Rev. Pamela Dolan
Trinity Sunday Sermon
“Three Things”
May 26, 2024
We Christians sure have a thing for the number three, don’t we? There are three years in the lectionary cycle, three synoptic Gospels, and three days between the death and Resurrection of Jesus. Episcopalians, in particular, are famous for invoking the three-legged stool as a way of explaining how we understand authority. We are not part of what some call a sola scriptura tradition, which is to say that we do not depend only on the Bible for our decision making, nor do we read it in a vacuum. We look at Scripture critically, using historical and cultural context, literary and textual analysis, and other tools to aid our understanding. We are free to use the wisdom and insights of others who have read and interpreted these texts over the centuries, and to use our reason, experience, and even scientific knowledge to make sense of what we read.
And it works the other way, too. Our reason and experience cannot be the only criteria we use to make important decisions, whether as individuals, a community, or a denomination. What the church has taught about an issue and what the Bible, carefully interpreted, has to say about that issue should also come into play. And so it goes, each leg of the stool working cooperatively with the others.
By calling Scripture, tradition, and reason a three-legged stool, we are suggesting that they need to be held in balance. If we abandon any one of them or make one of the legs too long or too short, we risk losing our balance and falling on our ethical and moral backsides, so to speak.
The three-legged stool, while a very handy metaphor, is not actually an official teaching or doctrine of the church, unlike the Holy Trinity, which we commemorate today. Preachers, and sometimes their congregations, tend to dread this day, because it is nearly impossible to say anything about the Trinity that is not (A) unintelligible or (B) deadly boring or (C) heretical or (D) all of the above.
The word “trinity” isn’t in the Bible. It’s an idea that developed over time, based on the experience that people had with God. The Trinity is both the most important thing, the closest to a correct thing, that we can know about the nature of God and also is an incomplete and imperfect explanation, like all other explanations. We are talking about God, after all. It is a truism to say that if we could explain or understand God, then it wouldn’t be God we were talking about.
To quote Teresa of Avila, a revered Doctor of the Church, “All concepts of God are like a jar we break.”
When we look at today’s Gospel, it should not be much of a shock that Nicodemus becomes increasingly confused during his conversation with Jesus. Nicodemus was a very important person in his time and place, a member of the Sanhedrin, the council of the seventy most outstanding Jewish leaders. He likely had some pretty firm concepts of God and how the world in general worked, and Jesus is breaking those jars left and right. And to be clear, Jesus does that regularly to Christians who are willing to listen and be in relationship with him, so it’s not because Nicodemus was Jewish that he didn’t understand what Jesus was going on about. It was because Jesus was talking about God and the Spirit and other things that it is really, really hard to wrap our brains around.
It may well that Nicodemus never entirely understood what Jesus was talking about, and yet the important thing we learn from later passages in the Gospel is that his encounter with Jesus had a profound impact on him. He spoke up for Jesus when others wanted him arrested and brought lavish provisions of myrrh and aloe to help bury him. His life seems to have taken a new direction after encountering Jesus.
And so it should be for all of us when we encounter God, whether that happens through reading Scripture, or participating in the life of the Church, or seeking the face of Christ in everyone we meet. Faith changes us. Jesus changes us. Being in relationship with a loving and liberating God changes us. It changes how we see the world, how we behave, how we treat other people and all creation.
The sacrament that most embodies this fundamental change in our orientation toward life is the sacrament of baptism. It also seems to be what Jesus was talking about when he said that we all need to be born of water and the spirit; baptism certainly is a form of rebirth. The Catechism of the Episcopal Church (which doe exist! And can be found way in the back of the Book of Common Prayer), says that “the outward and visible sign in Baptism is water, in which the person is baptized in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Christian baptism, to state the obvious, is a trinitarian act. We name the three persons of the Trinity in every baptism because we want to be clear that the person being baptized is being incorporated into the entirety of God’s identity, the whole relationship that is the God of love.
The trinitarian nature of baptism is so essential that the Catechism can’t seem to find any other way to explain the sacrament. It goes on to say that “The inward and spiritual grace in Baptism is union with Christ in his death and resurrection, birth into God’s family the Church, forgiveness of sins, and new life in the Holy Spirit.” Did you hear that? Another trinitarian formula: union with Christ, birth into God’s family, and new life in the Spirit. Baptism is essentially relational and transformational. It symbolizes new life. And so it is impossible without the Trinity.
At the risk of going around in circles, I want to state, or restate, three fundamental things we know about God: God is love. Love is relational. God is relational, or better, God is Trinity. If we take as our starting point that God is love, then it is a little easier to see how necessary the Trinity is as a means to getting closer to knowing God.
Love doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s not that we can’t love ourselves–we can and we should. But even that love has a source, and it’s not us. Furthermore, a love big enough to be called God can never stay inside, isolated. It just can’t. If you’ve ever been in a really good mood, having a really good day, and just generally in love with life and your own place in it, you know that it is impossible to keep this feeling to your self. You have to share it. You can’t wait to be nice to the barista at Starbucks and give an extra-big tip. You smile as you wave someone ahead of you into your lane in traffic. You call a friend just to say hi, and maybe do something nice for someone you don’t even like that much. You can’t help yourself! That feeling of effervescence, of effusive goodwill, is just like the tiniest of bubbles in the overflowing magnum of champagne that is God’s love.
“God is love therefore God is relationship therefore God is Trinity” is not a concept, a jar that needs to be broken, or at least I don’t think it is. It is the logic and the poetry and the truth that undergirds yet ultimately overrides all our concepts. The God who is love must express that love in relationship: with Godself, in the form of the Trinity; with us, by sharing Jesus and the Holy Spirit with us; and in all creation, which sings and shouts of God’s goodness and love through its very existence. See, that’s three things again: love, love, and love. Amen.
