Trinity Sunday

Readings:
Proverbs 8:22-31
Romans 5:1-5
John 16:12-15

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

This is Trinity Sunday. Most of the special days in the church calendar refer to some historic event. This is different because it refers to the Trinity, the Holy Trinity, which is at the center of our faith. We often don’t reflect on it. It’s hard to reflect on it. That’s one of the things I’m going to talk about. Just to illustrate what I mean by saying that the concept of the Trinity is at the center of our faith is this: every time we pray, we pray in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. That’s the Trinity. Every time we pray. We probably say it 10 times during the church service. It really is at the center of our faith, and so today is devoted to thinking about what the Trinity means to us.

Now, the Trinity is a concept that the human mind simply cannot grasp. I want to suggest that’s really what it’s about. It tells us about the nature of God by giving us something that we simply cannot wrap our minds around. The way our faith defines it, is as follows: God consists of three persons that are one God. They are co-equal, co-eternal, uncreated, and omnipotent. That is a nice definition, but the human mind simply cannot comprehend what that means. It is a mystery. It is the central mystery of the Christian faith. There are many things that are important to our faith that are simply a mystery. How is it that Christ becomes present in the host and the wine? It is a mystery. What is the Trinity? It is a mystery.

There’s a funny video on YouTube, I think it’s called “St. Patrick’s bad analogies” and I watch it probably every year on St. Patrick’s Day. The idea is they got these two characters asking Saint Patrick to explain the Trinity to them. In the video, Saint Patrick starts saying, well, the Trinity is like this, and they say, oh no no that’s this ancient heresy. And he says, well okay, I’ll try something else. The Trinity is like this. No no no that’s this ancient heresy. The point of the video, which is actually very good, is that if we try to compare the Trinity to something that is understandable to us, we can’t do it. Our minds simply will not do it. We can’t compare the Trinity to something that we can observe and see in the world, because it’s not like that. It’s just not. It is a mystery. This underscores that our minds cannot comprehend God. This is so important for us to understand, that it’s simply too big for us to get. Why is that important? It’s important because it tells us, first of all, that there is a God, like you’ve heard the saying, and it is not us. God is way bigger than we can understand. We are God’s children and we can understand our relationship to God in that way, but God is more than we can understand.

This is not one of the readings today, but I often think, in connection with this, of a passage in the book of Job. The Old Testament book in which Job undergoes all the suffering and Job does not understand it, and finally Job cries out in agony to God. Why are you allowing all these awful things to happen? And God’s response is, where were you, when I created the earth, and the seas, and the mountains, and the rivers, and the animals, and everything else? And the point is, you don’t know. It’s not for you to know. And that is what the Trinity is like, in that sense. It’s not for us to understand. It’s for us to look upon, to the extent we can, with wonder and awe.

What do we as people get out of understanding, not the Trinity itself, but understanding that it’s a mystery that we can’t understand? I think what we get out of that is a sense of humility, and with humility comes gratitude. We can realize that we are God’s children. We can be grateful for that, even if we can’t understand what God means, what God is, or understand the ways of God. We can still be grateful for the existence of a loving God, even if we don’t fully comprehend Him. We’re not God’s equals. We are not God’s peers. We have to have respect, awe, and wonder for God. That’s what the sense of mystery, that’s conferred by the Trinity, can tell us.

The Trinity is, of course, a Christian concept. There are actually suggestions of it in the Old Testament which I’ll mention, because I think they’re interesting. If you look in Genesis, there are a few that I can mention. One is Genesis, chapter 1:26, God speaks of creating man in our image. The Hebrew word there is plural. It’s not my image, it says, let us create them in our image. In Genesis 18, Abraham is visited by three men or three angels. When you see those kinds of appearances in the Old Testament, they’re understood to be God and there are three of them. In Genesis 11:7, the story of the Tower of Babel, and here, God referring to Himself says again, let us go down among them and confuse their speech. So God is referring to Himself in the plural and the Hebrew is like that. It’s a plural word in the Hebrew. Those are interesting kind of foreshadowings, or implications, of the Trinity that are in the Old Testament.

Now today’s readings all relate, in one or another way, to the concept of the Trinity and so I want to talk about those for a few minutes. I’m going to try and relate each of them to this, which I think is the common thread that ties them together, namely that God has poured Himself out in love for us.

