because God’s fullness is known to us in community. The Trinity matters for our lives as members of one body because the flow of love between the three persons of the Trinity models for us the way we were made, the type of community we were created for and are being called into. The three persons, whether you call them Father-Son-Holy Spirit or Creator-Redeemer-Sustainer or Mother-Son-Advocate or something else entirely, is a divine relationship that does not know competitiveness, or envy, or greed, or selfishness. The flow of love is eternal, and eternally reciprocated, not predicated on exchange but constantly mutual, never ebbing and never withholding. The Trinity delights in themself, unguardedly and unjealously and uninhibitedly, glorifying one another in a circle that never ends, in a spiral that has no beginning. Why does that matter? Because we who were made in the image of God were made in this image. Not the image of a white robed man in the sky, but in the image of love itself, community itself, reciprocity itself. We were made to be plural oneness, to be united difference, to delight in one another with the abandon of God and to allow ourselves to be seen and known as the Father knows the Son, as the Son knows the Spirit, as the Spirit knows the Father. When we come together as many members of one body, we are participating in the divine unity of the Trinity, the wellspring of our interconnected life. We do not need to understand how it works. We need only trust that it does.
Mother A Writes 