Trinity Sunday, June 4 - Beyond Understanding

This sermon was preached for Trinity Sunday, June 4, 2023 at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in East Longmeadow, MA. The texts for this sermon were: Genesis 1:1-2:4a, Matthew 28:16-20, and Psalm 8.

When I was serving in Medford, I had the chance to attend a prayer service at the Kurukulla Center for Tibetan Buddhist Studies. I sat cross-legged amidst rows of chanting monks, with no clue as to what was going on. Everything was in Tibetan, of course, and the liturgy was entirely unfamiliar. My hosts had kindly set a three ring binder with lists of chants in front of each meditation pillow and I remember frantically flipping through in a futile attempt to decipher each chant’s transliterations and the corresponding translations. Finally I gave up and sat back and let the chanting wash over me. Only then, only in letting the chants just be what they were, and letting me be what I was, did a spiritual experience begin to open up before me. Only then did I hear the beauty of the words, not because I understood them, but because I allowed them to move me. 

Kurukulla Center for Tibetan Buddhist Studies, Medford, Mass.

Today is Trinity Sunday. It’s traditionally the Sunday to teach about the doctrine of the Trinity - our belief in God as three-in-one, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Today, therefore, is also the best Sunday to contemplate and celebrate all that we do not understand about God. Because the Trinity truly defies explanation. Now I have devoted my life to studying about God, years learning how to teach the Christian perspective on the divine - that work is literally in my vows. Yet our theology professors make sure none of us graduate seminary without this one key humility:  all the words and metaphors we can use to describe the relationship between Father and Son and Holy Spirit - personhood, begotten not made, even the fancy ones in the origins of our Creed, words like homoousios and peri-chor-esis  - they all fall short. The three are in constant motion loving, being loved, overflowing love out into creation. Unable to be pinned down.

The Trinity, like all doctrine, is ultimately an imperfectly human attempt to give shape and name to our collective experience of a God beyond human comprehension. Hear me out, claiming God defies explanation is not a cop-out. It’s not lazy theological hand waving. It's a vital part of what it means to have faith.

You see, behind our drive to understand lies our need for control. Once we can understand something or someone, we can predict it. We can anticipate, we can prepare. We can act on it, master it. We can be in control. 

Faith, on the other hand, is what allows us to accept that we are not in control. Faith is choosing to trust in spite of fear. Faith, as many of you have taught me, faith is the secret to resiliency, to forbearance when circumstances force us to confront the limits of our own power.

Theologian Kate Bowler writes in her introduction to The Lives We Actually Have: 100 Blessings for Imperfect Days, "We like to imagine that we are built out of every small choice we made…this will make it hard to accept something that, deep down, we also know to be true: that most of what defines our lives happens to us." 

So much of what happens to us, so much of our lives and our world, we will never fully understand. 

The first version of the story of creation we heard this morning tells a deceptively simple story: God took chaos - darkness and a formless void - and created order from it. God created light and dark, and separated them. Land and water, and separated them. Different categories of living things: plants and sea creatures and birds and land animals. Male and female. Nice, neat categories. Separate and definable. Everything in its place. 

Now, there’s a danger in elevating this vision of creation too highly, just as there is a danger in memorizing basic doctrine and leaving it at that. We can assume that order, control, and proper categories are the ways things are meant to be experienced. But what if we take the words, “in the beginning” seriously. What if we take categories and simplicity as more of a starting point than a destiny?

Creation, as I have experienced it, is filled with diversity and complexity and category-defying mysteries. I love what Lutheran pastor Asher O'Callaghan wrote about the gift of the in-between. God created night and day, he writes. And yet the most beautiful hours of our lives are the in-between times - the neither-day-nor-night, neither-light-nor-dark-ness of dawn and dusk: sunrises and sunsets. Where would we be without their astonishing glory? Or the stark majesty of the in-between of land, water, and sky, cliffs and coastlines and fjords? God created them, too.

God created land animals and sea creatures, and yet here’s the frog, half its life in water and half on land. And yet there’s egg-laying mammals called platypuses and squirrels and fish that fly and even the moving predator plant called a Venus fly trap. There are creatures who shift from male to female and back again over their life-span. Viruses who act alive but aren’t, not really. So much we still don’t understand and maybe never will. Mind-blowing diversity, flowing in and out of definitions, blurring lines, overflowing boundaries. 

Humanity, as I have experienced it, is also filled with diversity and complexity and category-defying mystery. Ways of being human I will never fully understand. Entire spectrums of color where once we were taught only to see black and white. When I let go of my need to understand or define the other people, when I begin to blur the categories and boxes that keep us apart, only then can I appreciate and celebrate the full beauty of the people I share this planet with - even the people I shared my life and home with. 

The eternal dance of the Trinity - the dynamic choreography of love between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - reminds us that being created in God’s image is not about fitting into definable categories. The essence of God is relationship, complexity, and interdependence. To be created in God’s image means we are created to love and be loved and share that love, we are made to be complicated, we are designed to depend on and support one another. 

Now there is value in admitting, I just don’t understand that way of living, being, acting, loving. Beauty in saying to the other, help me understand you. Yet faith teaches us that we do not need to understand in order to love. Indeed, part of love is allowing the other to remain mysterious to us, out of our control. And I’m not just talking about our love for foreigners or strangers or neighbors. How many couples counselors advise preserving some mystery in a marriage? Letting go of ever fully understanding our children and who they’ve grown up to be, isn’t that vital to a harmonious relationship? When we can honestly say to our friends and family, “I love and honor even what I really don’t get about who and how you are” - it is then that we begin to reflect God’s unconditional love in our lives. 

This piece of Christian faith and love is part of why I believe so strongly in resisting the temptation to explain how the Eucharist works, or trying to make sense of Christ’s presence in the bread and wine. When we fool ourselves into thinking we understand the Lord’s table, we can so easily fool ourselves into believing that this table is ours. Ours to dictate who can receive and who is turned away. Ours to control. But you don’t need to understand in order to love. You don’t need to understand in order to receive love, either. 

So my formative experience of Tibetan chanting? Turns out we’re maybe supposed to have that kind of experience here, too, in our own liturgy. 

The Trinity beckons us into mystery. The Eucharist invites us to let ourselves be drawn to the unknown, an undefinable experience of God and God’s generosity. 

We called to celebrate, literally celebrate, the mystery of God, creation, and one another. 

Amen.