Sermon: Trinity Sunday

Today is Trinity Sunday! One of the beauties of the Christian understanding of God, is that of God as Holy Trinity. Today I am going to share a bit of history and theology about the Trinity… let’s get inspired together.

The Trinity is God as three in one. God, Jesus Christ, the Spirit in one. There are other ways to describe how the Trinity works, as told in our Song of Faith:

God creates the universe… God tends the universe… God enlivens the universe…

We can know God as:

Father, Son and Holy Spirit Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer Mother, Friend, and Comforter Source of Life, Living Word, and Bond of Love… the One on whom our hearts rely, the fully shared life at the heart of the universe.

What beautiful and rich words to help us witness in our own lives, to the “Holy Mystery that is Wholly Love”.

History & Theology

Here’s a little church history and theology. Theology meaning, how we understand God…

Our understanding of the Trinity was developed in the 3rd Century. About 300 or 400 hundred years after Jesus’ ministry, the Early Church Fathers were inspired to gather together to talk about their experiences of knowing God through Christ and their experience of the Spirit working amongst them.

And so they did. They gathered. Mostly to try to understand what was the relationship of Jesus to God. There were many different theories. But the Church Fathers kept coming back to their experience of Jesus Christ, the essence of Jesus, being so aligned, so true to the essence of God, that this divine essence in God and in Christ was one in the same, as to exchangable one for the other. God had taken form as the human person of Jesus Christ.

In a similar way for the Spirit. They wondered, what was the Spirit’s relationship in the mix? There experience was that the enlivening of the Spirit was again so very much of the same essence as our experience with God, and our experience of Jesus enlivening humanity through healing and teaching and ministry. That the Church Fathers could not distinguish one from the other. The Spirit and God and Christ were of one essence, each in relationship with each other. The Trinity. The Church Fathers conveyed how they and their communities were experiencing God: as a transcendent creative and powerful love energy that transcended human ways and human history. That we could look to, to reflect on ourselves. That stood before history and that would cotinue long after human history.

They also experienced this creative and powerful love energy in humanity, infused into the fullest of human existence, in the person of Jesus Christ. God came to life through the life, lessons, healings, relationships, vision, purpose, death and resurrection of Jesus, and comes to life through our humanity… as church and as individual persons.

The church Fathers also sought to convey this enlivening Spirit that enlivens the universe and that enlivens our very lives. The Spirit of creative and powerful love energy that is the very essence of who Christ was and who God is. That moves people, holds people, heals people. The Trinity was their way, and is our way, of explaining or understanding our experience with the divine: as creating, tending and enlivening our lives and all life! Pretty inspiring stuff, eh?

I know this has ben a bit of a theology lesson, but I guess I really wanted to share with you this foundation of our faith culture. That God is around us, within us and moving us… but wait, it gets better!

The Trinity at Creation

The Trinity invites into the cosmic mystery of God. Let me expain…

God created everything at the beginning, at the moment of creation, in the Big Bang, or however you understand it…

Looking back to Genesis, it tells us:

In the beginning when God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:1-3)

One question people have about the Trinity is: if God, Christ and the Spirit are one in the same, does that mean that Christ was there at the beginning of creation? And was the Spirit?

Richard Rhor Idea of Universal Christ

A well-loved Christian theologian named Richard Rohr said of the Trinity, “There is a part of God that is formless, there is part of God that is form… and there is part of God that is forming, that is energy.”

Richard Rohr asks what if Christ is another name for everything that is formed. Everything that has taken form from the formless energy of God. We know Christ as God in human form, in Jesus of Nazareth. But imagine the universe. Everything formed on earth and beyond is energy and matter coming together. This coming together of energy and matter has been happening since the beginnning of time. Since God whispered matter into life. God created the light and darkness, the oceans, mountains, plants, animals, and yes as God created humanity… God breathed the Spirit into Matter and brought matter to life. Every formed thing, Rohr suggests, follows the model of the Christ. And you, you my friends, are made in that image, in that model, of Spirit breathed into Matter, of Creation.

Speaking from Colossians 1:15…

[Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created. (Colossians 1:15)

This is what is so awesome about understanding the Trinity. It invites us into the cosmic mystery of God… the cosmic mystery of relationship that you and I are blessed to alive in. Can you even imagine, that we are part of this “holy mystery that is wholly God”? (A Song of Faith, United Church of Canada)

Relationship

I call the Trinity beautiful because it holds relationship as its basis. The Christian God is a God of relationship. The relationship between God, the formless, and Christ, the formed, and the Spirit, the forming. Working co-equally. Unified each in love, and unified in the outpouring of that Love to all of creation. Modelled for us in our lives. Pretty amazing stuff.

Guided Meditaiton

When I read the Psalm for today, I thought how wonderfully it connects to this Trinitarian relationship of God, how reading it slowly gave me goosebumps and a glimpse of that cosmic creative unity: that is at once formless, formed and forming.

I thought, what if we paused this sermon… to take time out… to be with God’s transcendent power and truth… reconnect with how that truth gets lived out in our lives… and to be refreshed with that graitude and that hope that moves us forward.

So, I invite you to sit with me in silence for a few moments, followed by a guided meditation. I invite you to put your feet soft and steady on the ground, relax your legs and your hips and your torso and shoulders and your arms, relax your hands onto your lap, release your jaw and your forehead… remembering that participating is optional. If you prefer to keep your eyes open, that’s okay too…

We can listen to the music, and just breath. … sink into silence… breathe into the formless, the formed and the forming… Just me, just you, in our own time of quiet and peacefulness here in this sanctuary space. Opening to God’s many ways of being. Nothing else but peace… and settle in to the peace of simply being…

for two minutes of quiet, after which I will read to you our Psalm for today. Let us breathe into two full minutes of peace…

[SILENCE]

You can remain with your eyes closed and simply listen to this from Proverbs, or open your eyes as feels comfortable for you, as I read today’s reading from Proverbs 8:

Proverbs 8

Does not wisdom call,

and does not understanding raise her voice?

On the heights, beside the way,

at the crossroads she takes her stand;

beside the gates in front of the town,

at the entrance of the portals she cries out:

“To you, O people, I call,

and my cry is to all that live.

The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,

the first of his acts of long ago.

Ages ago I was set up,

at the first, before the beginning of the earth.

When there were no depths I was brought forth,

when there were no springs abounding with water.

Before the mountains had been shaped,

before the hills, I was brought forth—

when God had not yet made earth and fields,

or the world’s first bits of soil.

When God established the heavens, I was there,

when she drew a circle on the face of the deep,

when he made firm the skies above,

when she established the fountains of the deep,

when he assigned to the sea its limit,

so that the waters might not transgress his command,

when God marked out the foundations of the earth,

then I was beside you, O God, like a master worker;

and I was daily God delight,

rejoicing before God always,

rejoicing in God’s inhabited world

and delighting in the human race.

[Music]

Here ends the sermon. As we take few moments to come back into the space, and open our eyes to the Mystery of Life and Love all around us, during our Musical Meditation. Thank you Parker…. [Music]

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This sermon was prepared for Wesley United Church, Montreal.

Scripture: Psalm 8, Romans 5:1-5, John 16:12-15