Sunday, June 11, 2017

Trinity!

This is my sermon from Trinity Sunday, June 11th 2017 at Christ Church Cathedral. It was my first Sunday sermon ever at Christ Church (which sponsored me for ordination, and where I had been a member since 2008). It was also my first Sunday sermon after my ordination as a Deacon.

In the name of the Holy & Undivided Trinity – Amen

Today is the day known as Trinity Sunday, always the Sunday immediately after Pentecost. It’s a day perhaps infamously known among clergy and preachers as the day when we all stand on pins and needles trying to avoid accidentally professing major heresies by using misplaced metaphors, poorly-constructed analogies or faulty theological logic! No easy task at all, even for the wisest & most experienced leaders of the Church, to explain perhaps the greatest & central mystery at the center of the entire Christian Faith. And so it falls upon this Cathedral’s newest clergyperson, having been ordained only 8 days ago, to explicate the great mystery of the Holy Trinity in my very first Sunday sermon as a deacon in this church, under a tent at the church picnic! I will certainly need the help of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit!

About 5 years ago, I’d just started seminary, maybe 2 or 3 weeks into my very first semester, and I was in a class called Patristics. Patristics  is the history and theology of the early church fathers in the first few centuries AD, which laid the foundation for the theological doctrines we believe and practice today. For 90 very long minutes, I’m convinced that the professor explained the entire trinity using words like “homoousious” and “consubstantial” (both of which mean “of the same substance”, but more on that later) and to this day I’m not sure whether the class was taught in English, Latin or Greek! I remember looking around at some of the senior members of the class, all of us genuinely dizzy from confusion, wondering how in the world I was ever going to make it through seminary! Thankfully I gradually began to figure things out in the following months, and with God’s grace I did indeed eventually manage to graduate. J

Those of us who are longtime churchgoers are well accustomed to saying “in the name of God, Father, Son & Holy Spirit” or “Glory be to… as it was in the…..”. But why do we say it? What in the world do we mean? We say the Nicene Creed every week and some among us know it by heart from repetition but do we ever pause to consider its meaning or implications for our lives?

These aren’t just vague or inconsequential doctrines the church forces us to believe. These are the believes we corporately and individually hold at our core – for which the ancient saints like Augustine were willing to endure torture, exile or even death, and for which martyrs today, like the 26 Christians murdered in Egypt a few weeks ago, continue to go to their graves professing.

We believe in ONE God – not three, ONE. And we believe in three PERSONS of God, not three faces or appearances or modes, and not three beings, deities or separate gods but three PERSONS of the One Holy and Undivided God. To some of our ears that may come of confusing and impossible to wrap our heads around. You’re right. To others of us it may be so commonly repeated and reinforced since childhood as to seem obvious. But imagine yourselves in the shoes of the early bishops of the church, without the benefit of the historic creeds, without the tools of mass information and communication today, without two thousand years of Christian theological writings upon which to rely, and still 400 or so years AFTER the resurrection and ascension of Christ. Try to imagine gathering a church council – essentially a huge church committee – and I know some of y’all know a thing or two about serving on church committees – to try to come up with a viable orthodox definition of the Trinity AND the essential beliefs about Jesus in 225 words or less that would survive for the next 1500 years as a leading source of unity among Christians across the globe. How many of us would sign up to join that committee? How many of us would feel up to the task?

The Trinity really is first and foremost a sacred mystery. And the Nicene Creed, along with the shorter Apostles Creed which you’d find on page 96 of your Prayer Book, and the longer Athinasian Creed which you’d find on page 864 of your Prayer Book, are the best markers we have to teach us constantly about the great unknowable Triune God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

But as great as those tools are, no creed, no document, no three-part phrase can contain or define the boundless indefinable God we love. Even those beautiful words Father, Son and Holy Spirit cannot even encapsulate a tiny fraction of the overflowing God who surpasses every language under Heaven. And no other phrase – whether in English, Latin, Greek or any other can begin to do it either.

But one of the beautiful things about those ancient creeds is that, in the words of a wise priest I know, they can tell us more about ourselves than about God. They help us to hold ourselves together on one living and life-giving faith throughout the generations and centuries of constant change. They help us to believe.

The Trinity is not something that we simply “believe” intellectually, this priest reminded me, but it is something to which we “give our hearts”. We believe it not in our heads but in our whole beings, body mind and spirit. As we pray – not read – pray the creed and profess once again our Trinitarian faith, ask yourselves this:

Do you give your heart to One God, the Father Almighty, the Maker of Heaven and Earth?

Do you give your heart to One Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God?

Do you give your heart to the Holy Spirit the Lord, Giver or life?

Go home and pray the words of that creed day after day. Meditate on them. Discuss among one another and with your clergy what we mean when we say them. On days when you struggle to believe them or simply cannot bear to say them again, rely on the community of believers gathered here and around you to carry you through. Rely on us to believe with you. And when others cannot carry themselves in belief, you carry them along the way.

Because if we believe – if we truly give our hearts to that sacred faith that we have one God and three unique but undivided persons of God, maybe we can take on the same for ourselves. As people made in Gods image, we are called also to be unified and unique, undivided and uncontainable in God’s love. WE are called to love one another, and to be united to one another, as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are united, and yet individual as they are.

May the Triune and Triumphant God make it so.