Let’s look first at the Old Testament reading for today, which is from Proverbs, chapter 8. Proverbs, chapter 8, is a long speech. If you look at the whole thing, it’s a long speech by a character called Wisdom. Wisdom is a character that appears in a number of what are called the Wisdom Literature books of the Old Testament. Wisdom is typically referred to, in the third person, as a woman. The idea is generally, the wisdom of God is something to be desired. These were used to educate young men, because that was the way the society worked – but you would love the wisdom that God can confer on you, like a young man loves a beautiful woman. You desire wisdom, you desire this relationship. This part of Proverbs that we read today is beautiful poetry, and I think this is a way in which this reading relates to the concept of the Trinity. Even if we can’t give a nice pat definition of Trinity that we can understand, God sometimes discloses Himself to us through poetic imagery in Scripture, and that’s what happens here, even if we can’t give it a definition. Think about it for a minute – what is beautiful? When you see something that is beautiful, how do you define its beauty? You really can’t. Right? This is one way God can disclose himself to us, is through poetic imagery. I’ll just read a bit of it, to give you a sense of what I have in mind. This is Wisdom speaking, “thus from of old I was poured forth, at the first, before the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no fountains or springs of water; before the mountains were settled into place, before the hills, I was brought forth.” And it goes on with this beautiful poetic imagery about the creation of the earth, at the time the earth was created. This is something that gives us a picture of the wisdom of God. What is this wisdom? Again, it is this concept that appears in a number of Old Testament writings, and basically it means what it is that connects God with human beings in an intimate loving way. When the wisdom of God is referred to in these Old Testament writings, such as Proverbs, that’s the ideas that’s being conveyed. God wants to have this loving relationship with us, and we have this desire to connect with God. Wisdom is that connecting thing that binds us together in an intimate loving relationship with God. The Old Testament reading is saying, this was there from the beginning, this was there when all was created. Even before there were any human beings, there was this desire of God to be connected with God’s creation, which includes us.

The Epistle for today is from Romans, chapter 5. This, too, is a nice statement of the Trinity. As is typical of many passages in Paul’s writings, it’s kind of densely reasoned,  the chief ideas, I think, are these: Paul is telling the church in Rome, Jesus has imparted grace to us. This was Jesus’ mission, to give us the grace of God. Why? To have peace with God. Again, to have this intimate connection with God, to have peace with God. Jesus gives us His grace. We are able to have this connection with God through that. Paul refers to the Holy Spirit. He says, “the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” What does that do for us? Paul says, “it has given us hope.” This, too, is beautiful language. He says, “we can even boast of our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance, proven character, and proven character, hope, and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” This intimate loving connection with God that we get through the redemption we received through Jesus Christ, and the guidance, the counseling, the comfort, we get through the Holy Spirit, these give us hope. This is a gift of God, hope, that we have this continued connection with God.

The Gospel reading for today is from John, chapter 16. I think the chief idea conveyed here is the unity of God in the Trinity. Jesus is talking to the disciples and He’s saying, I’m going to send the Holy Spirit to you. I’ll read a little bit from John 16. “He will guide you to all truth. He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears, and will declare to you the things that are coming. He will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you. Everything that the Father has is mine; for this reason I told you that he will take from what is mine and declare it to you.” This is what’s conveyed here, really, is the unity of God in the Trinity. Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Everything the Father has is mine. Jesus says everything the Holy Spirit has, comes from me and from the Father. All of it is coming from us. We are one God. This is the idea being conveyed in John, chapter 16.

Even though we can’t define the Trinity in a way that makes it easily comprehensible to us, or makes it comprehensible at all, there are some things we can say. These different persons that are the Trinity. God, the Father, we know as the Creator. We saw this in the Old Testament reading today. This imagery about the creation of the world. God is also the Son, and our Brother, in the person of Jesus Christ. In this, He’s our Redeemer and our Savior. So we’ve got Creator, we’ve got Redeemer, we have the Savior. And God, the Holy Spirit, is our Guide and our Comforter.  Jesus says, I will send you a comforter, the Holy Spirit. I will send you a guide. We talked about that in the reading for today. So we have a Creator; we have a Redeemer; we have a Savior; we have a Guide; we have a Comforter; all in these three persons that constitute one God. So what can we distill from those images that God has given us of what He is? We know that on the one hand, God is mighty and awesome. We know also that God is loving and wants to have a relationship with us. We know that God guides us and comforts us. God gives Himself for us. We see this in the life, passion, and death of Christ, that God gives Himself for us. God pours Himself out for us.

So, to look back to where I began. On the one hand God is a mystery to us, but we do know that God is bigger than us and infinitely powerful. We also know that because God wants to have this connection with us, we are not alone. Even in our darkest moments we are never alone, because we are always in the presence of an all-powerful Creator who loves us and wants us to reach out to him.

Amen.