Tag Archives: Trinity

God is Love; The Holy Trinity: The Community of Love (Trinity Sunday, 6/15/2025)

Leave a reply

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!

The Holy Trinity: And I should pay attention because? (Trinity Sunday, 5/26/2024)

Leave a reply

Readings

Today we celebrate Trinity Sunday, one of the principal feasts of the Church. One God; Three Persons. But—with all due reverence—so what? There are many ways we might answer that question; here are a couple.

Confessing the Holy Trinity we say that before creation there is a community of love: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. That’s probably the most profound sense of the statement “God is love:” Father, Son, Holy Spirit in an eternal relationship of love. ‘Relationship’: that’s probably too weak a word. We might call it a banquet or a dance. And out of that love God creates our universe. Not out of lack or necessity (nothing is lacking) but out of desire to share that primordial love.

To share that primordial love: that’s the human destiny. It appears throughout Scripture; here are three examples. The first comes at the culmination of the Exodus at Sinai:

Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up, and they saw the God of Israel. Under his feet there was something like a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness. God did not lay his hand on the chief men of the people of Israel; also they beheld God, and they ate and drank. (Exodus 24:9-11)

The second, from the prophet Isaiah:

On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever.  (Isaiah 25:6-8a)

The third, from the end of the Revelation given to St John:

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. (Revelation 22:17)

The party’s been going on from all eternity; we’re invited to join in.

Now, a parenthesis which for some will be quite unnecessary, for others—like the preacher—quite necessary. One God; billions of people scattered over the centuries. How could that not end up being organized bureaucratically? Here’s where my imagination needs stretching. Jesus, it turns out, is aware of the problem:

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows. (Matthew 10:29-31)

Even the hairs of my head: counted. Perhaps not surprisingly this personal dimension to the divine invitation is captured most vividly in the Old Testament’s portraits of Lady Wisdom: “She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her.… because she goes about seeking those worthy of her, and she graciously appears to them in their paths, and meets them in every thought. (Wisdom 6:13, 16)

Which brings us to today’s second theme. The first: the Holy Trinity’s breath-taking invitation. The second: we’re not left to respond to that invitation on our own, as we’ve heard in the readings from Romans and John. In Romans Paul speaks of the Spirit empowering our prayers. A bit later he talks of those frequent situations in which we don’t have the slightest idea how to pray:

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. (Romans 8:26-27)

In John’s Gospel Jesus uses the image of birth: “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.” And so we baptize (with water) in the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Birth: that suggests a one-off event. In practice it tends to be a recurring event as we—picking up Paul’s language—repeatedly by the Spirit put to death those destructive habits that still form part of our character.

The Trinity’s breath-taking invitation, the Trinity’s daily assistance in responding to that invitation: that’s probably plenty for the sermon. But there’s that last bit in the Romans reading: “it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ– if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.” Suffer with him? After all the talk of feast and banquet in the sermon, how’d that get in? A long answer would require another sermon; here’s the short answer. In Jesus’ parable that we usually call “The Prodigal Son” the Father wants both the younger prodigal son and the older self-righteous son at the banquet. But that’ll only happen if both recognize that the father’s love, forgiving, repaying evil with good, is an expression of strength, not weakness. That’ll only happen if both practice love in forgiving, in repaying evil with good.

The Holy Trinity wants us at the banquet. More precisely, us and our enemies at the banquet. But that’ll only happen if we recognize that the Trinity’s love, forgiving, repaying evil with good, is an expression of strength, not weakness. That’ll only happen if we’ve at least begun to practice that love in forgiving, in repaying evil with good. And that practice in this world means suffering—as every Eucharist reminds us.

The Holy Trinity, a community of love since before time, inviting us into that same community, empowering us through the Spirit to accept that invitation, empowering us through that same Spirit to walk in the way of forgiveness and repaying evil with good. If that’s not a reason to celebrate, I don’t know what is.