How do you explain the inexplicable, or comprehend the incomprehensible? How do you preach on Trinity Sunday? A lot of clergy bemoan this day – and plenty of rectors pawn it off on deacons and other ministers to preach. Could they just be scared of committing a heresy?
Or could it be that in our modern, western way of thinking and being, we have simply forgotten how to dwell in the realm of mystery? In our post-Enlightenment world we are told that everything can and should make sense. If something cannot be proven, that it cannot possibly be “real.” For some, the fact that the Trinity makes so little sense is enough for them to say the whole thing is gobbledygook. But we mustn’t throw out the baby with the holy water. As my theologian wife has reminded me on several occasions, if we understand the world out of which the doctrine of the Trinity developed, and if we can re-learn to embrace mystery, then it’s perfectly reasonable to affirm the Three-In-One-and-One-In-Three. And that there is good news in the Trinity, even for us now.
First off, the word Trinity is nowhere in the Bible. The only reference we even get to ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’ shows up at the very end of the Gospel of Matthew (in what we call the Great Commission), when Jesus tells the apostles to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” You’d think our lectionary would use that Gospel every Trinity Sunday, but it only shows up in Year A, the year we read Matthew’s Gospel, so you’ll see it again in 2026.
But notice I didn’t say that the Trinity isn’t in the Bible, because it is, albeit not explicit. God as Father – or Mother, or Creator – is all over the Bible. God creates the world ex nihilo, from nothing, and creates it out of love, a stark contrast to the creation stories of the ancient world that were rooted in violence. This is the God that Jesus of Nazareth calls Father, or Abba in Aramaic. Jesus is described as the Son of God, making him equal to God in stature, but the prologue to the Gospel of John goes even further and states that Jesus is the Word, the logos in Greek, that existed from before time itself, in the beginning with God. This logos, this Word, this Jesus, is not just the carpenter-turned-rabbi from Nazareth but is also God made flesh. The Holy Spirit, who showed up amongst us last week, is the breath, the wind, the ruach in Hebrew of God, which both moved over creation and spoke through the prophets. It’s not hard to find references to the Trinity, to God’s threefold action in the world, but how, when, and why, did it become such a core piece of being a Christian?
For roughly the first 400 years after Jesus folks struggled to figure out the question of who this person they called their Lord and their God was in relation to the God of the Hebrew Bible and this Holy Spirit that they were told came upon new believers. All the while publicly worshipping and professing this faith was illegal in the Roman Empire, seen as seditious. That is, until 313 when Constantine the Great declared it to be legal in the Edict of of Milan, and 10 years later gathered a bunch of bishops from both the Latin-speaking West and Greek-speaking East of the Church at a place called Nicea and locked them in a room and said: don’t come out till you figure out how who Jesus is. Well, they did, sort of. They declared that Jesus and God were one in the same, but they stopped short of explaining the Holy Spirit. That work did get done at the Council of Constantinople – not Instanbul – in 381, where three bishops called the Cappadocian Fathers said that God was three hypostes (persons) in one ousia (substance). One of those bishops named Gregory of Nazianzus coined the term perichoresis – the eternal dance - to describe the nature of this Trinitarian God, who was engaged in an endless waltz of the persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The document that came out of that council was the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, which got shortened to just the Nicene Creed, and, of course, we affirm it every Sunday.
The Creed did more than declare who God is, it told us who God isn’t. There were, after all, lots of theories out there, which fractured and splintered this fledgling church-thing. They’d be declared heresies, but I assure you, they’re still around: Arianism said that Jesus and the Spirit weren’t divine, they were just creations of the Father: like the sun – you have the star, heat, and light, but the heat and light aren’t the star, just products of it. Modalism said that each Person of the Trinity had a specific jobs or modes, which didn’t intersect with each other: like water that exists as liquid, ice, and vapor, all separate modes. And then there’s Partialism, that stated the three Persons composed 1/3rd of God individually, which is, of course, like Voltron, the Defender of the Universe, who is composed of five robotic lions that merge into a giant robot samurai that fights evil alien monsters. Maybe you can guess which of those heresies is my favorite.
This teaching that God was Three-In-One became church law as a means of creating a common, unified faith, and without an affirmation of the Trinity a group can’t really be considered Christian by the historic definition of that word. But what’s the good news about the Trinity now? Very simple, it’s relational. The Most Rev. Peter Carnley, who was Archbishop of Perth and my seminary ethics professor, once said that every single conversation about God begins with the Trinity because every conversation about God begins with relationship. God models relationship for us. The Trinity is not hierarchical. There is no power-over in it, simply co-existence. One of the best modern allegories for the Trinity is the book The Shack. While it’s not super strong theologically, it gets the point across, especially a scene where Jesus – depicted as a Palestinian carpenter – and the Holy Spirit – a teenage Asian woman – are playfully dancing together. God the Father – shown as a well-built Black woman – says to the book’s author, who is spending a weekend in a shack with the Trinity, that that was the dream for humanity, that we might dance together the way the Trinity does. That’s our good news, that the Trinity is the model for all of our relationships. There’s no leading or following, no power-over. Just….the flow. Anyone who has ever seen a preacher just let loose and be led by the Spirit, anyone who has ever done any kind of theatre improv, those who understand the music of jazz or hip hop, know what “the flow” is all about. Flow is about creativity – play and life. It involves both letting go and being fully present to the movement of what is happening. The flow state is a divine state. The flow is the Trinity.
Is it even possible? That we could all be in relationship with each other as perfect as the relationship God is in with Godself in this flow? For humans by ourselves, left to our own devices, maybe not. But anything is possible with God. Such is this holy mystery. The Trinity is not a question to be answered, a doctrine to be understood – trust me, you’ve probably already committed a heresy today. The Trinity gives us the freedom to dwell in mystery, to not have all the answers, to rest in and dance with our God.
