Trinity Sunday–Year C
June 12, 2022
Sherwood Park Lutheran Church, Winnipeg, Manitoba
Today is Trinity Sunday—a day to focus on a concept that we use to explain what we know is complex and unexplainable. We can’t confine the Trinity—this idea that God is 3 separate but united ‘persons’—to one Sunday. Just like we can’t contain the breadth and vastness of the essence of God in one concept like “The Trinity.” So we acknowledge right up front that what we’re trying to wrap our heads and hearts around when we talk about God and how God shows up in the world is imperfect and somewhat incomplete, and we leave space in whatever definition or explanation we find meaningful for ongoing learning and wonder.
But isn’t that how it is with any relationship? When you think about the relationship or relationships that are closest to you, isn’t there always space for ongoing learning and discovery? Don’t you find that sometimes the words we use just aren’t enough to capture the essence of concepts like love, community, relationship, and connection? Sometimes, do you find that the deeper you engage in mutual, authentic, supportive relationships, the more you come to know yourself?
Maybe that’s a small piece of what we can learn as we wrestle with and explore this concept of the Trinity. I will leave the specific doctrines and explanations of the Trinity up to Pastor Erik, but on some level when we describe God as Trinity, we are saying something about God as relationship. “God” is this pure and mutual relationship between the persons of the Trinity—Father, Spirit and Son. Or, as we’re learning about the imperfection of our own language, Creator, Sustainer, Redeemer. However you want to understand the one-in-three/three-in-one nature of the Trinity, God IS relationship. And not just any relationship, but God is LOVE. The gospel reading for today is a somewhat confusing few verses that make more sense when put into the broader context of Jesus’ teachings. From the beginning, John is clear that Jesus as the ‘word made flesh’ is a window into the love that God has for the world. Love is the overall theme woven throughout these chapters of teaching and instruction as Jesus seeks to prepare his disciples to carry on without him. He reiterates that the Advocate…the Spirit…is being sent as an extension of God’s love so that just as HE was a window to that love for them, now they get to be a window of God’s love to others.
What that means for us is that we reflect and participate in the presence of God in and through relationship. God is relationship. God is love. When Jesus talks about going back to the Father and sending the Spirit to empower the disciples to witness to what they’ve come to know from him, he’s talking about relationship—the love they demonstrate with each other and the love they share with creation. At Pentecost, which we celebrated last week, the Holy Spirit blew through the community and challenged the boundaries they had drawn around who was worthy of or worth God’s relationship. As a result of the Spirit sending the disciples into relationship beyond their small circle, we now get to be included in this spiral of unity and community.
There’s a lot I don’t understand about God—about the teachings like the Trinity and about exactly what Jesus meant when he talked about all that “I am in you, you are in me, I am in my Father, the Spirit is in you” stuff. Even in today’s gospel reading, Jesus seems to know that those listening to him don’t understand everything he’s trying to tell them. But what I am coming to appreciate about how I hear Jesus talking about his relationship with the Father and the Spirit is that it is an inviting relationship.
As a university student I was really struggling with this concept of God’s love, and spent some time trying to dissect it and understand it cognitively. But it was really as I was invited into community, as I was welcomed into relationship with others, as I was loved by others that I came to know God’s love. Because think about it—love doesn’t really exist outside of relationship. We know what it is because of relationship. We know what it’s not because of relationship.
Think back to a time when you were on the outside of a group—maybe the first day at a new job where everyone knew each other, the first day at a new school or in a new neighbourhood. When you are on the outside of an established relationship group, it can be hard to find your way in. This past week the clergy gathered for a few days of fellowship and learning, and it was common for small groups to form as people who knew each other stood in circles or moved chairs to face each other during social time. For a new person, or someone who is witnessing these relationships, it can be awkward. You might stand at a distance, listening in to see if there’s a connection with what is being said. But then something happens when the circle opens up. Someone steps aside and creates space for you. Someone scoots their chair back and invites you to move closer. Someone takes their stuff off the empty chair next to them and motions for you to join the discussion. As an outsider, when an established community opens itself up and creates an invitation, you are brought into the relationship and the group shifts. As you add your voice to the conversation, they get to know you. As you listen to them, you get to know them. And sometimes before you know it and without anyone actually saying “now you’re part of the group,” you discover that you now ARE part of the circle. You have been caught up in relationship, and it has transformed you.
Maybe that’s something of what happens in and through the Father-Jesus-Spirit relationship. This relationship within God is whole and holy. But it is not closed and bound up within itself. It is open and available to others. Maybe you’ve been on the outside of a closed circle, where no one slides aside to invite you in and no one makes an effort to bring you into the conversation. That’s not a comfortable place to be. I think what Jesus is trying to say to his disciples in his teachings about knowing God by knowing him and the Spirit being sent to help them witness to the world has something to do with this idea that the nature of God as love is relationship that is open and available to anyone.
