Trinity Sunday - The Rev. Brian Petersen
I’m going to guess that if you took a poll of everyone’s favorite feast days in the church year, you’d get a variety of answers: Christmas, Easter, maybe Pentecost or All Saints or even Epiphany – but absolutely no one would say Trinity Sunday!
And to be honest, it’s probably not the favorite of many preachers either. There’s nothing easy or exciting about preaching on a day dedicated to a doctrine (as opposed to a person or event). It’s very easy to lose the congregation pretty quickly when you get into theology. And that’s a shame, because in some ways Trinity Sunday might be one of our most important feast days. So as we might ask ourselves “Why Trinity Sunday?” when this day comes around, I’ll risk an answer: because the Trinity is at the heart of our mission as Christians.
Organizations (the church included) talk about mission statements a lot. We have a mission statement at St. Andrew’s – anyone know what it is? (hint: it’s in your worship bulletins!) Seems like a good mission statement to me. And really, any church’s mission statement should ideally be a version of the original mission statement given by Jesus to his disciples: the Great Commission.
What’s the Great Commission? That’s the “marching orders” for the church that we just heard from Matthew 28: Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.
It’s a pretty simple and concise mission statement, really, because it comes down to just a few actions: go, baptize, make disciples.
That’s it. Go out into the world (don’t wait for the world to come to you!), baptize people (grow the church), and make disciples – don’t just grow in number, but grow in depth. Teach people and walk alongside them as they grow deeper in their relationship with God and with each other.
And so how is the Trinity at the center of all this? We see it right there in the marching orders: go and make disciples, and you start by baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The very beginning, the genesis of the Christian life, involves being immersed in the fullness of who God is - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
We heard the creation story from Genesis today, which reminds us that we are all made in the image of God. Baptism reminds us that we are made, not just in the image of any sort of god, but of God who is Trinity. But what does that mean for us, for how we live and move and have our being in the world?
The way we talk about God is important, because it shapes the way we believe. In the Episcopal Church, we say that “prayer shapes belief”, and it’s why we take our liturgy so seriously. And then the way we believe affects how we live – and bad theology can have very bad consequences, as we see in the world today and all throughout history.
The doctrine of the Trinity didn’t just arise out of nowhere – it came about in the early church as a reaction to that sort of bad theology. The church had to figure out how to articulate this new, expansive view of God that went beyond the old view – God as a static, distant, all-powerful and yet completely removed from the messiness of human existence. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus broke the old model, and the Trinity was the way the church found to talk about it.
God as Trinity means that God is first and foremost a relationship – a constant outpouring of self-giving love from one person to the other. God is less like a king on a throne, a “sky-daddy”, an unmoved mover – and more like a movement, a dance in which all the partners are equally important.
All the persons of the Trinity are required in order to make the dance complete. The creating and sustaining power of the Father only takes shape when it is poured out into the world through the Son, and then shared with all creation through the presence of the Spirit.
And if this is the God in whose image we are made – what does that say about us and what we are called to do? Could it be that, with God-as-Trinity at our center, we might be able to find deeper purpose and significance in all of our work to bring healing and wholeness in the world?
I believe that this is what the church has to say, and to offer, that is different from what the world gives. We might do good things to help others, but we are not just another non-profit or social club. The work we do is rooted in the very reality of the God who created the universe, and invites us to be co-creators remaking the world into that image, one act of love and compassion at a time.
You may have heard of Pope Leo’s most recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity), which was released last weekend. In it, the Pope speaks directly to the question of what it means to be made in the image of the Triune God, and how that informs the work we do for the common good of humanity and all the world. He writes:
“Founded on Christ, the living stone, we experience the powerful and mysterious action of the Holy Spirit, and we believe that every authentic human effort to cooperate with him for the good will be blessed by our heavenly Father, in whom we place our hope. For this reason, we can diligently contribute to every initiative that builds a more just world, and we can call others to collaborate in promoting the integral development of every human being.”
He goes on to speak to how this Trinitarian lens guides how we approach the big issues of our day, from AI to war and nationalism. He encourages us to “view history in the light of the crucified and risen Lord, to whom the Father has given ‘all authority in heaven and on earth’” (and by whose Spirit we are both called and empowered).
It’s here that we can come back to those marching orders, that mission statement – to not just baptize, but to go forth and make disciples. The invitation that we give others to join in the life of the Trinity only begins with baptism – we are all on that journey for our whole lives, working together to come to see and know and understand the fullness of who God is and the dream that God has for the world.
It’s not a one-time thing and guess what? We’re not going to be perfect at it. We’ll struggle and stumble, sometimes we’ll question our own faith – Matthew tells us that even at the Great Commission, some of Jesus’ own disciples doubted. That doesn’t matter to Jesus. He calls and empowers them, and us, just the same.
God-as-Trinity invites us, in the midst of all the messiness of our lives, to see the bigger picture of the fullness of God, in whose image we are created, and called to follow in our full humanity. We are invited into the dance, as Thomas Merton beautifully describes:
“No despair of ours can alter the reality of things; or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not. Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance. “
