The Trinity: Faith in Action
Trinity Sunday Sermon
June 15, 2025
Let words of my mouth
and the meditations of all our hearts,
Be now and always acceptable in your sight,
O God our strength and our redeemer. Amen
Introduction
This has been a season of mysteries, hasn’t it. First we have the resurrection of Christ, with all the hopeful uncertainties that entailed. Then Ascension Day, as the disciples witness in hope Christ’s rising to the heavens but are not entirely sure what to do next. Then Pentecost with the speaking in tongues and the hopeful confusion in response to the fire of the Holy Spirit. And today, the Trinity. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Three in one and one in three. What’s up with that? Another mystery.
I) The Trinitarian Mystery
Theologians, clergy, and people of faith have struggled mightily with the mystery of how God can simultaneously be divine, earthly and metaphysical all at once. And indeed, until the Council of Nicaea and the Arian controversy of the 4th century, there was significant debate as to whether Jesus and God were in fact the same. The Nicene Creed resolved this issue in favor of the Trinitarian view of Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit as One, although some claim that the decision was achieved as much through the political machinations of the Roman emperor Constantine as through divinely inspired wisdom. But there we have it, the mystery of the Trinity – three in one and one in three.
II) Unpacking the Trinity
Perhaps one way to think about the Trinity is to consider the chord structure of the triad. So maybe we can all sing “Holy” to different notes of a C Major Chord [Michael plays three notes – C, E, G.]. Perhaps I could ask the front right – yes, you folks down here, to sing the C. Then the front left – yes you folks over there, could sing the E. And then everyone in the back, sing the G. The Choir can help. All together now, Holy, Holy, Holy That’s the triad – three in one and one in three. A Trinity for our ears.
In seeking out the Trinity for our souls, let us consider the different roles of its members – as Paul put it in 2d Corinthians, “the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Love of God, and the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit.” At Pentecost last week we celebrated the fellowship of the Holy Spirit in our lives. As we learn from the Hebrew Book of Proverbs, the Spirit of God has been at work in the world from earliest days through Woman Wisdom and her ways of righteousness and compassion. Einstein spoke of a beautiful order in the universe revealing the Spirit of God. As we hear in today’s Gospel reading, the Spirit will guide us into God’s truth. So we embrace the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, abiding in us and guiding our journeys of faith.
Our faith in the Trinity also invites us to embrace the grace of Jesus Christ as the Anointed One. In our age of intellectual rationalism many are drawn to a more populist view of Jesus. Jesus is often portrayed simply as the radical revolutionary – which indeed he was, and serves as an exemplar of how to live our lives. Others think of Jesus as our companion and friend, who walks with us in our lives – and indeed he does, and offers strength and comfort in the face of the challenges of the world. But are we to confine our understanding of Jesus as simply a prophet, a companion, a remarkable historical figure? That might be fine for dinner conversations and philosophers’ cafes, and might even sustain us in good times. But let us not overlook Jesus’ divine unity with God, the gracious one-ness of God in Christ. For the grace of Jesus Christ will sustain us in good times and bad.
III) God Can Relate
The Trinity also invites us to embrace the love of God, who has acted through the Holy Spirit in the world since the beginning of time, and who lived in the world through Jesus the Christ. God doesn’t love the world in the abstract. God loves us as one who has been and is here, in the world. Jesus’ experiences of hunger and thirst, loneliness and betrayal, doubt and suffering, these were God’s experiences. Our God is one who understands, who feels our hopes and fears, our wins and losses, our hurts and healings, who understands all these and more. Who walked the earth, ate and drank with outcasts and sinners, felt joy and sorrow, comfort and want.
When Nobel Laureate Ellie Weisel was a teenager imprisoned in Auschwitz during the holocaust, he witnessed a young boy being hung for some imagined crime. When asked where is God, Weisel pointed to the suffering lad and said there, on the gallows. There is God, suffering with us. But as Paul assures us in today’s reading, with faith in God’s love we know that “suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope, and hope will not disappoint us.” Hope in God’s love will not disappoint– in the world and our lives.
IV) Now What?
Unpacking the Trinitarian mystery involves what St. Anselm of Canterbury termed “faith seeking understanding,” the call to seek understanding of God, the world, and ourselves through faith. And that search involves unavoidable doubts and uncertainties. Even Jesus on the cross doubted – “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In the Gospel stories on doubting Thomas and the Road to Emmaus, we learn that after all that happened with Jesus’ passion and resurrection, some disciples still had doubts. Earlier, the Psalmist doubted – as today’s Psalm 8 put it, ‘who are we that the God who created the heavens should be mindful of us?’ And today, as we recoil at news from Gaza, Ukraine, or our own downtown east side, we can be forgiven for doubting a God that allows such horrors.
But take heart. Doubt is not the opposite of faith. The opposite of faith is certainty. And so our faith need not be troubled by doubts or propped up by false certainty. Ours can be a faith seeking understanding, a Trinitarian faith seeking understanding about God, the world and ourselves, Perhaps doubting a God who seems to permit suffering in the world reveals an all too limited vision of God as a referee, a manager of our affairs, when the real question is how can we allow such horrors in a world we are charged by God and empowered by the Holy Spirit to steward.
And so our faith starts to become simple again. The mystery of the Trinity points to a simple faith that God lived in the world through Jesus the Christ and acts in the world through the Holy Spirit. A faith affirming that the Holy One (not just a holy being, but a holy One-ness) the Holy One who knows us, the Holy One to whom all our hearts are open and all our desires known, the Holy One who knows all we can ask or imagine, this is the Trinitarian God whose fellowship, grace and love transcends all. And this, my friends is the source of our comfort, and also our call to ministry. Because if God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son and sent the Holy Spirit to be our guide, then we’d better get busy loving each other and our neighbors in the world.
But we are torn sometimes, aren’t we, as to how to do this. Torn between focusing on our churches and our worship that celebrate and empower our faith, and pursuing works of ministry in the world. The great theologian Henri Nouwen put it one way:
“ [Jesus] proclaims that the way to the Kingdom is not found in saying many prayers or offering many sacrifices, but in feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting the sick and the prisoners”
There is certainly wisdom there that may appeal to many. But, for us here, in this place, at this time, and for the Church at large, perhaps instead of choosing between ministry in the church and ministry in the world, we can instead adopt the inclusive interdependence of the Trinity and do both. For just as the Trinity includes all its members each complementing and empowering the other, so too can ours be a “both-and” Church, as we are comforted and empowered by our service in the Church to live out God’s call to serve our neighbours in the world. Let us be inspired by the Gospel of John read last week to believe and to do the works that Jesus did and, in fact, to do even greater works through belief empowered by our ministries in the Church and action through our ministries to the world. And in this journey let us be embrace the Trinity, through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Amen