Grace and peace to you from the one who is and who was and who is to come.

If you’re paying attention, and I know you all are, you’ll note that the greeting I typically start my sermons with talks about God in three different times – past, present, and future.  I think today, Holy Trinity Sunday, is an especially appropriate day to open a sermon with that greeting from Revelation.  Today is the day we lift up and celebrate the Triune God - Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  We can talk about one God in three persons, one God in three expressions, one God in three hypostases, but definitely not one God in three modes.  That would be Sabellianism, and Sabellianism gets you burned at the stake.  Any of you from around Louisiana might also want to talk about celery, bell peppers and onions – the Holy Trinity of Cajun cooking.  As you can already see, just one minute into this sermon, the Trinity is not an easy topic. 

Great minds of the Christian faith have pondered the doctrine of the Trinity for centuries.  Some of the writings and teachings have been great inspirations to faith and have glorified God.  Other times, arguments about the exact nature of our Triune God have moved well beyond the point of absurdity, including a debate sometime during the Middle Ages as to whether the second person of the Trinity could have become incarnate in a cucumber. 

Other more helpful analogies have come along over the years to try and help explain how the Trinity works.  One popular illustration is the way we each are in multiple roles in our lives, yet are one person; I’m Vicar, husband and son all at the same time, but I’m still Eric all along.  Another popular analogy comes from music – a symphony is a symphony in the composer’s head, it’s a symphony on the staves of the score, and it’s a symphony while the orchestra performs it.  It’s the same symphony the whole time, yet there are clear differences between each of these three. 

These are helpful ideas, but the problem, of course, is that these are logical explanations of a mystery, something that by definition defies logic.  Even trying to describe the mystery runs into trouble in terms of vocabulary – we say that God is three distinct…well, three distinct what?  Even if we skirt the problem of terminology and simply say God is three in one and one in three, the notion of being utterly, intimately connected while at the same time being distinctly separate is hard to wrap our minds around.  So why bother?  Why try to describe something we know is indescribable?

We believe that we are created in God’s image.  If we believe and teach this, it’s probably good to have at least some idea of what God “looks like,” so to speak.  Understanding God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit shows us that God is relational, and the key characteristic of these relationships is love.  Each part of the Trinity gives wholly of itself to the others.  Even before there was creation to love or to redeem, God as the Trinity was already love.  These are the relationships Jesus called us to have with one another, a way to live in that image.

The way the Trinity describes God, what theologians call the ontological Trinity, sheds a ray of light on the mystery of God.  This light illuminates the path God wants us to walk, the path Jesus taught us about and walked himself, and the path the Holy Spirit guides us along.  But we know that even as we were created in God’s image, we cannot fully reflect God’s glory in this world.  Just as God is at the same time three and one, we are at the same time saints and sinners.  So the Trinity can point us to what we were created to be, but the world pushes us from that path.  So why bother?  Why have a doctrine that shows us how we come up short?

Long before anyone, even the earliest theologians of the church, began to speculate on what came to be the doctrine of the Trinity, Christians were blessing the beginning and ending of their worship in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Prayers were being prayed to this Triune God, people were baptized and meals were celebrated in that three-part name.  These early Christians weren’t trying to describe how we think about God and how we should respond to that image, they were talking about what God had done and what God was continuing to do among them.  To use the theologians’ terms, they were less interested in the ontological Trinity than they were in the economic Trinity – how the Triune God relates to the world.

God’s relation to the world is the whole reason we have the Trinity.  If we thought God was a supernatural presence that dwelled far, far away from us, we wouldn’t have the Trinity.  This far away God was the one espoused by many of our nation’s founders.  What they thought about God influenced the place they thought God and faith should have in the nation they were helping to shape, and their views on the place of God in society and in government have returned to prominence in the news and in political circles lately.  Men like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams grew out of the Enlightenment, a movement that centered on progress and humanity’s ability to conquer all challenges and solve all problems through logic and rationality.  They believed in a “clockmaker God,” one who created the world and then left it to its own devices.  The need for a triune God whose existence defied logic and who was mysteriously active in the world seemed to fade.  This was the attitude that caused Jefferson to cut everything out of his bible that pointed to Jesus being divine, and caused John Adams to say all he believed in were the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount.  The cross and the empty tomb, the tongues of flame and the constant presence of the divine were conspicuously absent from their beliefs.

Clearly, the God of Jefferson and Adams and many of their contemporaries was not a Trinitarian God.  They acknowledged creation as the extent of God’s reach into the world, and even that was deemed to be a one-time act, situated in the distant past.  Their understanding of God did not include God’s continuing presence with us, Jesus’ promise of new life through the cross, and the renewing, guiding and gathering power of the Holy Spirit.  As their experiment in building a democratically-ruled nation was proving to be a success, maybe it seemed like rational thought was solving all of humanity’s problems. 

But we see the world from a twenty-first century perspective, in the wake of world wars, disasters both natural and of our own making, and the jarring reminder over the last two years that the systems we use to grow and manage our resources are far from perfect.  From our perspective, it is abundantly clear that we cannot solve all the problems of the world ourselves, and that the need for a God who is intimately active in the world in many ways is as strong now as it was when the world was created.  The ceremonies that will take place during this Memorial Day weekend remembering and honoring those who have died serving our country point starkly to that need.  One of those ceremonies will take place at Arlington National Cemetery.  I visited Arlington last year.  It is a quiet, beautiful place.  As I was walking through the cemetery, I stopped and looked around; I saw neat rows of headstones stretching as far as I could see in every direction.  Seeing how many people were buried there was staggering, especially as I thought that Arlington is only one cemetery in one country dedicated to one group of people. 

Knowing our God as three in one is a word of much needed gospel in this world.  Certainly it tells us about who God is, but much more than that, it tells us about what God does – how God reaches into our world in so many ways.  We proclaim the Trinity because when we proclaim the three-in-one God we proclaim that God is still very much at work in this world. 

This is the God Paul proclaimed to the Romans, the God who is active in the world in our lives in many ways at once.  Paul proclaims God, the one we long to be at peace with, to be in that best of all relationships with.  God will lift us up and we will share the glory that fills heaven and earth.  Paul proclaims Jesus, God’s son, the one whose death and resurrection promised us that the love God has for His Son is the same love God has for us.  Jesus brought us peace with God, a peace that always promises new life.  And Paul proclaims the Holy Spirit, the one who pours God’s love into our hearts to hear and proclaim God’s word, to serve God’s people and gather together as the church.  Each of the three, and all of the three, come into our world and reveal to us the love binding each to the others and them to us.

Like any other doctrine or creed we affirm as a faithful witness to God, I see the doctrine of the Holy Trinity as a tool – by itself neither good nor bad.  If we use it to try and find a conclusive explanation God, we find out very quickly that we don’t end up with a neat, tidy, or even very helpful result.  But when we let our faith use the Trinity to point us to the many ways God is at work in our world, it goes beyond being something for theologians to bicker over and write big books on.  In hands and hearts filled with faith, the Trinity shows us God at work in the world, each of the three active in a unique way, yet all active as one.  When faith brings it to life, the Trinity becomes more than a doctrine or a tool or an explanation – the Trinity, God being active, alive and experienced in the world as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, becomes gospel.

Amen