Hello, Trinity people!
For most of the Church, Trinity Sunday is the first Sunday after Pentecost and thus the first Sunday of a long green season between Easter and Christmas. Preachers around the world today are wrestling with how to explain the doctrine of the Trinity.
My seminary preaching professor warned that more heresy is preached on Trinity Sunday than any other single day of the church year. The doctrine of the Trinity is central to Christianity, and also one of the most mysterious and difficult to explain. Mostly because the intimacies of God’s relationship with Godself are impossible for mere humans to fully know or adequately describe.
The early church wrestled with how to describe all the dimensions of God. Eventually, after several tense and armed councils, emerging with the idea that God is both Three and One. Not three separate Gods - that would miss the importance of having ONE God. Not just one God - that would miss the dialogical relationship among the three.
Thus a doctrine that God is both in God’s realm and ours, creating and redeeming and inspiring, everywhere and all at once, evident in the interactions of all creation. Our world is saturated with divine presence and a God “in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). [1]
In a historical moment about which I would love to know more, 159 years ago this community chose to be called Trinity. Church names embody something of the spirit of their founding circumstances. And I believe that Trinity revels in being named for this doctrine. To note, revel has its roots with rebel. Reveling at being Trinity is an act of rebellion against the ways of the world.
The world divides and conquers, separates and parses, until we see ourselves and others as distinct and lonely individuals. All competing for a fleeting hold on something that feels like ‘enough.’ Seeking some sort of assurance that we will not forever be alone, scrabbling for human connections to feed and fill our emptiness, we latch on to scarcity to focus our fear. Unshakeable dis-ease, our constant partner, drags and trips up our best attempts to thrive on our own.
The Holy Trinity, for whom this community is named, refutes and challenges the inevitable despair of loneliness. In the Holy Trinity we see a constellation of complementary and healthy relationships. Creator, Son, Spirit. Each with their own context and role, all working in just and equal complementarity.
Like a graceful and intricate three-way tango of flying feet and skirts: partners who know their own strengths, trust the ones with whom they dance, and add their own delightful and unexpected flair from time to time. A beautiful and breathtaking blur of creativity, so joyful, so divine, that it inspires us to want to join in. Even if we are still learning to feel the rhythms and where to step.
In the letter to the Romans, Paul reminds us that we who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. As such, we did not receive a spirit of slavery to our fear, but a spirit of adoption by God. When our souls cry out “Abba, Father,” it is the holy in us craving connection with God and with one another.
Made in the image of God, we each reflect a different, unique and beautiful aspect of the Holy. As many different reflections of God as there are people in the world: many people, reflecting one God.
In the Trinity, we see how the parts of the Holy dance and work and play together in relationships that are just and equal. Where a rhythm of learning, listening, and living creates synergy and focus.
Made in the image of the Trinity means we are made for relationship. We are made for oneness - not only with our spouses and children and loved ones, not only with people whose politics match our own, not only with our church, not only with our God. But a oneness with all those, all creation, with whom God is one, which is without end.
Trinity rises up against the dis-ease the world promulgates. We are here in this time and place to be bearers of the Good News of Jesus the Christ, who comes to bring hope and healing and forgiveness to all people. We are here, in 2024, on 8th Avenue between James and Cherry, whole and human and called by God, in our weakness, our humility, our gratitude.
Relationship of oneness and complementarity says that together we are perfectly made to share the good news. Relationships take work to grow and thrive. God calls us to know one another, to bring our gifts, to summon our courage to be honest and vulnerable and humble, to be Trinity to the world.
More experienced dancers than me tell me that there comes a time when, after much practice, dancing changes from working to perform the steps correctly to a muscle memory of the steps. Then the deeper connections, trust, and intuition with one’s partners develop. From that place of deep knowing of self and context, creativity blooms, bringing new ways of hearing, new possibilities, new polyrhythms that inspire and move us.
In this moment of despair about climate change’s effects on food and water supplies, about increasing violence in our streets and homes here in Seattle, about persistent insidious racism in the church and our world, about rising hate speech in public discourse, our rebellious witness to the redeeming and life-giving power of the Holy Trinity is needed now more than ever!
Trinity people, we are named for a synergy of one-ness and multiplicity of love, creativity, health, forgiveness, comfort, and encouragement. The world doesn’t need perfection, the world needs honesty and love and generous dance partners. Here we are, Lord - send us!
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