Had a good Trinity Sunday yesterday. I confess that, after being a lectionary preacher for several years, I’ve gone the way of sermon series over the last few years. Part of that was a result of having a contemporary service with video and images, etc. I wanted to be able to have a visual theme that we kept up for a few weeks. And, in this age of short attention spans, it gave our regulars a sense of a beginning and and end of a series.
I find Trinity Sunday a great day to talk theology with folks, since, well, the Trinity is more a theological construct than a biblical one. However, it is a theological construct that explains the biblical evidence — namely, from Scripture it is clear that God comes to us in three different persons (modes of being) and that each of these persons is related/inter-related. The doctrine of the Trinity explains how this takes place within Godself. In the end, of course, it’s a mystery…a holy mystery of God…through which God demonstrates his love for us.
There’s a lot of good material on the Trinity out there…wonderful illustrations. Just today I looked up the blog The Ivy Bush, written by a former Duke Divinity Student. He uses the illustration of the Trinity as a dance that we’re invited to participate in.
I talked of the Trinity being seen as a puzzle in the life of the church and in the faith of the believers…something that we’re left to figure out, to work on, to solve, and seemingly give up because we can’t make it make sense. And while we can look at the creeds (I did talk about some of the heresies that the creeds addressed, fun) and talk about who proceeds from whom and how we have “God from God” and “true God from true God” it is most important to understand that the Trinity attempts to make sense of how this great God of ours loves us so much that he exists in this way and comes to us in this way. Whatever our level of understanding on the Trinity, we need to understand that it is about love, the love of God for us.
There are lots of good sermons out there, far better than anything that has come out of my computer. There is a nice sermon over at Day 1 that I found. The sermon is by Rev. Dr. James B. Lemler of Christ Church (Episcopal) in Greenwich, CT. In light of Trinity Sunday and our (sometimes) confusion over the theology of it all, he says it comes down to love. This is how Rev. Lemler closes his sermon…
… I had a couple of parents telling me the story about their family’s Sunday morning experience of a sermon that I had preached. They had gone home and during Sunday lunch were talking about my sermon. (something that warms the heart of a pastor to be sure.) In the midst of their conversation, the second-grade daughter sitting at the table chimed in. “Oh, Father Lemler’s sermons, they’re always the same. You know…blah, blah, blah,…love.” Well I was amused and thought to myself, “Hey, this little girl really got it…the message, the repetition, the core, the redundancy.
And so it is with the Holy Trinity…the message, the repetition, the core, the redundancy. Over and over again…”Blah, blah, blah, love…”
God the Creator…I love you and give you life.
God the Redeemer…I love you and embrace you in that love forever.
God the Spirit…I love you and warm your heart and your soul with my love.
“Blah, blah, blah love…I welcome you to that love. I enfold you in that love. I hold you forever and ever in that love.”
I liked that. As I said, there’s a lot of great stuff out there. But we had a good Trinity Sunday. Every year I pray that God is able to use me to explain the Trinity just a little bit more to folks. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
