This is going to be a little bit of inside baseball, but preaching on Trinity Sunday is sort of a “gotcha” for a lot of preachers, because there is very little that you can say, technically, about the Holy Trinity that isn’t a heresy. And not only would it be heresy, it would probably be heresy for which somebody or several somebodies fought and died centuries ago. Every approximation, every generalization, every summary, is somehow not quite orthodox.
Fortunately, I don’t think it’s very interesting just to recite for you what the orthodox definition of the Holy Trinity is, and so I shan’t. It’s sort of like how “does God exist?” is the least interesting question you can ask about God. [1] But, I also don’t like to assume that everybody playing along knows all the details, so I will tell you that the Holy Trinity is God. Historically rendered as God the Father, and God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. In a feat of math, God is simultaneously one and three.
Hence, we are not Unitarians, who believe in the one-ness of God and do not confess the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth. Nor are we polytheists, who worship several distinct gods. We are Trinitarian Monotheists and we are special. See page 4 of your bulletin for the Nicene Creed for more details.
This is my last sermon, and in fact my last day as part of the staff at the Episcopal Church of St. Martin. It would be memorable…? but ultimately rude to stream out of here in a flash of unorthodox pronouncements. But I hope that, by now, you know that’s not really my style. I prefer to ruffle feathers with surprisingly orthodox pronouncements, if I’m being honest. Quoting Jesus directly is usually a fine recipe for disruption.
Since today is the Feast of the Holy Trinity, and is a perfect day for celebrating Pride alongside the city of Davis, I have several very authoritative theological pronouncements to make. The reason that I am not reciting any three-dollar church words about persons and substances for you this morning is because doctrinal purity is not the most important aspect of our life with God.
And, as such, the Holy Trinity is not merely a complex theological concept to be comprehended, but a relational reality to be lived. God-for-us, God-with-us, God-in-us.
We are deeply blessed by a God who shows up to us in more than one way. As the one who created us and loves us as we are; as the one who teaches us how to be fully human and who redeemed that humanity from sin and death; and as the one who empowers us to live into the fullness of our created being.
You may find yourself connecting deeply with one person of the Trinity, or perhaps with a different one at different times in your life. There may be days or seasons when the immensity of the cosmos fills you with awe, and you are bowled over with love for God the Creator. There may be days or seasons when you reach for redemption and newness, and you sit at the foot of the cross of Jesus. There may be days or seasons when you feel bold, filled with the Holy Spirit’s power. God-for-us, God-with-us, God-in-us.
I know that I said that I wasn’t going to do three-dollar church words, but one of my favorite things is to verbify a noun, like to say “theologizing” like, doing theology? Is that maybe just a two-dollar church word? Great. The Doctrine of the Trinity, which we do have, I just am choosing to skirt, came about like so much of Christian scripture and thought—through the people of God theologizing their experience.
The premise of God as three and one comes from the lived reality of those who walked the earth with Jesus of Nazareth. Encounters with him seemed like encounters with God, but he also spoke about God as being distinct from himself. So that’s at least the two-ness of God. And then, like in today’s Gospel reading, Jesus spoke of the Spirit of God being among his disciples as an advocate and comforter. They experienced this presence of God when Jesus was gone from them, so that’s different in another way. So we’re at three-ness.
Our Christian ancestors wondered and wondered about this, seeking ways to “express this mystery with poetry and precision.” [2] Ultimately, they decided—very hasty paraphrase, there—that it was just…all of the above. God is one and God is three. God is here, and there, and everywhere. God-for-us, God-with-us, God-in-us.
Because God is one and also three, God defies normativity. God is radically creative, engaging in miraculous life-giving acts throughout time and space. We, as creatures of God and as God’s beloved children, are co-creators of the world God loves. We are part and parcel of God’s dream, the building blocks of Beloved Community.
You, dear one, are a beloved child of God, as you are and as you are becoming. Whether or not you know how to define yourself as your full self, you have wholeness and freedom and identity in Christ. You are a member of the family of God, you are a member of the Body of Christ. You are a tongue of fire in the Spirit’s movement throughout the world.
There’s a hymn that is easily my all-time favorite, it was sung at my ordination, and almost any time I have any control over the hymn selection. It’s hymn number 710 in Evangelical Lutheran Worship, it was written by William Whitla to a tune by Gustav Holst, in 1989. It was written in the midst of tremendous global upheaval, namely the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The hymn calls upon our rich scriptural poetry and the writer’s dreams for a different world.
It demands streams of living justice to flow down up the earth; it demands freedom for captives, rights for workers, dignity for the poor, food for the hungry, service to the neighbor, healing of the nations—you get the idea. In the third verse, he writes, “Your city’s built to music; we are the stones you seek; your harmony is language; we are the words you speak.”
