Happy Trinity Sunday! This weekend is my second time leading Sunday worship at Christ the King Lutheran Church in Port Washington, one of the two congregations where I’ve recently begun serving as pastor.
For Trinity Sunday, the readings are Romans 5:1-5, Psalm 8, and John 16:12-15. I found this 2014 sermon by Pastor Dawn Hutchings helpful in preparing this sermon. Also, I quickly mention a bunch of Trinitarian heresies later in the sermon – this page has decent, brief explanations of what they are.
You can watch the entire worship service online here, or listen to the audio recording of the sermon:
Grace to you and peace from the One who was, who is, and who is to come, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
Last weekend, we joined with Christians around the world in celebrating Pentecost. I started my Pentecost sermon last Sunday by talking about how much I like Pentecost, with the fun readings about different languages, wearing red, and celebrating the birthday of the church; Pentecost is a great holiday.
This week is not Pentecost. Today, we celebrate Trinity Sunday. I won’t ask anyone if you knew before you got here that today was Trinity Sunday, but I will say, raise your hand if Trinity Sunday is your favorite day in the church year. Anyone? No?
This is a strange feast day! Most church days are based around a story: Easter has the discovery of the empty tomb, Christmas has a baby in a manger, Epiphany has magi following a star, Pentecost has tongues of fire and different languages. There is no story in the Bible about the Trinity.
There are hints, like in the reading from Romans, where Paul does in fact mention God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, but he’s more interested in encouraging believers than trying to explain correct trinitarian doctrine.
In the Gospel reading, Jesus is talking and he mentions both his Father and the Holy Spirit, so all three persons of the Trinity are in the story…kind of. Honestly, it’s a bit of a stretch, but there aren’t a lot of options if you’re trying to pick readings for Trinity Sunday.
There are references to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit throughout Scripture, but never details about how it all fits together. Really, the only place in the Bible that mentions all three persons together explicitly is the great commission in Matthew 28, where Jesus says we are to go and baptize “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”
But even there, the right and proper theological understanding of the Trinity is not the point. And this whole idea of God as trinity is hard to understand.
How many gods do we believe in? One God. (Thank you for getting that right!) But—as we just confessed—we believe in the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, three persons. God who creates, God who redeems, and God who sustains. One plus one plus one equals one.
There are all kinds of ways people try to explain how that can be true, things like well, one clover has three leaves, or steam, ice, and liquid water are all water. But there are no examples sufficient for fully explaining who God is as Trinity, as three-in-one.
A leaf by itself is not a clover, but Jesus is fully God. I kind of like the water analogy, but God is not some kind of shape-shifter existing in different modes. We have symbols, like three interlocking rings, and theological diagrams, but none of them are really adequate.
Martin Luther supposedly said, “To deny the Trinity is to risk our salvation; to try and explain the Trinity is to risk our sanity.” In another sermon, Luther said the Trinity as an article of faith, “is so far above the power of the human mind to grasp, or the tongue to express, that God … will pardon us when we stammer and lisp as best we can, if only our faith be pure and right.” (source)
Personally, this is the first time in almost six years as an ordained pastor that I’ve failed to be either at synod assembly or on vacation for Trinity Sunday. The nature of the Trinity is one of those things people have debated and fought over for centuries, and frankly, I think Christians have spent far too much time trying to explain when it’s ultimately a mystery.
We confess faith in God as Trinity because over two thousand years of study, it’s the best explanation Christians have come up with for trying to understand God. Every other explanation turns out to be un-Biblical, inadequate for grasping how God is working. Our brains aren’t equipped for understanding the divine!
All we’re left with is, as a commentary I read this week says, is a “a feeble attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible mystery of the very nature of our God.”
But here’s the good news: We don’t have to comprehend the “incomprehensible mystery!” Jesus didn’t say, “Go and preach the correct doctrine.” He didn’t say, “Study hard so you can pass the heresy test at the pearly gates.” He said, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth…He will take what is mine and declare it to you.”
This Gospel reading from John comes yet again from one of Jesus’ last conversations with his disciples before he’s arrested and killed, and in these conversations, Jesus the teacher is trying to cram with his students before he runs out of time with them.
But he’s not trying to get them to understand precise theological doctrines (plenty of time for that in the next few centuries). He’s trying to reassure them God will not leave them alone in the trials they’re going to face. He’s trying to give them comfort.
Believing in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit is important. It’s important to study who God is, to work to understand Jesus as God’s self-revelation to us.
But the doctrine of trinity is almost never the point. The point is the good news Paul writes to the church in Rome: “We are justified by faith and have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
In the person of Jesus Christ, a first-century itinerant Jewish Rabbi, God chose to be made known to us. God came to us.
To live as Christians, we need to understand that God made us, Jesus, God in the flesh entered the world and died for us, and the Holy Spirit is at work in and through us.
Knowing God has not left us alone in this uncertain world, trusting God is present with us is what gives us the hope to endure sufferings, the hope that does not disappoint us.
The point is that God has come to be in relationship with us, and we can live in relationship with God. The doctrine of trinity—one God eternally co-existing in three persons—gives us a glimpse of God’s own nature, and God’s nature is relationship. God is love. God so loved the world!
And there’s no theological exam to pass to enter into God’s love. There’s no quiz on the difference between modalism and partialism and adoptionism and docetism and Arianism. (Those are all Trinitiarian heresies.)
It’s all by grace. God’s love is for you. God is welcoming us into God’s presence, inviting us into relationship, calling us to join the dance of Trinity, as we’ll sing in a moment, to live into who God created us to be, beloved children of our Creator.
If that sounds a little mystical, a little vague, that’s ok. The mystery of the trinity is the mystery of God with us, first that the King of Kings has chosen to step into our world, chosen to be born a human being, chosen to die for us on a cross, to experience even the worst this world can offer, and second, that God is still with us, moving among us, through us, working on us, reminding us of what Jesus taught us, connecting us to our heavenly Father, our Redeemer, our Lord.
Our call is to embrace the mystery of God, to do our best to live faithfully, to learn and to understand as much as our puny little human brains can grasp, and when we don’t understand, to trust. To believe. To look to Jesus to know God.
And to join in God’s work as we are able, as the Holy Spirit gives us the ability. Our job is to listen to the Holy Spirit, who reveals the truth of God’s love to us and to the world.
May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and your minds in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen