Trinity Sunday, Year C: The Story of the Trinity--The Shape Our Lives Take

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark

Trinity Sunday, Year C

The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector

Human beings are storied people—we make sense of ourselves through the stories we tell about ourselves, about each other, and about God. Some stories, like “I’m not enough” or “I’m unlovable” have crippling effects that turn us in on our ourselves. We can spend years of lives walking around in a haze of shame and guilt, feeling like we’re always a day late and dollar short.

Other stories, like the story God in Christ through the Holy Spirit reveals to us, have the power of freeing us from the shackles of our shame and fear, of not being enough. In Mark’s account of Jesus’ baptism by John in the River Jordan, for instance, we hear that the heavens are ripped open and Holy Spirit descends like a dove upon Jesus. The Greek is σχίζω the same root as our English word “schizophrenic.” When God speaks those words of belovedness—“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased,” it’s as if God’s love is tearing up the script of our old story, ripping open our shame, and fear, and sense of always falling short and saying once and for all—“You are loved. You are mine. In you I am well pleased. Nothing you can do will separate you from my love.” That’s the New Song God is singing in the depths of our hearts.

God’s love for us is basic, foundational, non-negotiable. But living from that love, making the story of God’s love for us our story, consenting to God’s presence and action in our lives is what makes love manifest in and through our lives. It’s what begins that deep transformation of beginning to see how God sees. When we begin to really accept that we are accepted—unexpected and undeserving insiders in the very life of God—those old, crippling stories that bang around in our heads and in our hearts—start to lose their hold over us. Before we’ve heard the world-ripping story of our belovedness, those old stories drag us around like an untrained Great Dane. Once love becomes the ground from which we live, those old stories no longer drag us around as much. They’re more like an old dog on the porch in the sun who opens one eye, yawns, and drifts back off to doggy dreamland.

On Trinity Sunday, it’s tempting to think that we’ve gathered together to worship a mathematical equation. In fact, it’s the one time in the Church year where, on the face of it, we celebrate a doctrine and not a narrative, a story. But I think if we dig a little deeper, we discover something powerful about the Trinity—the Trinity is actually the story  that has the ability to unmake our old stories about ourselves and teach us to live from a new story—the story of God for, with, and ahead of us, the story of our belovedness, the story of divine welcome to the banquet of love, peace, and forgiveness. How on earth could the Trinity do that?

Well, one of the images of God that many of us grow up with up is a combination of Distant Spector and Critical Judge. Ask people who don’t go to church why they don’t believe, and you’ll likely get some version of that image of God. I know when I was a kid, God was something like those two bushy-eyebrowed cantankerous hecklers Statler and Waldorf in the balcony of the Muppet Show. Critical, judgmental, mercilessly attentive to the least little mistake, they made poor Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog miserable. Cardinal Basil Hume, a Roman Catholic cardinal of England used to tell a story about the God-image offered to him in his childhood. His mother wanted to teach him self-discipline, so she called him into the kitchen and said, “Son, I have just finished baking some delicious cookies, and I’ve put them into this cookie jar. I’m going to leave this cookie jar right here on the table. But don’t you dare sneak in here and eat any other them. Remember: God is watching you!”

For years the young Basil Hume lived in fear of the ever-watchful “God of the cookie jar.” Then one day, long after he had become a Benedictine monk and was ordained a priest, it suddenly dawned on him: If he had snuck into the kitchen and put his hand into that cookie jar and secretly eaten one of those cookies, God would have looked down from heaven and said, “Basil, they’re so good! Have another one!”

God as the policeman of the cookie jar, or Hume’s God of the chocolate chip cookie? God as a distant spectator, or a God who lavishes himself on us? Since human beings become like the God we worship it’s important that our image of God, our story of who and how God is, is good and life-giving. If we worship a fearful God, if we worship a judgmental God, we become like the one we worship—fearful, contracted, judgmental. One of the things we see revealed in the Trinity is that God is not some aloof, monarchical spectator, but intimately involved in all aspects of creation. The “man upstairs” comes among us, breaks bread with us, touches the untouchable, gives name and face and voice to those shoved to the margins. The King stoops down, gets into the muck, ties a towel around his waist and washes the feet of his servants.

How do we know that our God is a loving God? How do we know that he’s the God of the chocolate chip cookie and not the policeman of the cookie jar? Because of the unique disclosure of God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. When we look at Jesus we see God. “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and still you ask for me to show you the father?” In the person of Jesus, we see the shape love takes when it comes into the world, takes on flesh and bone, blood, sweat, and tears. Suddenly, the Trinity is not some abstract doctrine, or mathematical formula, but the story of what it’s like to be loved into loving, the story of what it’s like to walk the way of love following after the one in whom we see God fully revealed.

The life of Jesus, to which the gospels witness, reveals to us the character of God, the God who pours Himself out for us in order to draw us to into the dance of joyful delighting, love that is the Trinity. The Father pours himself out without remainder in the Son, the Son gives himself back to the Father in the stream of love that is the Spirit. That’s the story, the narrative shape of the Trinity—love going out in humble, vulnerable, self-forgetful service to the least of these. It’s a story about being in relationship, with God and one another. It’s a story that says there’s unity and diversity in the heart of God. A diversity that never splinters into factions, a unity that honors and fosters true diversity.

That’s how in the community of love that is the three persons of the Trinity, we get a glimpse what it’s like to be a true community for and with each other. When we affirm that in God there are three persons in one substance—we affirm true diversity and true unity in the heart of God. We could even say with Bishop Kallistos Ware that there, “Is in God something analogous to ‘society.’ He is not a single person. Loving himself alone, not a self-contained monad or “The One.” He is triunity: three equal persons, each one dwelling in the other two by virtue of an unceasing movement of love.”

Rublev’s Hospitality of Abraham captures this perfectly. Each figure of the trinity is shown looking away from themselves in adoration of the other. Their heads are bowed in honor of the other person. Mutual love and welcome and honor and self-forgetful adoration are what we see enacted in that 15^th century egg and tempura. So it’s not a stretch to say that the trinity shows us what it means to be a community for a with each other. A community rooted and grounded in love, with an open spot at the table, welcoming the stranger into the divine dance of love serving love in love.

Far from being an abstruse piece of theologizing from a bygone era with which we can now dispense, the doctrine of the trinity, the story that it tells about who and how God is, is life-changing and revolutionary. It reminds us that we are loved unconditionally. It reminds us that the shape this love takes in the world is most fully disclosed in the person and work of Jesus whose life we are to make our own in the power of the Spirit. That’s the story that will make love manifest in our lives and in the life of our community. All the other stories—of not being smart enough, rich enough, productive enough, faithful enough, skinny enough, straight enough—are revealed in the light of this story to be poor substitutes, and woeful hindrances for growing into the fully flourishing human beings we are made to be.

Stories matter. And I mean that literally. Stories incarnate in their listeners the very things they narrate. The question for us is—what’s our story? What story has us? How is it working? Is it time for a new story? Is it time to let the love the love of God that has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit tell us who we are and how to be God’s beloved community? Is it time for us to live from the story that we all are welcome, honored, and celebrated as the precious sons and daughters created in God’s image we really are? What have we got to lose but our prisons?