Trinity Sunday
with Rev. Anderson, Rev. Gorsky and Rev. Sherwood
May 26, 2024
This Sunday’s message will come in 3 parts – each by one of our 3 pastors to explore the questions: Why do we believe in One God who is also in 3 persons of Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit? How can we make sense of this mystery of faith for our lives today?
The Scripture
Isaiah 6:1-8
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. 2 Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. 3 And they were calling to one another:
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty;
the whole earth is full of his glory.”
4 At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.
5 “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”
6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. 7 With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”
8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”
And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
John 3:1-17
Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council. 2 He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.”
3 Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”
4 “How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!”
5 Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. 6 Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. 7 You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ 8 The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
9 “How can this be?” Nicodemus asked.
10 “You are Israel’s teacher,” said Jesus, “and do you not understand these things? 11 Very truly I tell you, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony. 12 I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things? 13 No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man. 14 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, 15 that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.”
16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
Romans 8:12-17
12 Therefore, brothers and sisters, we have an obligation—but it is not to the flesh, to live according to it. 13 For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.
14 For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. 15 The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” 16 The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. 17 Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.
Read the Full Text
PART 1: God
Today is Trinity Sunday and I have a confession to make. I’ve always had a complicated relationship with the Trinity. I know it’s important and meaningful, but there have been times where it felt more like a brick wall I couldn’t get past. Recently though, I’ve changed and found so much beauty in the Trinity so, I want to tell you to where this complicated relationship began and show you what I’ve learned since.
It all began the summer before I started Seminary. In the midst of moving, I signed up for my classes. I chose all the courses I thought you were supposed to take in your first semester, but little did I know that I’d signed up for a combination of classes that were notorious where I went to Seminary—Funny enough, students and professors called the combination of classes I’d signed up for “the Holy Trinity.” The classes were Old Testament, Systematic Theology, and Early and Medieval Church History. Apparently the course load was so intense that students are encouraged to never take all three together. I had no idea!
I ended up taking the Holy Trinity of classes and it was hard for sure, but I loved it. My brain was processing lots every day, and connecting dots across classes, but it was all a very intellectual. We weren’t thinking about faith in practical term. This became clear to me when I started an internship as a chaplain after my first year. I worked at a very old hospital that offered long term care to patients with intellectual differences so I had to offer care that was very concrete, not intellectual.
Just to give you an example of the kinds of interactions I had, there was an individual I worked with who’d been hospitalized since 1986, so before I was born. One day, this patient got very excited when I sat down to meet with him. He told me, “Oh Rebekah! There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you: I’m rich now.” I asked him how he got rich and he told me his name was Commodore Lionel Richie. Not only did he make money by singing and dancing, but he also owned a liquor store so he had multiple streams of income. Almost every interaction with him was like this—he told me he was CEO of the hospital, Picasso, the President, very little was based in reality, but I loved meeting with this patient. I never knew what story he would tell me, but it was always a delight.
Sitting next to him during the last week of my internship, I had one of the most powerful experiences of my Seminary journey. As he shared yet another one of his wild stories, I felt this abiding sense that he was deeply loved by God. It dawned on me in that moment that in my classes at school, I was so determined to think about God the right way because I thought that if I could just get the theology right, my life and ministry would fall into place. But sitting with this patient, I saw how misguided that was. There was no way he could ever grasp a theological concept like the Trinity, but that had no impact on how God saw him or on his sense of faith. So I saw that couldn’t use theology as a tool to get life just right. It was a way for me to love God and love my neighbor.
So I wasn’t sure that realities as complex as the Trinity—the notion of God as divine parent and child, as Jesus, and as the Holy Spirit, all at once, were helpful in this. I saw people fighting over the Trinity and it made me wonder if the Trinity as a concept sometimes drove a wedge between people. But what I came to learn over time, is that paradox is our most valuable spiritual tool. Our ability to hold differing ideas in tension with one another allows us to embrace what we can’t fully understand. In our Scripture for today, this is what allows the prophet Isaiah—a man with unclean lips—to serve a God who is holy and set apart. This is what ensured that my interactions with a patient who was very removed from reality taught me more about God than any professor or class in theology I took. Paradox is at the heart of our faith—It’s this reality that out of deepest darkness, there is light, that in death new life can be found. That through God’s grace, God loves and accepts us even if we reject God.
To me, the Trinity gets at the mystery of God’s amazing grace more powerfully than just about anything else. And so it’s my prayer that when you are faced with a paradox—whether it’s the Trinity, whether it’s finding God’s love in the least likely place or person as I did, you will not run from it or reject but instead will say, “Here am I. Send me” and embrace it. Amen.
