Trinity Sunday

Isaiah 6:1-8
Psalm 29 or Canticle 2 or 13
Romans 8:12-17
John 3:1-17

If you go looking for the word “trinity” in the Bible, you’ll never find it. You’ll find the names of the three persons of the trinity, but the way they fit together took some centuries to work out. And even after it became official, people still argued about it. Many would say that it is what makes Christianity distinct from the world’s other major religions. Judaism and Islam interpret monotheism in a manner that excludes the possibility of a triune God. The polytheistic religions understand their various deities as distinct and separate from one another. Still other religions do not personify the divine. We know God as three persons, father, son and spirit, of the same substance undivided. it has been argued that this description make much more sense in the third and fourth centuries when the categories and definitions of greek philosophy were more familiar to Christians. Regardless of how well any of us can articulate it, early in the 14th century, John XXII, who was the bishop of Rome at that time, declared that a feast of the holy trinity would take place on the Sunday after Pentecost in the western church.
The idea is that Trinity Sunday is the punctuating mark, or the line drawn under all that we have learned and experienced about the persons of the trinity from the first Sunday of Advent through Pentecost. Consider the advent prophesies of the coming of the messiah; the stories of Jesus’ birth and the prologue of John’s gospel during Christmas; they are followed by the gospel lessons describing Jesus’ ministry, his arrest, trial, and death and the celebration of the resurrection at Easter. Those stories continue through Easter season, which culminates with the story of the ascension, followed by the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The feast of the trinity weaves all of those stories together and presents us with a doctrine that presents three essential aspects of our faith: that which is ultimate – the father, a material manifestation of the ultimate, the son and that which makes them known to the faithful and the seeker, the spirit.
The trinity is a source of dynamism for our beliefs. It is the engine and the fuel that allows our faith to be a journey rather than a stopping place. We know God the father as our beginning and ending, where we live and move and have our being. Our experience of our own humanity is both shared and perfected in the person of Jesus. Our faith is made new in the work of the spirit who unites us with all those who in every age have been and will be the community of Jesus’ followers. Whether or not we can readily articulate or understand a doctrine of the trinity in the categories of fourth century greek philosophy or the language of the Nicene Creed, we know it is there shaping and teaching us from one day to the next. It is a reminder that what we believe is not trapped within the realm of imagination, but can be made real with God’s help. Today as we celebrate this feast of the Holy Trinity let us give thanks for a faith that is rooted in the divine, before us in daily living and made real and alive in the relationships and communities in which we share it.