Trinity Sunday, Year C
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
June 12, 2022
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
There’s a joke among clergy that rectors always give the Trinity Sunday sermon to some other speaker, and that’s certainly rung true in my own experience: although we’re approaching the third anniversary of my priestly ordination and we’re still well within my first year as rector here at St. Andrew’s, this is at least my fourth time preaching this particular day of the Church calendar! Thankfully, since each of the first three were at different congregations and happened to use the same texts, I was mostly able to adapt the sermon. It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried to come up with something different each time, but when dealing with a concept as confusing as the Trinity, it’s hard to find something different to say when that first version still manages the job.
One of the difficulties in talking about the Trinity—beyond the “simple” question of how Three can be One and One can be Three all at the same time—is that it technically isn’t Biblical. It’s both extremely important historically and a strongly implied theological concept, but you’ll never see the word or read an explicit statement of the idea—like “God is love”—anywhere in the Bible.
The Trinity is an attempt to explain the different ways we see the One True God working in the world and a means of understanding how the Son and Spirit can be God alongside/together with the Father. The concept is most easily seen in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ baptism where we have Jesus physically standing in front of us, a voice from the sky proclaiming him to be God’s Son, and the Spirit descending like a dove. Again, a very strong implication of the Trinity, but not quite a formal statement asserting its existence. Other passages referring to Jesus and the Spirit as Lord using the same terminology as that seen with the Father or acting as creative forces alongside the Father appear to bolster the concept.
As we said last week, no one’s every really been able to figure out or pigeonhole the Spirit, so back during the first few centuries of Church history, the arguments that resulted in the doctrine of the Trinity largely centered around the Person of Jesus Christ. Was he actually God or was he just God’s Son? If so, what did that mean—were those things the same or different? Was he “the firstborn of all creation”—the initial and greatest of God’s created beings—or was he eternally begotten—a self-existence with yet alongside the Father? These questions might sound extremely philosophical and esoteric today (and they are), but in the first few centuries of Church history, answering this would have been an issue of pastoral care—helping people walk in the confidence and security of God’s restorative love.[1]
That’s actually how a lot of doctrines and Church traditions form. A conflict arises. Leaders within the religious community attempt to comfort their people and either resolve the problem or explain why it doesn’t need to be a concern. That solution then sticks around as a formally defined teaching or practice meant to help or encourage future generations. Unfortunately, after time a lot of those results calcify, and you end up with people arguing about minutia and subtle phrasing of a once-constructive idea that, dropped from its context, now becomes a source of disagreement and contention.
Historical conflicts about baptism are a good example. We know that Jesus’ early followers baptized new converts—and that Jesus told them to. When Christianity was first spreading or an underground religion, that’s pretty much all anyone needed to know about it. Once Christianity became the Roman Empire’s religion, adult converts grew rare and the focus shifted to baptizing young children as new members of an established Christian household. As Christianity and baptism spread out from the Mediterranean basin and encountered substantially colder weather, submerging certain converts became a health concern. To avoid accidentally killing babies or medically fragile adults, those areas start sprinkling or pouring water on people instead. Over time the various forms drifted their way into different settings, contexts were forgotten, and after a thousand or more years you have a explosive argument over whether or not babies should have been baptized in the first place and questions about the validity of sprinkling or pouring versus the “Early Church” method of immersion. Lines are drawn. People condemn and excommunicate each other. And the Church ends up destroying itself from the inside. Meanwhile, the important thing—baptism itself—is torn from its original purpose of celebrating entry into the one body of Christ and is twisted into a means of segregation and division: a way to distinguish who’s “right” and who’s “wrong;” who we trust, and who we hate.
We do similar things with Paul’s writings.
Although we tend to approach it as a dissertation, Romans isn’t a theological treatise. It’s a pastoral letter. Paul certainly introduces a lot of theological ideas from which the Church has drawn a significant number of doctrines and teachings over the past two thousand years. However, the main purpose of the letter is to address a specific division within a specific congregation: ethnic and cultural animosity from majority non-Jewish believers toward minority Jewish ones. After his earlier letters warning non-Jewish congregations against the need to adopt foreign cultural practices as a display of their faithfulness to Christ, Romans is essentially the opposite: a warning against antisemitic thinking and action. He wants the faithful to be able to worship together wherever they are and wherever they’re from without the need to “prove” their loyalty to Christ by performing certain actions or adopting particular local habits. Christ is the Church, and the Church, wherever it may be or however it may look, is inherently within Christ.[2] It’s okay to be different. It’s okay to not completely understand or agree with one another—those aren’t reasons to exclude anyone or stop worshiping together. The body metaphors that Paul applies to a congregation apply to the broader Church as well.
One of Paul’s significant points in Romans is the equal status of all believers: no matter our background, we’ve all declared our allegiance to Christ and been set in line with God’s ways through faithfulness to God.[3] We’ve all entered through the same gateway. We’ve all shared the same waters of baptism. We all continue to breathe the same Breath (or Spirit). We are one, despite the divisions Empire has always attempted to sow among us.
In the same way, God is One, and the Church is built in God’s reflection. Within God we recognize three significant expressions or “Persons:” Father, Son, and Spirit—or, in a slightly more modern rendition, Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. One Being, one “body,” one purpose, yet three recognizable Persons. Think of it like stretching to pick an apple. Who’s picking it? Is it the stomach, telling the brain it’s hungry? Is it the hand, the one most directly and immediately responsible for plucking it? Is it the foot, who lifted the body just a few more inches from the ground so the hand could finally reach its target? All are involved, actively performing their distinct roles, but all are one, because ultimately, all share the same being and all benefit from achieving the same purpose. Unique roles, unique expressions, and unique functions, yet all one being.
God is one, yet God is diverse within God’s self. The Church is one, yet the Church is diverse within itself. Distinct branches, distinct functions, distinct ministries :: one purpose, one body, one hope. One, not despite our differences but because our differences, brought into unity, are essential for the health and harmony of the whole. Empire longs to scatter us, to preserve its reign through division and separation. However, Christ’s Body is meant to cooperate and gather. We join our Breath to worship One God. We join our hands to reveal One Kingdom. And we join our lives to confess One Church.
[1] Vastly oversimplifying, the primary conflict centered around the idea that only that which had been “assumed” could be redeemed. If God was not fully and completely alive in Christ, religious philosophy (aka: theology) of the time posited that any and all of Jesus’ work on our behalf was useless. As only God could restore Creation to Godself—and people in particular—Jesus had to be both fully God and fully human in order for God to heal/restore/redeem the rest of humanity.
[2] This is not to say that individual Christians or even entire branches and institutions of the Church can’t and haven’t sinned. They have. They do. And they will continue to do so. The important thing is to repent, correct our faults, and amend our actions moving forward.
[3] aka: “justified by faith” | Romans 5:1 (NRSV)