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SERMONS

The First Sunday after Pentecost:
Trinity Sunday
May 26 , 2002

By David Christian

We are gathered here today to celebrate a mystery. Today is Trinity Sunday. It is the only day in the church year that is dedicated to a doctrine. We have days on which we celebrate events: the incarnation on Christmas Day and the Resurrection on Easter Day. We have days on which we remember people: feasts for Mary and John the Baptist and the disciples and other great figures of the faith. But this is the only day of the church year that is dedicated to a teaching; to the Trinity. And the doctrine of the Trinity is a mystery.

This doctrine-this understanding of the nature of God-developed over the course of the first few centuries of the Church as followers of Christ struggled with a seeming paradox. Jesus, as we know, was a Jew. His first followers also were Jews. As Jews they recognized that there is only one God. Jesus addressed this God as Father.

Yet after his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, his followers recognized him as God. And later as they experienced the Holy Spirit moving through the community and through their lives, they recognized this Spirit to be God also. So there is God the Father, whom Jesus spoke of and prayed to and worshipped. There is Jesus himself, the Christ, God the Son. And there is the Holy Spirit--promised by Jesus--God continuing to be present and active in the world and in the life of the Church.

Father, Son, Spirit. One, two, three. Yet God is one. How can this be?

As I said, the Church struggled for hundreds of years to understand how we can worship God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, and at the same time say that there is only one God, not three.

The solution that the Church eventually arrived at, late in the fourth century, is the doctrine of the Trinity. Using categories from Greek philosophy-most of the great thinkers of the first centuries of the Church were Greek-they arrived at the understanding that the one God who created all that is and who we worship, is manifest as three distinct Persons: Father, Son, and Spirit. Three Persons in one Being. Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity. Three in One and One in Three. As I said before, a mystery.

But it is important for us. It is important for us because this notion of God as Three in One reveals to us something about who God is. And it tells us something about who we are as beings created by God in God's image.

The doctrine of the Trinity tells us that at its core the nature of God is relationship. It is the relationship between the Father and the Son and the Spirit. Each of the Persons of the Trinity is intimately and fully involved in each of the other Persons. To be God is to be in relationship.

And we, created in God's image, have been created for relationship-for communion. We have been created by God for relationship with God and with one another. For us as for God, this drive for relationship is at the very core of our being.

One other thing that the doctrine of the Trinity reveals to us is that the essence of this relationship between Father and Son and Spirit is love. This love between and among the Father and the Son and the Spirit is the music that sets the tempo for their eternal dance. It is this same love spilling forth from the Godhead that has called creation into being and that made and fills each of us. Created by God's love in God's image, we have been created for love.

And so we come here today to celebrate this great mystery; the mystery of God's love that lies at the heart of the very nature of God. The mystery that called us into being. The mystery that calls us into relationship with one another and with God. The mystery that calls us into community. The mystery that we are called to share with the world.

We come here today to celebrate a mystery.

The mystery of the Trinity.

The mystery of God's love.

David Christian
The Chapel of the Cross
Madison, Mississippi

Genesis 1:1-2:3
2 Corinthians 13:11-14
Matthew 28:16-20