Trinity Sunday Sermon - The Rev. Dr. Paul Kolbet, June 4th, 2023

It is Trinity Sunday! A day at the heart of the Christian Faith, the only day of the Christian year devoted to a doctrine rather than an event or a person because it is our most celebrated doctrine. A doctrine that represents a hard-won understanding that every generation of Christians needs to learn for themselves because it is not the sort of insight that is easily captured in sentences passed on through the generations. Faced with the Trinity, you may quite rightly feel the same way as the ancient prophet Isaiah did in today’s reading saying, “Woe is me! I am lost” (Is. 6). It calls for continual thinking and rethinking as each generation strives to add understanding to faith.

Contrary to what some may think, we don’t have this doctrine because theologians speculated about the inner life of God and wondered how one could be three or three one. The Trinity is not the theological equivalent of the Pythagorean theorem. The best way to understand the doctrine of the Trinity is to remember that we have this doctrine because it was the best way for common, everyday, ordinary, Christians to name their experience of God. This means that the best way to understand is to try to have that same experience yourself. In this way, you may continue to struggle with the words like Christians always have, but you’ll know their truth.

Why the early Christians needed this complicated doctrine was that their experience was not of the abstract God of the Monotheisms that were common among the ancient pagans. The first Christians had an experience that was real, difficult to get their minds around, and even harder to find words for. In their own words, their experience was one where “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (Jn. 3:16-17). When Jesus was explaining what God was like to his disciples, he got up from the table, knelt before them, and washed their feet. What an astonishingly daring claim to make about God! When two of his disciples told Jesus that they would like to reign with him in an everlasting kingdom, he pointed out to them that “the rulers of the nations lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.” He told them that if they understood anything about God, they would know that anyone desiring “to be great [like God] must be a servant, and whoever wishes to be first must be a slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life for many” (Mt. 20:25-28).

The trouble is that, if we think about this rationally as we should, any God who is truly God–that is, the outside of time, transcendent, One, who, does not exist as an object in the universe because it is the Source of the universe–cannot be known by finite, time-bound creatures like us who know nothing we cannot perceive with our five senses. In the words of our closing hymn, how can you know the “Immortal, Invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes”? If you read contemporary philosophers, there is a widespread consensus among them that human brains only know themselves and the mental construction those same brains generate. This leads to vying theories of how what we think relates to the physical objects we interact with, but, in any case, what is ruled out is knowledge of the eternal, immortal, God, we have nothing in common with. If the words of the playground taunt, “It takes one to know one” are as true as the philosophers say they are, then to know God one would have to be God. Or in the words of today’s hymn writer, “We blossom and flourish like leaves on the tree, and wither and perish but not changeth thee.”

It’s a scientific and philosophical problem ancient Christians were well-aware of and the doctrine of the Trinity is a daring, hard won, way of explaining how their experience of God in Jesus, and ours, could be true. The great Christian insight was that God’s infinite compassion, that is, God’s intimate involvement in the world, including Christ’s death on a cross, made God no less God and made us no less free. God does not compete with us for space in the world. To use their words, that the all-too-human experience of God the Son, made God no less transcendent Father, or omnipresent, life-giving Holy Spirit. As difficult as it is to think this thought, Christians came to worship a God whose very presence to us in Jesus makes this God no less sovereign over everything else.

How it works is explained in Scripture. The first chapter of the Gospel of John says, “No one has ever seen God” (the old familiar theme), but then it continues, “It is God the only Son … who has made him known” (1:18). In other words, while our brains cannot fathom or perceive the invisible God, we can perceive through our five senses the visible image of the invisible God in Jesus. This is a knowable known. But Christian experience does not stop there with the man Jesus. It’s more ambitious than that. There is third movement where the Divine Spirit of Jesus, otherwise known as the Holy Spirit, works in our hearts and minds to make us the kind of creatures who through, sanctifying love, become more godlike so that what is godlike in us can perceive and adore God.

We just read the conclusion of the Gospel of Matthew that ends with Jesus’ injunction: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”  In the Episcopal Church, there has been an effort to introduce what we call “expansive language” when it comes to speaking about God. New formulas for the Trinity have emerged recently such as Eternal Majesty, Incarnate Word, and Abiding Spirit, or Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer, and they have succeeded in being more gender inclusive, but they only achieve that by removing the language of the necessary relations within the Trinity. This is a problem because the only thing true about the terms we use for God are their relational quality. We, therefore, have some sort of problem whatever language we use. When you hear the traditional Trinitarian names, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, it is important in your mind to strip the terms of any notion of human gender since God is certainly without gender. And when you hear our newer gender inclusive formulas, please add in your mind the necessary relations within the Trinity because without them the words have no power or truth at all. With the necessary spiritual and mental discipline, the goal is to discover yourself being caught up into powerful, life-giving relations by the very saying of the names. We don’t name them to impose a gendered hierarchy or any other kind of humanly constructed hierarchy upon you are anyone else. How God is known from a classical Christian Trinitarian perspective is to know the One God as Father (where “Fatherhood” names the necessary relation to “the Son”), and to know Jesus is to know the Father’s Son, and to know “the Spirit” as the Spirit of the Son of the Father. Each Name of the Trinity necessarily invokes the other two since to have Father is to have the Son and the living Son is animated by the Spirit. To have any experience of God is to be caught up into this dynamic relational motion from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. As Jesus explains in the Gospel of John, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own” (John 16). Of course, the Spirit leads, because it is the Spirit who leads us through the Son to the Father.

The thinking we do on Trinity Sunday is about how creating space in the mind to worship God creates space in the heart for so much else. There is a kind of despair in contemporary thinking about almost anything where what we value only has value because we value it, not because we discover ourselves valued apart from whatever our striving or thinking may be. The more our world is a world without the sacred, where our aims and ambitions exclude worship of anything above ourselves, there are fewer and fewer mechanisms for stretching minds and expanding hearts. It may well be that to rise above the pervasive cynicism and distrust that continues to erode our faith in humanity requires a faith in something more than human beings. The Trinity is this ancient way out of our contemporary despair where our minds can not only know but experience themselves as known, and not only establish our values, but experience themselves as valued. It is the invocation of a Beauty that does not depend upon our near-sighted decisions about what is beautiful; it is the invocation of a Justice that does not depend upon our feeble deliberations about what is just; it is a Love far surpassing our fickle, unsteady affections. Insofar as our own judgments and decisions in the modern world have become unmoored from anything outside the human mind and its constructions, adrift on a sea of our own making, the Christian invocation of the Trinity is a summons to have an experience that is anchoring because it connects you, importantly, to what is beyond you.

To name God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and to baptize in that exact name as Christians have for the nearly 2,000 years is an invocation of a Truth pulsing through our physical world and every moment of human consciousness. To put it concisely in the simplest words possible, God became our neighbor without ceasing to be God so that we could love God by loving all our neighbors (repeat). Thus, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is a profound religious, even mystical teaching, but it is also a powerful means to situate oneself in the world in a new way, one that elevates our too-often flat vision, renews our reasoning, kindles our affections, and exceeds what would otherwise seem impossible.

May the Spirit of God sanctify our hearts and minds and make us more like the God we seek to understand, elevate our vision, and may each of us find true life in Christ Jesus to the glory of God the Father. Amen.