Trinity Sunday: May 26, 2024
The Rev. Nat Johnson
Isaiah 6:1-8
Romans 8:12-17
John 3:1-17
Psalm 29
Every year, the first Sunday after Pentecost is a feast day that commemorates the Holy Trinity. It is the only feast day in our church calendar that commemorates a doctrine rather than an event or a person. In some sense, this celebration is meant to synthesize all that we have celebrated in the first half of the church year: God taking on flesh and dwelling among us in Christmas and Epiphany; Jesus’ death and resurrection in Lent and Easter; the gift of the Spirit poured out on all flesh on the Day of Pentecost. The celebration of Trinity Sunday looks back to the proclamations made through these seasonal journeys and invites us to contemplate what they reveal to us about the nature and purpose of God. In some sense, our proclamation of God as triune is on our lips every Sunday in our prayers and in our affirmation of faith expressed in words of the Creed:
We believe in God the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen;
We believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, who, for us and for our salvation was made truly human by the power of the Holy Spirit;
and We believe in the Holy Spirit, the giver of life, who is worshiped and glorified with the Creator and the Son.
These statements of faith we say each week are expressions of belief in the One God who has been revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They are ancient words that we have received in the passing down of the Church’s faith and tradition. When I am invited to
accompany someone experiencing a crisis of faith, these words and statements are often at the center of their theological struggle. I’m often asked, “How can I say these words each week when I’m unsure if I really believe them? Doesn’t that make me a hypocrite?” And, inevitably, whatever part of the creed someone is struggling to believe leads to a confession that the concept of God as Trinity is too incomprehensible to have any significant meaning in their life.
Perhaps you can relate to this struggle. Perhaps, like Nicodemus, you’re simply left with the question, “How can this be?!” If so, you’re in good company! God is one and three, three in one – it is, by all sense of the word, incomprehensible. So, what are we to do with an incomprehensible doctrine on a day on which we are meant to celebrate its meaning? How do we not miss the forest for the trees and get ourselves out of the weeds of technical logic and theological debate? Embracing the faith we have received does not require us to describe in infallible terms the mysterious dynamic of God’s inner being. Theology is important, the work done over the centuries to aid us in our contemplation of a God who is radically different from
all that God created is not something we can simply brush off and deem unimportant. However, it is important to remember that all of that theologizing, all of the debates about precision of language, is meant to lead us not to absolute certainty in our articulation of who God is and the nature of God’s being but is instead meant to open our hearts and minds to the beauty of God’s self-revelation.
At the heart of our understanding of God as Three-in-One and One-in-Three is not, in fact, a doctrine at all. It is a relationship. Christians have come to understand God as intrinsically relational. We read Scripture as bearing witness to a God who is love, and whose love for us opens a door to the mystery of God that allows us to see ourselves as the ones being known and embraced. Yes, theology is important, but if we allow our theologizing to reduce our contemplation of God to propositional statements, we risk losing sight of a God who is personal and relational and who embraces us. We are finite creatures in relationship with an infinite God and for this reason “mystery” is an appropriate word when we speak of God’s nature and being– not mystery like a novel or puzzle to be solved, but like the unfathomable, the awesome, that which so exceeds our experience that “knowing” is found beyond words, beyond mastery, beyond control.
Being embraced by this mystery means that we are drawn into the very fabric of God’s being, held and beheld by Love itself. We are caught up in the giving and receiving of divine love shared between the persons of the Triune God. The relationship between the Incarnate Word, the One he calls Father, and the Spirit of Truth is a relationship based on mutual indwelling. Within God’s own being is a perfect communion of love and unity. And Jesus, the Incarnate One, reveals to us that God extends this perfect communion of love and unity to all humanity. The beginning of scriptural witness affirms that God created humankind in God’s own image and that image is not found in our capacity to reason but in our capacity to relate.
Being made in the image of the relational God means that existence itself is relational. This is the image in which we are gradually being perfected as we learn to live the resurrected and Spirit-empowered life, as we make real in our lives the communion of all creatures with one another and God. This all flies in the face of so much of the rhetoric and social mores in our present context, where rugged individualism and boot-strap theologies distort true freedom and hinder true peace. We have been conditioned to believe that we are products of our own making, that freedom is based on absolute autonomy, and that self-preservation is the goal of being human. We are bombarded with messages that tell us over and over “personhood” is nothing more than individual self-consciousness. But the doctrine of the Trinity exposes the lie here by insisting that true freedom is a “freedom for the other” rather than “freedom from the other.”
Now more than ever we need this reminder. We need the reminder that the goal of Christian community is not to acquire and protect worldly power and influence. We need the reminder that the liberation God offers us is not a liberation to an aimless and isolated existence but is instead a liberation from all that keeps us bound to self-centeredness and self- preservation. We are image-bearers of God called into divine community not only with God but with each other and with all of creation. Dietrich Bonhoeffer suggests that the liberation, the freedom, we find in God is not a limitless or boundless existence but instead finds its property precisely in being bound – bound to God and bound to one another. The community of liberation must therefore be a place in which “everyone is accepted as an ineffable, unique, and unrepeatable ‘image of God’” to whom we are bound in divine love and with whom we are being perfected in divine love.
This is the mystery of God’s being that the doctrine of the Trinity invites us to contemplate. But we should not see this mystery as something simply to think on, to imagine, to leave as an internal and private image. As we discover the relationality of God and come to see ourselves created in that image, we are called to bear witness to that by living in right relationship with one another, with ourselves, and with all of creation. We are called to engage the world with the gospel of liberation, to embody the divine life into which we are drawn, and to invite others into this relationship of love. Ours is a community that is always extending and expanding in a posture of openness to the other.
Today, on this Trinity Sunday, may we each remember that at the heart of our faith is not a doctrine, not a set of propositions, not even a set of instructions. At the heart of our faith is a relationship – a relationship that exists in perfection within God’s self into which the Spirit brings us as we are united to Christ in his death and resurrection. Our embodiment of this relationship begins with each of us – with the ways we chose to be free for one another, the ways we chose to love one another even as we differ from one another, the ways that we hold one another in prayer and care, and the ways that we accept the prayer and care of others. God is a relational God, a God who chooses not to be God apart from us, who invites us into the depths of God’s being – each as unique image-bearers of God in the community of God’s people. Today, may we open ourselves to the incorporative reach of the Spirit and in faith follow her lead in making real the communion of all creatures in the life of God.