Readings

Children’s Sermon

Can you play ping pong or tag by yourself? Tell yourself a joke?
Many of the things that give us the greatest joy, that express our humanity, we need to do together. Loving is another of those things.

What we’re celebrating today, Trinity Sunday, is that that joy and love have been at the heart of reality even before God created anything. God is One. God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, an eternal community of joy and love.

And this God calls out to us: come join the party. That’s the invitation we share with our neighbors.

Adults’ Sermon

What I shared with the children is the core of what I’m sharing with you. Love, like telling a joke or playing tag, demands others. What we celebrate on Trinity Sunday is that the statement “God is Love” did not need to wait for creation to be true. And God, rather than putting up a wall around that community, has been calling out to us from the start: Come on in!

Today’s readings offer different ways of exploring this reality.

Our psalm: “you adorn him with glory and honor.” We heard the psalmist spell that out within the psalm’s horizon. Within the horizon of Scripture as a whole the core of that glory and honor is that divine invitation. We heard it a couple weeks ago in Revelation: “The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come.’ And let everyone who hears say, ‘Come.’ And let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.” And we heard it in Jesus’ prayer: “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” What is any glory or honor our nations can gin up in comparison to being the recipients of this invitation? (So the Doctrine of the Trinity ends up telling us who we are.)

In the Gospel we heard “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth,” or, as Raymond Brown translates it in his magisterial commentary “he will guide you along the way of all truth.” But here—sorry—we need a brief parenthesis about that word “truth.” We’re used to contrasting it with what’s factually false. But recall its first use in the Gospel to describe Jesus: “full of grace and truth.” We might better translate “abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,” because John’s citing God’s self-definition at Sinai (Exod. 34:6). That’s who God is; that’s who Jesus is. And the truth in question is as much about being true in relationships (faithful) as being true to the facts.

The Spirit’s work, guiding “along the way of all truth,” is crucial in both senses. Jesus is alive, not dead. The Gentile believers don’t need to be circumcised. But how do the Jewish believers who keep kosher and the Gentile believers who don’t, live faithfully together? That’s equally important, so that the New Testament letters spend a great deal of energy on what truthful/faithful life together means—in the midst of our differences. Turns out there’s nothing automatic about “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (Jn. 13:35).

In today’s epistle we heard “and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” Why doesn’t this hope disappoint us? If we asked Paul to unpack this, I suspect that I would have reminded us that all of this is directed to us in community rather than us as isolated individuals. We’ve received the Holy Spirit, who guides us into more faithful relations with each other. We can put our weight on that hope of sharing the glory of God because we’re getting a foretaste of that glory in what the Holy Spirit’s doing in our relationships in the parish.

We pray for this at every Eucharist. Recall the words from Prayer A: “Sanctify [the bread and wine] to be for your people the Body and Blood of your Son… Sanctify us also that we may faithfully receive this holy Sacrament, and serve you in unity, constancy, and peace.” Make these elements holy; make us holy. We need this holiness to live together in love.

What of wisdom’s words in our reading from Proverbs? They’re probably included because of their historical role in early conversations leading to Doctrine of Trinity. This morning, let’s hear them in context of other readings.

^30b and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
³¹ rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.

What’s surprising about these lines is their contrast with wisdom’s words elsewhere in these first nine chapters. Wisdom has been offering to guide us “along the way of all truth.” But we humans are often a hard—if not hostile—crowd. Nevertheless, wisdom chooses to focus on what brings her delight, so “delighting in the human race.”

(Another quick parenthesis: as the portrait of the accuser—which comes into English as “Satan”—develops in the Old Testament, its core is arguably viewing humanity in the worst possible light: Job’s only serving God from self-interest. Or in the prophet Zechariah the accuser pointing out all the things that are wrong with the high priest. Delighting in or criticizing other folk: regularly choosing the latter—even when it’s more or less justifiable—is satanic.)

Proverbs’ portrait of wisdom participated in the Early Church’s conversations regarding the Trinity because what wisdom does sounds like what the Son or the Spirit do. In the light of our other readings, we can also observe that the Spirit’s guiding us along the way of all truth, strengthening our capacity to hope, also aligns us with wisdom’s stance so that we might echo wisdom’s words. So Trinity Baraboo might aim at:

We are daily God’s delight,
rejoicing before God always,
rejoicing in God’s inhabited world,
delighting in the human race.

Not a bad way to extend our celebration of Trinity Sunday into the rest of the year!