This is important for us in the church as we think about how we create space for others and how we demonstrate our commitment to relationship and community—to one another and to the world. I don’t know when the last time was that you were a visitor to a church, but let me tell you…it’s not always comfortable or easy. Congregations can be these closed groups of relationships that others don’t experience as welcome and hospitable. Often congregations will say that they seek to be friendly and welcoming, and they use words like ‘family,’ to describe how they feel about each other. But sometimes what that means is that for those who have the right history, or the right beliefs, or the right preferences, or the right traditions, or the right income, or the right background, or the right knowledge, the community is friendly and hospitable.
But Trinity Sunday reminds us that we have been brought into a different kind of relationship with God. Trinity Sunday calls us back to this image of God as relationship that is open, broad, attentive to those on the margins, and ever welcoming. This is what we see Jesus model as he expands the circle to include children, women, and those otherwise labeled as unworthy. Along the way, as he is healing the sick, lifting up the downcast, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, he’s pointing beyond himself to the One who sent him—whom he identifies as Father. Then as he prepares for his trial and death, he scoots the chairs of the divine circle back just a little bit more as he looks beyond the disciples to all those he hopes will be impacted by the witness and ministry of the disciples…and he reminds the disciples that the Spirit’s work is to help them to broaden the circle, keep expanding the community, keep sharing the relationship.
This congregation, and the whole church, really, is sitting in the unknown between what has been and what might be in the future that we cannot clearly articulate or control. Many of us may be struggling to exactly articulate and understand who God is and how God shows up in the world…and what in the world that has to do with us. Left to our own devices, our capacity for relationship and love is insufficient to really affect change in our communities. On our own, our tendency is to turn in on ourselves and scoot the chairs of our circles just a bit tighter towards what is comfortable and familiar.
It is into that liminal space of both unknown and discovery that Jesus shows up with a promise of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit invites us to re-orient our communities around the abundant, expansive, inclusive love that God has for the world…a love that we’ve been transformed by and a love that we are called to share with others…a love that flows from the very center of who God is. This Spirit who enables us to love one another is not a result of our work or our righteousness, but is sent to us as gift in the sacraments, and in all those big and small ways we are called into relationship with God. God IS relationship and opens the circle of the Trinity to include and embrace us in the divine dance, so that we find ourselves drawn more deeply into love of God and love of neighbour, and more fully able to share that love as we also include and embrace the world.
As I met with the council yesterday to engage in some conversation about the identity, purpose and values of this congregation, I was clear that I don’t have a 5-step plan that guarantees growth and success in the next 3-5 years. I don’t think that’s how God works. But if we can hold the momentary anxiety about things like attendance and budget lightly, and get back to the core question of identity and purpose, I think we discover some nuggets that can inform our discernment and discussion about the future. Yesterday as we reflected together, we lifted up words like ‘generous’ and ‘connected’ and ‘belonging’ as words that reflect this congregation. Those words speak to the value of relationships.
Identity and purpose. You and I are created in the image of God. That means that you and I are created for relationship…because God IS relationship. You and I are created in the image of God, which means we are created to love…because God IS love. When we ask questions about who we are and what we are doing in this place, hopefully the answer has something to do with engaging in relationship with God and demonstrating and expanding relationship with others.
The disciples understood this better on some days than others, and so will we. The rhythm of relationship is that sometimes we don’t get it right. Sometimes we mess up and have to apologize. Sometimes we get lazy or distracted and have to be reminded to make intentional time for those we love. Sometimes the chaos of life gets overwhelming and it takes everything we have just to make it through the day. But that’s the gift we bring to one another as a community of faith. As we participate in the patterns and rhythms that define us as followers of Christ—worship, fellowship, service, discipleship–we discover that we are drawn into this divine dance of the Creator, Sustainer and Redeemer. The community that we form as church is the work of God and a reflection of God, not a result of our brilliance and effort. As we remind one another that we are created in God’s image of love, we discover ourselves to be both loved and capable of sharing love. As the Spirit calls, gathers, nourishes and sends us, we are drawn into the very heart of God, who IS love, who GIVES love, who calls each of us to BE love to and for others.
Trinity Sunday kicks off this long season of ‘ordinary time’ as we live into the implications of Easter and Pentecost and reflect on who and what the Holy Spirit calls us as the church. The language we have for what that means and how it works is insufficient, but I pray that as we get caught up in the open welcome of God, we are strengthened and empowered to share that welcome with the world. Amen.