In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”
It is a little-known fact that Jesus spoke these words to the disciples shortly after delivering a rather long and philosophically intense Trinity Sunday sermon.
Well, actually, what Jesus was doing was preparing the disciples for what was to come.
We ourselves are here today on Trinity Sunday, one of the principal feasts of the Christian year. Some have said that it is unique among the principal feasts in that it is a feast set aside to celebrate a doctrine rather than an event, or, as in the case of All Saints, particular saints of the faith.
I would push back against that a little and say that, in reality, both the doctrine and the feast of Trinity Sunday are meant to celebrate and direct us toward the revelation of God’s divine identity. That matters because it reveals that God’s identity is historical, personal, and hopeful.
It is historical in the sense that God interacts with God’s people through history. It is personal in the sense that God is the community of three persons, one of whom we encounter in the person of Jesus Christ. And it is hopeful because, when we come to know God as revealed in Jesus Christ, it becomes the foundation of an unfathomable amount of hope.
So here we are on Trinity Sunday, and our Gospel text is actually a good introduction to what it means to talk about God as a community of three persons. We see all three persons of the Trinity recognized and active in Jesus’ words to the disciples.
Jesus begins by recognizing that they have not yet been able to understand all of his teaching. While there are many more things they need to come to understand, they will not be able to comprehend or receive those teachings before Jesus goes to the cross. They will not yet understand the importance of what Jesus has already been teaching them before Christ is glorified and ascends.
In fact, there will continue to be more things for Jesus’ disciples—for the Church—not only then, but even down to us today, to come to understand.
That is what this text from the Gospel of John is about. Jesus recognizes that the disciples could not yet receive the fullness of divine truth, that this truth would need to be revealed to the community over the course of time, and that there is a consistency and unity between the teaching of Jesus in his earthly ministry, the will of the Father who sent him, and what the Holy Spirit will proclaim in the future.
There is consistency and unity because, as Jesus says, the Holy Spirit will take what belongs to him and proclaim it. All that Jesus has belongs to the Father, and all that the Father has belongs to Jesus the Son. There is unity. There is a community working together in unity.
So the Trinity as a doctrine is a wonderful example of exactly what Jesus was talking about in the Gospel text: a truth that would need to unfold and be revealed over the course of time and history.
Sometimes we get bogged down in the idea of the Trinity. There is an old joke that rectors are prone to invite seminarians or new curates to preach on Trinity Sunday. It is easy to get bogged down in the doctrine.
I think one reason for that is that we have a tendency to look at the doctrine from above. In other words, we treat the doctrine of the Trinity as though it were intended to answer the question, “Who is God?”
But in reality, the doctrine of the Trinity was not constructed from above. It emerged from the community of the early Church, and it was not originally an answer to the question, “Who is God?” Rather, it was an answer to the question, “How can Jesus, whom we know to be God, be God?”
The truth that Jesus is God in the flesh came to be celebrated in hymnody, prayer, and action before it was understood in a theological or philosophical way. Over the course of centuries, the Church worked out the theological and philosophical underpinnings of what it had been experiencing from the beginning—from the moment Thomas said, “My Lord and my God,” and from the time the early Church replaced the name of God from the Old Testament with the name of Jesus in its hymns, elevating Jesus and recognizing his status as God in the flesh.
So the reasoning began with experience. The Church said, “We know Jesus is God, and we know that in Jesus we have seen God. How can this be the case?”
Our Gospel text highlights an aspect of the Trinity that is sometimes described with a Greek term meaning “moving around,” or even “dancing.” It expresses the idea that the persons of the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—move into and out of one another, surround one another, without overwhelming or erasing one another: perfect unity, perfect love, perfect relationship.
This is an example for us because we are brought into the community of divine life as those for whom Jesus died.
There is also a Latin term I want to use because its literal translation is an image I want to leave you with. The word is circumincessio—or, in its anglicized form, circumincession. It simply means “to move around” or “to walk around.”
That was one description of the divine life: the persons of the Trinity moving into and out of one another in perfect relationship.
But we can expand the image further. Think about the beginning of John’s Gospel: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Literally, “pitched his tent among us.” God walking around in the person of Jesus Christ.
So the Trinity is historical.
It bears some relationship to other ways of naming God that we hear in Scripture. Think about one of the most common names for God in the Old Testament: “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” It is a name that stems from story and relationship. It is historical because, when people hear “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” they know what that refers to. They know what God has done in the past, and therefore they understand the sorts of things God will do in the future.
This God is not only the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but also the God of Hagar, who named him “the God who sees.”
So we have these names of God, and the Trinity is another way of doing this.
The creeds themselves are Trinitarian in structure. At the eight o’clock service we read the Nicene Creed, as we usually do. Today, because there is a baptism, we will use a form of the Apostles’ Creed in call-and-response format. Both are structured around God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
The Nicene Creed, in particular, is also historical because it deals with specific moments in history and references specific people. It names the divine persons and Jesus, the human and divine person, but it also names two human beings by way of contrast: the Blessed Virgin Mary, who said yes to God, and Pontius Pilate, who represents those who say no to God.
The Creed itself tells the story.
The names of God are always tied to the experience of the people of God and to God’s revelation to God’s people.
One of my favorite ways of talking about who God is comes from the theologian Robert Jenson, who referred to God as “the one who raised Jesus Christ from the dead, having first raised Israel out of Egypt.” I think that is one of the most concise ways to describe both the historical and personal nature of who our God is.
You can narrow it down even further to the statement with which I opened the sermon: “In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”
In that title there is already a story.
The Father is Father because the Father is named so by the Son. The Son is Son because Jesus claims the name for himself. The Holy Spirit is the one who enables the future of the Father and Son together and enables us to participate in that divine life.
And that is where the hope comes in.
We can be part of the divine life of God. We can have hope and faith and trust in who God is because God has revealed God’s self in a person.
The incomprehensible becomes comprehensible because the incomprehensible becomes relatable in the person of Jesus Christ.
We can understand the love of God for us because we can see the love that Jesus exercised in his earthly ministry and the love Christ calls us to exercise in our communities with one another.
So the Trinity is about community, faith, and hope.
It is not abstract. It is not a generic God we worship. It is not a generic “Fatherhood of God” that we talk about. Rather, it is the specific, historical, and personal nature of God as the one whom Jesus names as Father—not an archetypal divine version of human fatherhood, and certainly not a divine container into which we pour our own understandings of fatherhood.
Instead, it subverts our notions of fatherhood, just as calling Jesus “Lord” subverts our notions of lordship.
It calls us to be different. It calls us to love one another in the way Jesus has demonstrated, and in the way only Jesus can empower us to do through the power and work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, expanding our capacities beyond what they would normally be.
That is what is happening today in these baptisms.
When Evelyn and Maylee are baptized, they will be welcomed into a community: a community Christ has brought into being, a community the Holy Spirit has nurtured, a community intended for love, a community intended to care for others, a community in which the God who walked around in Jesus Christ continues to walk around in the Body of Christ, in the people next to you right now.
These are the people called to profess God as a community of three persons—a community that calls us into communion with God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
If Christ is made the sure foundation, then surely the Trinity is part and parcel of that foundation.
And when we say that God is love, when we call God Jesus, we know what that means and the actions to which we are called.
Amen.