Today we have the absolute delight of celebrating the mystery of God’s amazing grace through baptism. I want to invite the Cleary family to come forward for the baptism of Cameron Michael Cleary.
Finish reading
PART 2: Jesus in the Sacraments
You’re not going to believe this, in fact, I barely believe it. I was in a Panera on Friday, 2 days ago, having lunch, and there was group of about 8 or 10 young guys sitting near me. They seemed to be good friends and were bantering back and forth with one another. I was reading a book and didn’t pay attention to what they were saying but enjoyed hearing the sound of their jovial conversations and periodic outbursts of laughter.
Then, my ears perked up as I realized one of the group was talking about scripture. First, he referenced the Matthew passage that gives us the Lord’s Prayer and the group was impressed by his knowledge. Then, he mentioned today’s passage from John, and quoted verse 16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…” and went on to explain the verse to his friends – “God loved the world so much, that he gave us his Son, Jesus.”
After he said that, the group resumed their banter and joking and I could no longer understand what they were saying, but the way that guy rephrased verse 16 kept ringing in my mind. It was a simple change in wording with a deep impact. God loved the world so much, that he gave us his Son. Jesus came into this world, our world because of God’s love – God’s love for the world and all who are in it.
Today we are talking about the Trinity: God, Christ, and Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ is the part of the trinity that we know through our own human flesh. I’ve heard it said this way: that Jesus is God’s human touch in the world. We see that human touch in our only 2 Sacraments – Baptism and Communion. It is a rare joy to celebrate both in one service as we are today.
These are our only Sacraments because they are the only rituals in scripture that Jesus both participated in and commanded us to repeat. He was baptized by John in the Jordan river[1] and he told us to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”[2] He instituted Communion through the Last Supper with his disciples and told us to “do this often in remembrance of me.”[3]
God’s love for us and for the world are at the center of both. In Baptism, we claim and proclaim our identity as beloved children of God – an identity that shapes our lives in love. In Communion, we practice this love by gathering at a table where we recognize all whom God created as our siblings in Christ. A table where we are reminded to treat one another with love and respect and to come together across divides for the sake of peace and justice.
Baptism and Communion are physical acts that involve elements we can touch – water in Baptism, bread and cup in Communion. They are ways we can still feel the human touch of Jesus through our own human flesh that also point to the love God shows us in Jesus. God’s eternally unconditional love that is for us and for the world through us. Amen.
[1] Matthew 3:13-17, Mark 1:9-11, Luke 3:21-22, and John 1:32-34:
[2] Matthew 28:19
[3] Luke 22:19 and 1 Corinthians 11:25
PART 3: The Holy Spirit Our Companion
Holy Spirit our Companion! Even as I say this, I realize how significant and also how different and mysterious our understanding is of the Holy Spirit, especially when compared to the other two members of the Trinity. I have often thought of the Holy Spirit as the forgotten child, the one least understood. We can look around at the earth and all creation and witness with our eyes the power of God, we see Jesus and his work revealed throughout scripture and in our sacraments of baptism and Holy Communion but the Holy Spirit…the Holy Spirit’s presence in our lives and in our church requires a special pair of glasses, or perhaps a unique vision.
Why is that? Recognizing the Holy Spirit requires perception by the heart. So much of our faith is tied to our brains; reading, pondering, memorizing…oh but not so with the Spirit, that mysterious Holy Spirit can only be detected by the heart…an internal realization…an internal sense of movement and energy that makes us spiritually alive. The Spirit connects us from the physical world to the spiritual world. Richard Rohr, my favorite Franciscan Theologian explains it another way he says this, “If there’s never any movement, energy, excitement, deep love, service, forgiveness, or surrender, we can be pretty sure we aren’t living out of the Spirit. If our whole lives are just going through the motions, if there’s never any deep conviction, we aren’t connected to the Spirit.”
But the opposite, being connecting to the Spirit means we experience movement, energy, excitement, deep love, service, forgiveness and surrender. Now I’m not trying to say you will be filled with energy and excitement or any one of these attributes all the time…but rather it’s those moments that come and go when we are moved in these ways. With the Holy Spirit, it’s not about believing it is all about connecting. And in this connection to the Spirit, we find this ever present companionship. The Holy Spirit is our Companion!
We believe in the Triune God, God, Jesus and Holy Spirit. God’s very Spirit breathed into the world to create life, Jesus revealed to us God’s great love of us and how we are to live out this love as Children of God. And the Holy Spirit, the Spirit is our companion that connects us to the source of love and life. Amen