Trinity Sunday Year C 6/15/2025
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Canticle 2 & 13; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15
Rev. Mark A. Lafler
Today is the feast day of The Holy Trinity… Trinity Sunday!
The last major feast day until All Saints’ Day on November 1st.
The long stretch of ordinary time or as it is called the Season after Pentecost begins in our liturgical calendar.
But today is dedicated to our theological, doctrinal, and worshipful understanding of the Holy Trinity.
As Christians we believe that God has revealed himself to us as Triune.
That is one God in three persons:
God the Father,
God the Son,
God the Holy Spirit.
And we see this revelation of God in our readings from Romans and from the Gospel of John…
All three persons of the Holy Trinity are named in each of those readings.
Thus, we have the doctrine of the Holy Trinity…
developed from the revelation of Scripture.
In the autobiography of General Douglas MacArthur, he recalls an education strategy he carried out while he was at West Point before his graduation in 1903. (in Reminiscences)
He writes:
The first section was studying the time-space relationship later formulated by Einstein as his Theory of Relativity.
The text was complex and, being unable to comprehend it,
I committed the pages to memory.
When I was called upon to recite, I solemnly reeled off almost word for word what the book said.
Our instructor, Colonel Fieberger,
looked at me somewhat quizzically and asked,
“Do you understand this theory?”
It was a bad moment for me,
but I did not hesitate in replying, “No, sir.”
You could have heard a pin drop.
I braced myself and waited.
And then the slow words of the professor:
“Neither do I, Mr. MacArthur.
Section dismissed.”
That’s probably how a lot of us feel about the Holy Trinity…
We can state the doctrine.
We believe in One God:
God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit.
But apart from reciting the formula, we don’t understand it.
And it’s probably good that we don’t try…
As almost instantly when we do try, we either state the heresy of Modalism or the heresy of Arianism.
We won’t dive into those today…
The Holy Trinity, though, is not something easily grasped…
It is always said and believed in faith…
Through the revelation of Scripture.
The Holy Trinity is a theological understanding of God that speaks to the heart of who we are and who we are in God.
As the Rev. Zac Neubauer states:
The Holy Trinity isn’t a math problem to be solved but a relationship to enter into.
So today we will lay aside the work of trying to understand the Holy Trinity…
Instead, we will look at one of the things that the doctrine of the Holy Trinity teaches us.
Specifically, what it teaches us about relationship.
We believe that the Godhead, that is, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit has always existed and always will.
This is the theology behind our prayer in the Gloria Patri:
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit:
as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be for ever.
Amen.
Jesus has always been… he wasn’t created at the Incarnation.
The Holy Spirit has always been… he wasn’t created at Pentecost.
All three persons were present at the creation of all things.
So, the Holy Trinity has existed for all of eternity.
Therefore, so has the love, friendship, and mutuality of the Holy Trinity.
The Holy Trinity has always existed in love.
Again, as my colleague Zac Neubauer writes:
It is not as if the Holy Trinity looked down on us in our helplessness and then decided to be loving,
no, the love that the Holy Trinity has for us is an overflow of its very nature. God is love.
The Holy Trinity’s love is the ultimate reality.
God has always existed in love.
And he invites us into that relationship of love.
In fact, we get a feel for this in our reading from Romans.
It declares:
…we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through
whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand…. because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the
Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
Here you see all three persons of the Trinity at work.
With the main thought being that because of God’s grace…
Because of this gift that he has given to us…
God’s love has been poured into our hearts.
It is about God’s love being made alive in us.
This love being made alive through the power of the Holy Spirit.
And the greatest example of this love of the Holy Trinity being poured into our hearts…
Into our life…
Is that we as sinful humanity…
deserving the wrath of God…
But because of Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross,
his resurrection from the grave,
and his ascension to the heavens,
and through the power of the Holy Spirit,
we as Christians are reunited with God the Father.
We are reconciled with God in love.
We have peace with God through Jesus Christ…
(as it said in our Romans text).
God invites us into his love.
Into the love relationship that the Holy Trinity has mutually in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
We can struggle to try to explain the Holy Trinity,
but the reality is that we can experience the Holy Trinity!
We are invited and brought into this love relationship.
And it is through this state of being…
Through this relationship of love.
That we find out who we are…
We are the beloved of God.
We are his people.
We are his children.
We are righteous.
We are forgiven.
We are wonderfully made.
We are never alone.
God delights in us.
God treasures us.
God loves us and invites us into his love.
Into the mutual love of the Holy Trinity.
And once we live in the reality of who we are in relationship to God…
To the Holy Trinity…
We can have a greater foundation of the love that we are called to have for one another.
Our experience…
Our personhood…
Our relationship and reality…
When we understand the Holy Trinity’s Grace, Love, and Communion with us…
We discover that it is the basis for how we are to live with and love one another.
The more we understand the love of the Holy Trinity…
And not just a head knowledge understanding…
But a living, breathing, experiential understanding of the love of the Holy Trinity…
We can truly love each other as God calls us to do.
Well how do we do that in our world?
True in this world we are told day after day…
Sometimes hour by hour…
who we are to like and who we are to dislike.
We are told who we should support and who we should slander.
We are told who we are to love and what we are to love…
And we are told who we are to hate and what we are to hate.
And that message is the way of the world.
Drifting with the winds of trends and culture…
But we are called to more than the shadowlands of our society.
To the whims of our world.
We have been created and invited into the love of the Divine Creator… the Holy Trinity.
Not to follow the ways of this world…
But to be transformed by his love.
That is the love of Jesus Christ who gave up his life for us…
…a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world (BCP, 334).
To know what love is…
What love looks like in this world…
It looks like Jesus on the cross.
And that is the way…
The path…
That we are invited to take…
To receive by grace through faith…
To enter into the love of the Holy Trinity.
To enter into the mutual love of our one God in three persons.
I want to conclude with a reading of scripture from St. John’s first epistle.
St. John really brings this whole message all together in 1 John 4.
Listen to this, he writes:
7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.
8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.
10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another,
God lives in us and his love is made complete in us….
God is love.
Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
(1 John 4:7-12, 16).
This is the message of God.
This is the message of the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
You are loved.
And you are invited into his love.
And in this divine love, we understand how to love one another.
Praise be to God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit… Amen.
