So, as a preacher, Trinity Sunday is intimidating. Faced with the indescribable, incomprehensible mystery of what we call in theology-speak the one triune God, it is my job to say something coherent about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit without straying into the realm of heresy. Too far, at least.
To begin this task, let’s hear the first lines of today’s collect again:
“Almighty and everlasting God, you have given to us your servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity.” And there I think I may have found a loophole! The Collect of the Day calls us to acknowledge the glory of the Trinity, not to explain it, and—better yet—not to understand it. And thank God for that.
As Evelyn Underhill says of the Trinity, “If God were small enough to be understood, God wouldn’t be big enough to be worshipped.” We don’t have to understand God in order to acknowledge God, but it's more than that. We don't have to understand God in order to live out the Trinity in our lives.
Our family recently has gotten a new puppy, Mother Maybelle Carter Cato, another brilliant black mouth cur that is proving to be smart as a tack, just like Cotton the dog. In the month she's been with us, she's learned “sit,” “come,” “down,” “off,” and she is closing in on mastering the elusive “ring your bell” to signal she needs to go outside. Now she doesn't understand English. She can't spell or grasp grammar rules. And she never will. But she understands that a certain sound comes attached to a treat. Another one wins her a cuddle. Responses get smiles and scritches. Actions bring about love and praise.
And maybe that's all we can grasp with the Trinity. Not so much understanding God in all God's persons, but understanding us in relationship to those persons.
When we encounter the creator father God, the God of Genesis, we are all like Maybelle when we try to fathom the unfathomable creation of everything out of nothing by a being that was never created and always existed. But we can understand when God says, “You are in my image and you will have dominion.” And we know that dominion in the image of God, in relationship with God the father, means loving stewardship of God's creating work. Not reckless destruction. Not selfish hoarding. Not cutting and damming and diverting resources. Not taking from others so they have nothing and carving moats around ourselves and what we consider to be ours so we can keep the need out and the needy back. Not cruelty to God's creatures, especially to those created in God's image, who God considers higher than the angels and, so often, we consider not even human.
And in the Gospel according to Matthew, Jesus comes to his disciples and tells them to go, tell the story, and bring them into the fold. Tell them the story of loving God and loving your neighbor. And in doing that, we begin to understand God the Son. Because this story is a story that all who are baptized belong to Jesus forever, belong to the Son...forever. And they are deserving of the same love and respect we claim to show the Son. And that we acknowledge how often we fall short of showing that respect when we hunt our neighbors down, when we falsely accuse our neighbors, when we take from our neighbors unjustly, when we not only refuse to help our neighbors, but set out to make their lives even harder. When we ignore the lessons of the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, the Woman at the well. When we refuse to acknowledge that the stranger and the alien are our neighbor and are made in the image of God. When we take what the Son teaches and twist it to the extent that even the Son, himself, would be abused, despised, and neglected in our land. And it's the story of how we rejoice that even when we fall that far, so far as to reject and despise the Son, we are loved and redeemed, saved and nurtured, but a God that marks us as Christ's own forever. A story worth telling, indeed.
And finally we try to grasp that ever elusive Holy Sprit that Jesus promised and Paul tries to describe, that most incomprehensible aspect of all of God's aspects. Swift moving. Wild. Entering our lives and changing them, whether we want it or not! The glue that brings us together, with all our differences, here into this place, in peace and communion. If not forever, at least for a while. The Spirit of God that allows us, like Maybelle, to feel and understand, if not fully, the nudging of God, the direction of God, the rewards of love and peace that come with communion with God. A spirit that says, you don't need to understand God to love God. You don't need to agree completely with your neighbor to love your neighbor. A spirit that says, God loves you...period. Now go do the same.
Last week, Christians came together to celebrate Pentecost Sunday, the birth of the church and it's mission to the world. And today we try to make sense of what...or rather, who... that church points us to. Like I said, it's hard to do. But maybe we don't have to understand, but just believe or try to believe. And maybe, again, like Maybelle, we don't need to understand, but just “know.”
It's all in our Baptismal Covenant, right?
We began by saying “I believe in God, the Father almighty…in Jesus Christ, his only Son…and in the Holy Spirit.” We say these words together, each of us understanding some, none of us fully grasping all. And in that first bit, right at baptism, and every time we recall our baptisms later on, we begin with the Trinity. We don’t fully grasp it, but we start there.
And then we make a turn. We say, “Look, even if we don't get it completely, we know that the Trinity, the Creator God, this Jesus we follow, this wild spirit blowing through our lives, they drive us to a better place that truly is in God's image, that truly is higher than the angels. And in that covenant with this Triune God, we take our vows.
Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of the bread, and in the prayers?
Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?
Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?
Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?
Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?
And the answer to all of these? I will, with God’s help. Honest. Unexplained. Undefined. I am not fully sure of all that God is, but I know that I am nothing without God.
Y'all we don’t have to understand the Trinity to do God’s work, but we can't do that work without our faith in the Trinity: our reliance on the Father, our love of the Son, our strength in the Spirit.
We cannot understand God, cannot grasp the magnitude, nor the complexity, nor the extent. And really, it’s best if we don’t try to put limits on what God must be. Rather, when we celebrate Trinity Sunday, the true celebration is that in admitting our own limits, we admit God into our lives, and we look to the world as God wants us to see the world, through God's eyes, with God's love, a gift peopled with God's gifts, and our to protect and cherish.
Now please take your Prayer Books from the pews in front of you, and turn to page 304.