May 26, 2024 (Trinity Sunday)

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer. Amen.

Today is Trinity Sunday. Today the church encourages us to grapple with the mystery at the very heart of God’s identity: that God is somehow one indivisible entity with one mind and one will while at the same time being three distinct “persons” – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Preachers and congregations both dislike this concept for the same reasons: it’s difficult to explain and it often makes for tedious sermons.

And that’s too bad, because the Trinity is fundamental to our faith. Early Christians didn’t come up with this idea as part of a “see how crazy we can make Christianity” contest. They came up with it because they needed to solve a problem. On the one hand, they had experienced God through Jesus’ miracles and teaching that stirred their hearts and souls. On the other hand, Jewish Christians came out of a tradition that commanded “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You must have no other gods before me.” There was only supposed to be one God. And so these early Christians had to find a way to faithfully make sense of their experiences. They had to find a way to faithfully square the circle.

This Trinitarian God they discerned has three persons, each of whom has a distinct part to play as they work in unity to bring about God’s purposes for the universe. There’s God the Father, who possesses an awesome ability to literally create anything out of nothing, and who continues to create, sustain, and direct the universe.

Then there’s God the Son, incarnated some 2,000 years ago in Bethlehem as a human named Jesus. Through his life, ministry, death, and resurrection, Jesus overcame sin and death – reconciling us to God and opening the way to eternal life. How does this all work? That’s a sermon for another day.

And then there’s that baffling third person of the Trinity; God the Holy Spirit – “the giver of life”. Modern culture has eroded our theological imagination in many ways, so it can be hard for us to square the notion of a “person” with something that we can’t see or touch. But the Spirit is loose in the world – giving many different gifts to many different people. And through the resulting creativity and diversity, the Spirit empowers us to join in God’s life-giving work of reconciliation and restoration.

Throughout Jesus’ ministry, his followers had seen a close relationship between Jesus and the Divine. Jesus gains confidence from listening to the Father, who sends the Spirit to rest on Jesus’ head when John the Baptist baptized him. Jesus gives thanks to the Father before the feeding of the five thousand – when God creates food out of nothing. Jesus declares in John’s Gospel that his healing of the blind man at the pool of Siloam was a display of God’s life-giving power working through him. Watching his ministry, Jesus’ disciples learned that being in relationship is essential to God.

And that’s the answer to the question: Why does the Trinity matter? Why should I care about this weird doctrine? What matters most here isn’t how the unity and distinctiveness work. We can never fully understand the mystery of how these three fit together. And it’s okay to not know everything about God.

What matters most about the Trinity is that it shows us that God is in relationship with God’s self. In other words, if there’s one thing we can say for certain about our mysterious God, it’s that God is a relational being. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist in a mutual relationship of self-giving and receiving. Everything they are is shared completely with each other, for the good of all creation. As theologian Elisabeth Johnson puts it: “the unfathomable mystery of God is a communion of overflowing love enfolding the world with gracious compassion.” Relationship is how the early church squared the circle – it gave them a new way of seeing and understanding God.

And this matters to us because God’s way of being in relationship points to the way of life we’re called to live. If we’re created in the image of God, and God is a Trinity that is, at its heart, a relationship, then we are created to be relational beings. Created to share our selves with humanity, with the world, and with the divine Trinity.

The opposite of this way of being is called individualism. Individualism isn’t about sharing at all. Instead, it seeks to tempt us into believing that the purpose of our relationships is simply to get what we want get out of the other person. It tries to make us all Gods focused entirely on our own interests and wants.

This morning, Trinity Sunday gives us an opportunity to reject that way of being. Because we are made in the image of the three-in-one God, we are made to be in relationship with God and with the world – not to get what we want, but for the good of all creation. The good news is that Jesus made this super-simple for us. Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Love your neighbor as yourself.

And so the question for us today is not whether we’re going to be in relationship with God and our neighbor. We are, because that is who we are made to be. The question is: how do our worship and our spiritual practices enable us to enter fully into those relationships? How do they help us to love as Jesus has called us to love? Amen.