Happy Trinity Sunday! Did you know that there are three creeds in our prayer book? You probably could name two of them – the Apostles and Nicene Creeds. A third creed used to be said on Trinity Sunday but is now in the Historical Documents section of the prayerbook. The Athanasian Creed is very long and probably would take at least ten minutes to say it, so I will say just a few phrases to give you an idea of its content. “The Catholic faith is this: that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in unity, neither confounding the persons, nor dividing the substance. For there is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one, the glory equal, the majesty coeternal. Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Ghost. The Father uncreate, the Son uncreate, and the Holy Ghost uncreate. The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible.”
The doctrine of the Trinity is probably the most complex of any of the doctrines in the Christian faith. Ultimately, one comes down to the point that there is one God in three persons. It’s a mystery, and therefore it’s not possible fully to explain it or to understand it; it must simply be accepted. And then, on Trinity Sunday, we do our best to explain it. For years I have let an assistant preach on Trinity Sunday, but usually the assistant would begin by saying something like I was passing it off because I didn’t want to deal with it. So the last couple of years I’ve taken up the challenge!
Christianity comes from Judaism. Our Lord Jesus Christ was, and I suppose still is, a Jew. His disciples were all Jews. His ministry was almost exclusively with the Jewish people. The most important statement of faith for a Jew is the Shema: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”
And then our Lord Jesus says some incredibly bold statements that basically claim that he himself is God, too. “I and the Father are one.” “The Father is in me and I am in the Father.” The people who knew Jesus and accepted him as Lord and Savior, firmly also believed that he is God the Son. St. Thomas sees Jesus after the resurrection and exclaims, “My Lord and my God.” Later, as a consequence of his returning to the Father at his ascension, the Holy Spirit became such a force in the life of the Christian community that it believed that he is God as well.
So now, this new Christian faith, for which the creedal statement “The Lord is one” remains foundational, knows three divine individuals, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It didn’t have a doctrine of the Trinity in New Testament times. It didn’t even have the word Trinity for a few hundred years. What it did have was the firm belief that there is one God, and that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God the Father is God, God the Son is God, God the Holy Spirit is God.
Why didn’t the early Church say something like, “The Holy Spirit’s done a new thing and what we once believed about God is no longer true? Therefore, the Lord our God, the Lord is three.” The Church held on firmly to the belief that God is one simply because God would not contradict himself; he had clearly revealed himself as one.
And so, in the fourth century the Church began to deal with what it really means to say that there is one God and that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all God. The Nicene Creed dealt with it by saying that Jesus is of “one substance with the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.”
Ever since, preachers have tried to explain the doctrine. Some have used attributes of God to describe the Trinity, such as creator, redeemer, and sanctifier. And yet that misses the point because these attributes are neither broad enough nor personal enough to capture the meaning. God is three persons, not three attributes or four or five attributes. Some have tried to describe the Trinity by means of science: water, ice, and steam are three manifestations of the same substance, H2O. While that may be a nice scheme, it really doesn’t explain how three persons can be one God.
Last Thursday morning there was a story on NPR that is one of the best examples of the Trinity that I can think of. A group of people gathered in London for the memorial of a man who died on 1 July 2015 at the age of 106. In 1938 this man visited a friend in Prague who was helping refugees flee from the Nazis. That inspired him so that he went on to save 669 children, most of them Jewish, by arranging their safe passage to England from Czechoslovakia in the lead-up to World War II. The people who gathered for the memorial on Thursday were some of the survivors whom Nicholas Winton saved. He is known as Britain’s Schindler.
Why is he an example of the Trinity? Because love is always an example of the Trinity. The greatest attribute of God is love. God the Father is love, God the Son is love, God the Holy Spirit is love. God doesn’t need anything to express that love. In himself he has both the lovers and the beloved in the persons of the Trinity. All of creation is an expression of that divine being who is love. And the more selfless human love is, the more it reflects divine love. Winton is a wonderful example of the Trinity just as you and I are when we love others. May those who are being baptized experience a bright reflection of the Holy Trinity in this parish as they grow in faith.
Sermon preached by The Very Rev. Fredrick A. Robinson
Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota, Florida
Trinity Sunday
22 May 2016