Sunday Sermon - The Rev. Susan Flanders (May31, 2026)

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Sam. [00:00:49] Speaker B: The Holy Gospel of our Savior Jesus Christ according to Matthew. [00:00:53] Speaker A: Glory to you, Lord. [00:00:56] Speaker B: Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him. But some doubted, and Jesus came and said to them, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always to the end of the age. The Gospel of the Lord. [00:02:10] Speaker C: Children ages 3 through 10 are invited to follow Adeline, our storyteller today to the music room for a Bible story, prayers and music. They will return at the peace. [00:02:29] Speaker A: O God, our great companion. Lead us ever more deeply into the mystery of your life and ours and make us faithful interpreters of life to one another. Amen. I begin with Leonard Hodgson, a 20th century English theologian who wrote extensively on the Trinity. He says this. How many clergy, as Trinity Sunday draws near, groan within themselves at the thought that it will be their duty to try to explain this dry and abstract doctrine to congregations for whom they anticipate that it will have but little interest? I'm one of those clergy and I not only groan inwardly, I groan outwardly, as I have to some of you in recent days. How do I talk about the Trinity? How do we understand it? And perhaps most of all, who. Who cares? How many of you here? When you think about your faith, think about the Trinity. Show of hands. Okay, you got a few more than eight o', clock, but not many. But it is Trinity Sunday and I'm standing here and it is my duty, as Houghton says, to try to say something about the Trinity that will help make sense of it. But more than that, something that will ring true to living our faith today. So first, I'm going to give you my short one sentence sermon on the Trinity. The Trinity is a handy reminder that we can experience God in a variety of ways. Amen. But since I and you have about 10 more minutes now to kill, here goes. First I'll try to explain how the doctrine came to be. And then I'll tell you what it has meant for me and hope you can relate it to your own life and faith. Back in the 4th century, Christianity had grown from a small sect of Jewish people following the young charismatic Jesus into a religion surrounding the entire Mediterranean basin. In 380, the Roman emperor Theodosius I. Christianity then became the established church of that vast empire Christianity, with its roots in Judaism and the Hebrew Bible, had to emerge into the wider world of Greek Hellenistic theology. The Gospel accounts of Jesus life, mostly parables and teachings passed down orally at first, and various letters and other New Testament writings. All of these were from the first and early second century, and none of them mention the Trinity as such. But once Christianity took its place on the world stage, it needed to be explained to this wider world, and this was a hard job. Judaism was monotheistic and emphatically so. There was one God. Not many gods, not hierarchies of gods, not local tribal gods, but one God and Christianity. Jews wanted to maintain monotheism, but to do so involved the daunting task of presenting Jesus as the divine Son of God, equally God, not separate from God, but distinct from God. Jesus and God, still one God, but sort of not. And then the sticky business of the Holy Spirit, who played the starring role last weekend as we celebrated Pentecostal. This belief in Divine Spirit as part of God had to be accommodated as well. Like Jesus, part of God, but distinct. So the doctrine of the Trinity as one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, one God in three persons was born. And it took decades of wrangling over the course of several church councils to finally come up with the Nicene Creed as we have it now in the year 381. The Creed begins with we believe in one God, moves to we believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, and concludes with we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. So we have one God, two Lords, one of them begotten, one proceeding from the other two. How is this not confusing? And these three persons of the Trinity are supposed to be equal. But our readings this morning consist of the first reading about God the Creator, which includes the entire first chapter of Genesis and part of the second, and then some ten paragraphs, and then the second and third readings which mention the three persons of the Trinity, but don't call them that, don't use the word Trinity. And each of those readings is only five sentences long. How are these three of equal importance, then? God and three Persons, as our hymn has it today, Blessed Trinity. What do we make of all this? Why does this doctrine matter? Does it matter? What does the doctrine of the Trinity mean for our lived experiences as Christians? Because doctrines do start, and should actually start with lived experience. And if doctrines continue to mean anything, it's because they express something we actually experience. Doctrines are like code language for life. In this case, life with God and I want to offer three kinds of experience that might point to the three so called persons of the Trinity, our three in one God. The first kind of experience could be said to be of God the Father, the God of the creation story we heard from Genesis. That story outlines the awesomeness of our universe and our world and who of us doesn't respond to that? I was captivated by the recent Artemis mission to fly to the moon and around it. Those pictures of our blue and green planet and the vastness of the rest of the cosmos and universe surrounding it were just amazing. They point to a creation so old and so inexplicable that my heart sees a creator behind, sees God the Father or mother of all that is. But this wonder at the beauty of the vastness of creation also captures us in much smaller, more intimate encounters with nature. My oldest son, definitely not a churchgoer, responds to the beauty of the first light in the woods of an early morning as he sits waiting and watching as a hunter. For him, this is transcendence. And I suspect that for many of us there are times when either the sheer beauty or grandeur or even overwhelming power of the created world point to a God. Times when, like the God in Genesis, we say, this is very good. These are first person experiences of the Trinity. Experiences of the first person of the Trinity, not the doctrine, the experience. Other experiences lead us to the second person of the Trinity, God the Son, Jesus. These are times when we feel through human love, touched by God's love. The people who knew the man Jesus felt touched by God's love when they met him. They came to believe that Jesus incarnated God, that Jesus embodied. Jesus was God in human form. His continued then. But different presence with them after he died sealed the deal. He had to be God, had to be divine. No one else could be alive again after dying. Part of the slowly emerging Trinity. So this is radical, but I hope not heretical on my part. I believe that God incarnates God's self and always has in all of our humanity and in each of us, in millions and myriads ways and forms. And for Christians, Jesus Christ is the herald and symbol of that. Remember the anthem two weeks ago? The one Hillary was brave enough to sing from the pulpit? It went in part. Christ has no body but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes with which he looks compassion on the world. Christ has no body now on earth but yours. In our bodies, in our human loving, we experience God's love as mothers and fathers and Wives and husbands and siblings and lovers and friends, we receive and give love. And this is of God. This is Christ within us, that second person. And when we live this love in wider and more compassionate and charitable ways in the wider world, this is of God. This is Christ within us. And so think of the most recent and best experience of human love you have known. That's the second person of the Trinity. Not the doctrine, the experience. And then finally, the Holy Spirit, the third person. Last Sunday, Pentecost was our celebration of Holy Spirit. With the dramatic energy of the huge crowds and the rushing wind and the sounds of all the different tongues, everyone is understanding each other's language. And this happened after Jesus ascended and wasn't around anymore. And he'd even told his followers that he would send this Spirit to be with them as advocate and comforter. But Holy Spirit is really hard to describe. It's one of those I know it when I see it experiences, a feeling that comes unbidden, a holy prompting towards something new. A time when, through no effort on our part, we feel changed or touched in a special way. You will have your own experiences of Holy Spirit. There is no formula, but we feel that these are of God, the third Person of the Trinity, not the doctrine, the experience. But pointing to three different kinds of experiences that might connect with the three persons of the Trinity seems lame and inadequate to the mystery of the God we worship in God's fullness. My three pedestrian paragraphs perhaps help us recognize various ways we encounter the three in one God. But God is so much more. Maybe 300 in one, maybe 3,000 in one. Maybe the heart of God is like a divine dance, swirling and embracing and evolving all through life. Maybe the heart of God is the essence of all love, restless, dynamic, never ending. Maybe this love lives in us in so many more ways than we even know, and we access it only in hints and guesses. Maybe our longing for this love and our openness to finding it and living it are far more important than whatever we make of the Trinity. Amen.