You may see how this, specifically, calls to me, as a musician and as a word nerd and as a firm believer in the power of both of those things. We are the words God speaks into the universe, and I will take us on an interpretive leap to say that the words we speak reflect the God we worship.
The words we use to describe who God is, and who God loves, and what God wants for us and for our neighbors, have life-altering effects. We can use our words to bless and invite and to comfort, or we can use our words to diminish and to reject and to harm. The words we use or do not use may seem unimportant to us, but may mean everything to someone else.
On this day in 2016, 49 beloved children of God were murdered and dozens more were wounded at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. They were killed because they were queer, and because they were celebrating that aspect of their identity together. In the 2016 legislative session, 48 bills in a dozen states were introduced that the ACLU considered “harmful” to the LGBT community. [3] During the 2022 legislative session, 28 states have introduced more than 300 pieces of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. [4]
These laws are designed to strike fear in the hearts of queer Americans, their families, and those who love them. They are full of language that dehumanizes, stigmatizes, and criminalizes the very being of our queer siblings, especially transgender people, especially transgender children. Their goal, they claim, is to protect children. But the reality is that these laws put all of our children in danger, and teach all of our children that who they are, who they love, how they look, and what they feel to be their truest self is shameful.
A sixteen-year-old child has already attempted to take his own life rather than face the cruelty of Texas’ new laws, after being routinely misgendered in school and facing other politically-motivated harm for being transgender. [5]
This is one reason why it is important on Holy Trinity Sunday, and appropriate for such a gender-exploratory time as Pride Month, to discuss not only which pronouns we use to describe ourselves and each other, but which pronouns we use to refer to God. There are many options here.
One came to me from my colleague The Rev. Broderick Greer, who has said that God’s pronoun is God. God is already a word we use to signify the unsignifiable, so we needn’t take it further than that. God. You may like that option. Try it on.
Another option on the table, especially excellent for the three-in-one and one-in-three is both the plural and singular they. God is three, that’s “them”. God is also one, which is “them” as well. Being a Trinity, God definitionally rejects the binary! The singular they has been part of the English language for centuries, and it’s high time we got used to it and put it to work. So you can talk about God with a genderless pronoun, and you can mean just them or all three of them. You may like that option. Try it on.
Another way to look at it is that God the Creator does not have a gender, and the man Jesus of Nazareth has a gender, and the Holy Spirit is the divine feminine. We can come at that from a few different angles. In Hebrew, Spirit is rendered as “breath”, which is ruach, which is feminine. In Latin, she’s wisdom, which is Sophia, which is feminine. If translation arguments aren’t interesting to you, isn’t it lovely to have a feminine, masculine, and neutral member of the Trinity? It feels balanced. It feels whole. And for millenia, women and femmes and people of all nonconforming genders have been marginalized, minoritized, and killed for being not-men who dared to see the image of God in ourselves. So, as a matter of repairing the breach, we’re taking this one. You may like that option. Try it on.
You may be confused, now. There’s a lot going on here with our Trinitarian paradox, and maybe you’re still stuck on something from six paragraphs ago. That’s fine. It’s okay to not understand the Trinity. You are in very excellent company, with mostly everyone. Just remember that it’s not about grasping the concept, it’s about living the relationship. God-for-us, God-with-us, God-in-us.
And as we wrestle with that during this LGBTQIA+ Pride Month, we have the distinct privilege to call upon our queer ancestors, saints, siblings, and selves to show us the multiplicity of God. It is queer—as in odd—to be the Body of Christ in the world. If we are truly living into the radical creativity of our triune God, we cannot be complete without the full spectrum of human relationship, connection, and love.
As Trinitarian Monotheists, the observance of Pride Month is not just a token “tolerance” or “we are all equal” or the backhanded “we are all sinners” and “hate the sin, love the sinner”. That’s not authentic relationship. We have to not only welcome but invite difference, affirm and celebrate queerness, and not demand assimilation but expect our own hearts and minds to be transformed. In whichever ways we find ourselves among the dominant demographic group, the majority, the “normative”, we must be willing to surrender that superiority and be changed by the liberating love of those who have been marginalized and minoritized.
We cannot say “come on in, your difference is cool, change it, though, to be more like us, but also your difference adds flavor to our sameness!” We must say first to ourselves, “I am prepared to change, I am prepared to struggle, I am prepared to learn, I am prepared to be transformed.” And then we can thank our siblings in Christ who trust us with their truth, their struggle, their authentic expression of their identity, and ask them to show us more of who God is.
That’s what authentic diversity provides us. That’s what radical hospitality cultivates. More ways of being human, more ways of meeting God. The Trinity shows us that there is more than one way to express divinity, and that we must embrace complexity in order to live abundantly.
God-for-us, God-with-us, God-in-us.
God-for-you, God-with-you, God-in-you.
Amen.
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[1] The writer John Green has said and written this on various occasions.