Holy Trinity Sunday 2022 - my last worship service & sermon with Good Shepherd before I begin internship. It has been my holy pleasure to worship and do ministry alongside the wonderful people of Good Shepherd of Coatesville, PA, and Messiah Lutheran of Downingtown, PA.
Facebook recording from Good Shepherd of the sermon: https://fb.watch/dC3dkt2yDB/
Youtube recording from Messiah Lutheran of the sermon: https://youtu.be/j7wJxOaptMk?t=1027
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my Redeemer. Amen.
Happy Holy Trinity Sunday y’all! This is notably every pastor’s favorite Sunday to preach because understanding the Holy Trinity is so easy. For centuries, we have understood exactly who the Holy Trinity is, who is in the Holy Trinity, and how to talk about the Holy Trinity without falling into any accidental church heresies that lead to ex-communications and whole new Christian Traditions from forming. Easy peasy. When I said yes to Pastor Susan to preach on my last Sunday at Good Shepherd and Messiah, I didn’t realize what Sunday it would be in the liturgical calendar. But I’m sure Pastor Tim isn’t complaining now, Right?
Notably Pastor Susan liked to throw me easy tasks like preaching on the Sunday after we all sprung forward and lost an hour of sleep or figuring out how to set up online worship in the earliest days of COVID. But really, her last gift to me and my spouse other than her wonderful friendship over the years and confidence was to leave us Minnie and Clio, her beloved kitty girls.
Now, if you knew Pastor Susan, you probably heard about the cats. She loved these two so much and Alyssa and I are doing our best to welcome them into our home with our already pre-existing cat, Clem. At almost two weeks into our cohabitation, we are all pretty glad our townhouse allows for each of the girls to have a floor of their own. They’re slowly starting to warm up to each other, but the one thing that brings them together is this miracle toy called a cat dancer. Pastor Susan had given us one for our cat years ago, and Clem goes wild for it, leaping and twisting and batting at little pieces of rolled paper at the end of an arching wire. It’s pretty graceful to watch, actually.
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| Minnie |
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| Clio |
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| Clem |
And Minnie and Clio love it too. It’s the one toy we can play with each of them around the other to try and coax them into family time. Three cats are all brought together by one cat dancer. It’s pretty trinitarian. And while they might not be as close as we had hoped they would be, it takes time. They’re cats after all. We have made a point to let each of them know that they are not alone in trying to figure out this new life together and that they are so loved. Which is - What Jesus is starting to get at in today’s gospel reading.
We are in the middle of the farewell discourse in the Gospel of John. This is the part where Jesus knows he is going to die soon, and he wants to make sure he gets all his last thoughts and teachings to the disciples before he goes. Jesus is letting the disciples know what is to come and how to keep teaching and making disciples after his death. Jesus is that friend that keeps coming back when he’s heading out the door with “And one more thing!” He’s been doing this for three chapters already! I promise I won’t go on that long in my own farewell discourse today.
Jesus has so much he wants to tell the disciples before his death. He is trusting that the Spirit will be with us and to trust that the Spirit will guide us in our relationship with God as Jesus did. We know the Trinity are three and they are all in one each other. There is a relationship going on within the Trinity that Jesus is inviting us into and sustaining us with through the Spirit.
But the first thing Jesus tells the disciples before he gets on with the rest of his teaching is this: “I have so much to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” Wow. This is the farewell discourse after all, and as readers, we know that, and this is a tender reminder of care for people who are going to mourn their beloved teacher and faith leader soon. Doesn’t that feel familiar? Jesus gets us to hear the thing that is most important: the assurance that we will not be alone.
It’s hard to remember things in our grief, but Jesus is making sure we are left with this important message. When things feel too heavy to bear, we are not alone. For right now, we are not expected to get it all. This whole following Jesus thing takes a lot of time and Jesus knew that we would need companions along the way, and the comfort that we won’t have all the answers or do the right thing every time but remember these two things: we are loved by the Holy Trinity, and we are not alone. The Spirit is coming to be with us.
