Trinity

Charlotte Collins Reed

Christ Church Episcopal

June 16, 2019

Trinity Sunday

          As many of you know, I returned home this week from 10 days in London studying the ways growing congregations are connecting with their communities and making a gospel difference in their neighborhoods.  The 10 of us in the class, plus our instructor, visited large churches and small churches.  We saw churches with amazing historic buildings and no building at all.   We met leadership teams that were made up of clergy and lay people, and some that were entirely made up of lay people.  And we experienced worship that ran the gamut from a service held as part of a dinner meal to an Anglo-Catholic mid-week service using the 1662 English Book of Common Prayer.  I have only half-jokingly referred to the 10 days as boot camp for church geeks.

          One characteristic all of these congregations had in common despite their diversity was an intentional focus on relationships.  Everyone we met radiated such joy in their relationship with God and in their ministry that we could not help but feel some of that joy ourselves.  The ministry teams we met had deep relationships with each other.  They prayed together regularly and worked to build community among themselves so that they worked together as one team with one mission rather than as a collection of individuals doing their own work.  And every congregation we experienced was deeply connected with the community they served, listening to the needs, the hopes and dreams of the people around them and finding ways to connect and build ministry around what they heard.  While I have many learnings from my trip, perhaps the most significant reminder for me was the call to always be working to deepen our relationships with God, each other, and the community we serve.

          Today, the church celebrates Trinity Sunday.  What, you might reasonably ask, do with my experiences in London have to do with Trinity Sunday?  Trinity Sunday always falls on the Sunday after Pentecost and is sometimes thought to be the one Sunday of the year when we celebrate a doctrine of the church rather than an event.   Usually we celebrate the birth of Jesus, or his baptism, or the events of Holy Week, or the resurrection.  Or we hear stories about the things Jesus did or stories he told.  But today we celebrate the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The Nicene Creed, which we say each week, is built around the Trinity.  We say “We believe in God, the Father almighty.”  “We believe in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord.”  And “We believe in the Holy Spirit.”  In the first chapter of Genesis, which, in my ideal world would be one of our readings for today, we are told that we are created in the image of God. “In the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.”  One of the interesting questions about the Trinity is “What does it mean that we are created in the image of the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?”  What does it mean to be made in the image of the Trinity?

If our readings from Scripture this morning would explain the Trinity, that would be helpful.  But they do not, and that is because there are only a few places in Scripture that even mention all three parts of the Trinity in one breath, much less give us an explanation.  At the end of Matthew’s gospel, in the great commission, Jesus sends the disciples out to baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  There are a few places in John’s gospel, such as today’s gospel, where Jesus refers to the Father, himself, and the Advocate, or the Spirit, in the same passage, but there is no explanation.  The apostle Paul will often mention two of the three persons of the Trinity in the opening of his letters when he says something like “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”  So, with all due respect to both Jesus and Paul, they are not very helpful in trying to understand the Trinity.

Taken together, however, today’s readings do shed some light on what the Church means when we say that the one God we worship is Father and Son and Holy Spirit, or Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.  In the reading from Proverbs, the Spirit is personified as Wisdom, the female voice of God that cries out to the people.  Wisdom reminds us that she was present when God created the mountains, the earth and the fields, the heavens and the foundation of the deep.  The passage ends with the reveling of Wisdom, or the Spirit, in the deep joy of being in relationship with the Creator and creation: “And I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race."

Paul tells us in the reading from Romans that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, and that God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, giving us all three members of the Trinity.  God has worked in human life not just as the Creator, but also as the one who has brought us peace through Jesus Christ and sustains us with the Holy Spirit.  And in the Gospel, Jesus tells us of the way that God will speak to us through the Spirit of Truth, and that what belongs to Jesus belongs to the Father.

What we learn about the Trinity from these readings is that God has always been in relationship, even before there were human beings.  We have one God who is intentionally and intensely relational in nature. Today’s readings are just a sample of the many places in scripture that tell us that from the beginning, when the earth was a formless void and waters covered the deep, God has worked in human history as the creator, the redeemer, and the sustainer.

Trinity Sunday calls us, as the image of God, to mirror that intentional relationship for the world.  The Trinity calls us to be in relationship with God, each other and the world around us the way that the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, or Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are in relationship with each other.  Just as the Trinity is one God who is and has always been in relationship, we are called to live as the image of the Trinity by being one body, always in relationship.  God’s love has been poured into our collective hearts, as Paul writes, so that we can pour out that love to God, to each other and to the world. 

                                                                   Amen.