Trinity Sunday 2025

Last week and this we speak of great mysteries.  The arrival of the Holy Spirit and the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity.  Matters of great miracle and endless debate.  What is the Trinity? What is the purpose of the Holy Spirit?  Do they work in concert?  Are they equal or did one exist before the others?  

The bible over it’s span of thousands of years give a variety of answers to the question of ‘who is God’ and ‘how does God operate in this world’.  Consequently, over those thousands of years the understanding of God changed and evolved, adapting to culture and era, then after the Canon of the bible closed, theologians continued the debate.

There has never been one universally agreed upon understanding on what the Trinity is, even today debate continues about the Holy Spirit and her relationship to the Father and the Son.  Some have said that all these questions have about as much relevance to our lives as debating Thomas Aquinus’ old question about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.  What we want to know really is how does the Trinity affect us?  That is where scripture comes in as an excellent teaching tool.

If we cast our minds back to what we remember about the disciples of Christ…they aren’t always the quickest to catch on to Jesus’ teachings.  They misunderstand and head in the wrong direction, they spend time debating who is the most important and how to impress their teacher.  Then after the crucifixion we find the disciples running away, denying Jesus’, not recognizing his presence among them and even cowering behind locked doors. 

Lat week, that all changed.

“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability…at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered because each on heard them speaking in the native language of each…about God’s deeds of power.”

 

Now, there has always been a lot of focus on the miracle of ‘speaking in tongues’,  the disciples suddenly knowing all these languages.  However, what I find most amazing, the most miraculous is that those same disciples…humble fishermen, tax collectors, and provincials … who had been hiding from the authorities or abandoning their faith now are standing openly in the crowds preaching about God and authoritatively.

Where did their fear go?  Where did their confidence come from?  Where did their skills at public speaking come from?  How did Peter, the beloved and impetuous, the famous denier suddenly gain the ability to interpret and preach scripture to the masses.

The church grew from this moment, because those scared, doubting, failures of discipleship were remarkably transformed by the Holy Spirit, one of the Holy aspects of the Trintiy  and the one we seem to understand the least.

The Holy Spirit has many attributes, and is referred to in many ways.  Perhaps the oldest description of the Spirit is that of Breath.  God’s own breath moving and shaping the world and us. 

 

 

 

“When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.”

The Spirit has been present since the very beginning of creation, acting along side God, the creator.  Trinitarian-ly speaking God is often considered the main or central aspect, God in the center with Christ on his right and the Spirit on his left.  Although our creeds speak of the Trinity as equal with God, we always name God first.  The scriptures refer to God as THE LORD and tend to place God at the top of a hierarchy.

Yet, this is simply one human way to organize a divine concept.  Perhaps our spiritual ancestors had the right idea.  Basil the Great said

“It is audacious to expound upon God in speech,…The human mind has become alienated from divine realities, yet human conceptuality is even less up to the task. The experience of the saints have taught us that the more a person advances in the knowledge of God, the more he realizes his incapacity to speak accurately of God. But we cannot remain silent, for the Church is eager to hear the Word preached and taught.”

We want to know! We want to understand and quantify the divine.  Perhaps, it would be accurate to say we want to control God, Jesus and especially the Holy Spirit.  After all, if the Spirit can empower and embolden the Disciples, as we saw last week; who know what she could do to us?!

The Spirit’s purpose within the Trinity seems to focus a lot around transformation, creative inspiration and renewal.  God appears to be the CEO calling the shots and from whom Christ and the Spirit are directed. Not, created like animals or plants, but ‘begotten’, extensions of God’s own self.  I go back to Basil the Great;

Christ was “not created by a command but having shone forth from the Father’s substance and been conjoined to him instantaneously beyond all time, his equal in goodness, his equal in power, sharing in his glory.”

Jesus of course, we get to know intimately through scripture because of his incarnation.  The miraculous devesting of that aforementioned power in order to bring about the salvation of all of creation.  We get to know Christ through his teachings and the experiences which the gospel writers have shared with us.  Furthermore, we have our own experiences with many people knowing a personal feeling of relationship with Christ.

Christ being the only figure of the God head who took on human form, became in many ways the most relatable of the Trinity.  Christ knows our experience intimately, he lived and died human, and thus we feel most comfortable with Christ in our own lives.

However, Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not to be understood as members of a social network, competing to accumulating likes and friends.  Rather they are more like unto members of a musical trio working in harmony; each in turn, and together as appropriate to the music being played.

And the music being played is creation.  From creation to eternal salvation, the Trinity have moved in and out of creation guiding and directing us to righteous relationship with the Trinity.  People have always struggled to work out that Holy Trio and where we fit into the relationship.  We accept the holy and eternal nature of the Trinity and we are grateful for the relationship, but struggle to define the details.

But as they say the devil is in the details.  Perhaps we don’t need to debate those angels dancing on the pin.  The questioning and learning can bring us closer to God and help us grow in spiritual awareness, but…. If the debate simply leads to negative doubt and confusion it is ok to simply accept the undefinable.  To know that God is.  Christ is.  The Spirit is. We don’t have to have all the answers to be in relationship with God and not all of us thrive in the theological struggle.  That is ok.

After all Gregory the Great also stated that “faith is proof of what cannot be seen, what is seen gives knowledge, not faith.” 

We are called to have faith in God.   We can pursue knowledge to our hearts content, but what we are called to embrace is faith.  Faith in the one God, Father, Son and Spirit however they exist and in what ever forms we experience them.

Trinity Sunday can be a doctrinal nightmare, but as I finish this sermon I appreciate all that those great saints and scripture has done for us to help us understand the nature of the One in Three and Three in One.  And very soon we will recite a confession of faith…not with 100% knowledge but a very human and questioning faith. 

Knowing that God is here; and that we are blessed in all those many ways which we can and do experience, read of and know the Holy Trinity.  So that together in faith we can say as a community…I believe.