The Trinity is a mystery that is hard to put into words, and one of the great mysteries of faith that we as Christians have tried to make sense of for centuries. One of the best ways I have come to understand the Trinity is through Jesus’ teaching about relationship here between Jesus, God, and the Spirit. The Trinity is about the relationship based on love, and how wonderful is it that we find ourselves in the midst of them? Instead of trying to focus on the Oneness of the Trinity to understand the three: God, Jesus, and the Spirit as separate beings, Franciscan priest and theologian Richard Rohr writes that we “Start with the Three and see that this is the deepest nature of the One.”
Rohr describes the trinity as an invitation to a transformational dance. By focusing on the three to understand one thing about the Trinity, we can get sweep up in the dance together with the Trinity. The movement and flow. How dynamic and ever growing in our understanding we are when invited into the dance of transformational faith. I’m not an incredible dancer, but I think of those three cats of mine at home leaping through the air in this dance. Jesus tells us that the Spirit will declare things that are to come to us meaning, we don’t have all the answers yet, but we can keep engaging in the relationship with the Spirit who is with us and with the Trinity to hear ever more clearly the voice of our loving God.
When we focus on the three to understand one thing about the Trinity, we also understand diversity. Instead of pinning down exactly who and how God shows up in our lives, we can take a step back and listen to how the Trinity flows through creation around us, how they show up in the creative beauty of the world, and love and righteousness. Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer captures neatly: “Wherever God is, God is wholly there.” How we in the room can each reflect the whole love of God to each other. The whole love of God that abides in us through the Spirit because we know the story of Jesus. That whole love abides in me and in you and we are stronger because we know that each of us reflects that whole diverse love from the Trinity to one another.
Now because it’s Pride month and I am who I am, I have to talk about how we talk about the Trinity. I am using the pronoun “they” for the Trinity on purpose today. When thinking about the diversity of the Trinity, I remember my siblings in Christ in gender and sexual minority communities. As an LGBTQ+ person with many beloved friends who use they/them for their pronouns, this can be a playful and helpful way to think of the Trinity for us. I invite you into holy imagination with me to think of the Trinity this way. They/them is most often used in English to refer to a group of people, and on occasion to refer to someone without revealing their gender identity. More often now though, people do not identify with genders like man or woman but as non-binary or genderfluid and use they/them to refer to themselves on a regular basis.
The Trinity, who is three in one, also goes beyond gender to me. God is so great, how can I say God is not doing a new thing in their own gender identity? ‘They’ in the singular and plural explores our very understanding of who God is, how Jesus loves us and how the Spirit shows up in our lives to remind us we are not alone. They, the Holy Trinity, is with us always, never leaving us alone even when we feel unloved and isolated.
Jesus is even referred to as Divine Wisdom or Sophia, in Early Christian tradition. This idea connects back to the book of Proverbs where wisdom is personified as Lady Wisdom. Jesus, child of God, was not always referred to in masculine pronouns. I was introduced to thinking about God as our Mother in Heaven when I was a teenager and read the popular Christian novel “The Shack” by William P. Young. The book introduced readers to the Trinity like this: a Black Mother God, Palestinian Carpenter Jesus, and an Asian woman as the Holy Spirit. We can find diversity in the Holy Trinity and how we see the Trinity showing up in our lives. Just as God made us in God’s diverse image, there are many ways we can imagine the Trinity.
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| Kelly Latimore Icon of the Trinity |
We also see how the Trinity values community. Everything about the Trinity reminds us that they are based in relationship. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and is God. Jesus was the Word with God in the beginning, and so was the Holy Spirit, calling creation into being which culminated in God walking beside the first humans. The Trinity was with humanity in the beginning, and they will be with us through Jesus’ own death and into life after resurrection. Jesus continues to remind us of the promise of the Trinity’s presence with us through the Holy Spirit.
The Trinity is an invitation to the transformational dance of faith, to diversity, and to community. The Holy Trinity’s presence in our lives is a reminder that we are not alone. And we are so very loved by our creator. May we bear that promise forward. Amen.
