Happy Trinity Sunday! It’s our day, folks. The day that we celebrate the theological doctrine for which our church was named. I wanted to open the sermon this morning by talking about why we are called Trinity, and make some sort of connection between that decision and who we are. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out why we are called Trinity. I did learn from the 75th anniversary book that the congregation was originally called St. Paul’s. This apparently caused some confusion owing to the fact that there were two St. Paul’s Lutheran churches in Battle Creek, this one and St. Paul’s Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod on Capital Ave. North East. So in 1942, the congregation decided to change the name of the church to Trinity, in order to be more distinct I suppose, the book did not go into great detail on the name change. At any rate, there went my witty and engaging sermon opener.
Whatever the reasons for choosing the name, Trinity is, I think, a good name for a church, for reasons I’ll get to later, but a strange name for a church holiday. Trinity Sunday is one of the only days in the church year dedicated to celebrating an idea. Every other church feast day celebrates an event, like Pentecost, Christmas, Easter, even the less well known ones, that don’t always get their own Sunday, like Ascension, the day Jesus ascended into heaven or Annunciation, when the angel appeared to Mary and announced she would have a child, all these days celebrate a thing that happened. Even if the thing is a strange thing, like the ascension, it was at least a thing that was seen and felt and experienced. We also have a lot of feast days to celebrate people. St. Peter day, St. Paul, Martin Luther’s birthday. We don’t celebrate a lot of the saint days here, but my internship had a weeknight service that frequently celebrated saint days. And let me tell you, as the intern who drew the short straw on the preaching assignments, there are a lot of saint days, and some of them are weird.
But even a day set aside to celebrate St. Bernadine of Siena, the patron saint of hoarseness—who knew that mild throat discomfort needed its own day—at least there again we are given something to see, something to connect to. On Trinity Sunday, we celebrate a theological concept. And not just any theological concept, we celebrate the one that theologians have cherished in struggling with and fighting over for millennia, the question of what it means that we proclaim a one God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One equals three, three equals one, it’s like the celebration of bad math day. So heated do our struggles over Trinitarian theology become that literal wars have been fought over it. And early. No sooner had the Roman Empire converted to Christianity then Constantine had to call a council to settle the question of how one God could be three. The result of the council was the Nicean Creed, that longer, more poetic version of the Apostle’s Creed that we frequently use at Easter and some feast days. Unfortunately, even this did not settle the issue. Some bishops signed on to the creed, others refused and were exiled, the church tried again a few years later with the longer and even more confusing Athanasian Creed, which we almost never use in worship because it is very very long. Before I get too swept up in the history of the early church, I think it is enough to say that the trinity is high on the list of things that Christian theologians love to fight about.
Truth be told, I think it’s good that we struggle with the trinity. I think it’s good for a couple of reasons. One, because at the heart of these debates is the essential question of who God is. And it turns out that words matter, that language matters, that the ways we describe God to in fact impact the ways we experience God. So it’s important that we talk about it, think about it, work through language around the nature of God. It’s important to challenge ideas that fall short and refresh metaphors that once fit but have grown small and tired with overuse. When we stop discussing, struggling, questioning, and yes, even fighting, that is when faith becomes distant and old, when we stop being able to experience God coming anew in our lives.
Another reason I think it’s good that we struggle with the trinity is because it reminds us that the trinity is bigger than the words we try to hang off it, that God is beyond our comprehension. Our inability to tie up the trinity in a tidy theological explanation reminds us that we worship a God who will not be contained by our ideas of God, but is instead always just beyond our grasp, drawing us constantly into new and deeper understandings of the beauty and majesty of God’s glorious unveiling. And because God is vast. Because God is beyond our comprehension, beyond our knowing, we need each other. We need each other to see God more fully. Each of us carries for the other a part of the divine mystery, and only through the gathered community can we get a glimpse of the wholeness of God. The incredible complexity of the trinity reminds us that God is too marvelous for us. But in questions and wonderings, each of us carry a piece of the puzzle, and in questioning and wondering and marveling together, we come to know more than we could ever know alone. The gathered community not only unveils wisdom, it also has the capacity to hold wisdom. There are days and times, periods of faith where the wonder of God seems far away. When we are grounded by the daily toil, swept off by crisis, or held under by illness, grief, or fear, when God seems distant and faraway and out of touch with the experience of life on this dusty planet. And it is in those distant times, when doubts overwhelm us, that the gathered community holds for us the mystery of faith. It is why we worship together. The ebb and flow of hymns and scriptures, words and actions, the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles Creed, eating bread and drinking wine, confessing sins and receiving forgiveness, we do these things every Sunday trusting that every Sunday there are some among us who cannot do those things in faith, who are simply going through the motions. And so the rest of us carry on the load of worship, singing songs, saying prayers, breaking bread and joining in fellowship, holding space for each other until we learn to worship again.
This questioning together, learning together, walking together and holding space for each other is in fact the very nature of what the trinity is. In the relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we see the perfection of Christian community, and through the divine mystery of three things that are one thing, we are drawn into this dance of relationship, becoming a part of the one, and made into one thing ourselves, the community and kingdom of God.
All this to say, for whatever reason it was chosen, I think Trinity, in all its nuanced complexity, is an excellent name for a church. Because the church, like the trinity, is bigger than anything we can bring ourselves. It is power and glory, relationship and struggle, and yes, often a few tooth and nail fights, the sort of fights you only have with people you love, the sort of fights that on good days help us to see things in a new way, so that each of us come out the other side stronger and better for having gone through it.
And so, on this day in which we celebrate the divine mystery, let us remember that God is bigger than our words and beyond our comprehension, and that God, in God’s vast and beautiful wisdom, gave us to each other, so that through each other we might come to know the love of God who is love beyond all knowing. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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