I preached this sermon on Sunday, June 15, 2025, for Trinity Sunday (Year C), at St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church and Pro-Cathedral, Brooklyn, New York. The lectionary texts cited can be found here.
Two thousand years ago, our ancestors started telling a story.
They told how God loved the world so much that God came down in flesh, and when God’s body left this earth, a Spirit was sent to us in a rush of wind and tongues of fire.
They came to call God “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”—the Godhead, three Persons in one.
As the story spread, our ancestors argued about how these divine Persons related to each other. In Councils of the fourth and fifth centuries, this story was refined and codified. The arguments were heated. Some say that at the Council of Nicea, St. Nicholas became so enraged by Arius’ heretical teaching, that he struck Arius in the face. (And yes, this is the St. Nicholas of Santa Claus fame.)
In discussions of substance, hypostases, and who proceeds from whom, our ancestors entered into a paradox of three Persons in one God—a paradox that lands in relationship: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The story didn’t stop there.
Christians continue to enter into this paradox, encountering, again and again, the God who loved the world so much that God came down in flesh, and gave us the divine Spirit.
Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus described the Trinity as perichoresis: a Greek word meaning “rotation” and “interpenetration” … a word also used for a traditional Greek wedding dance, in which there are not two dancers, but at least three. Three Persons in a dance of divine love.
In the mystic treatise Revelations of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich comes to understand the Trinity—in an ecstatic vision—as Maker, Keeper, and Lover. Julian also recognized God as both Mother and Father, as did Gregory of Nyssa centuries before her.
The story our ancestors passed down to us continues to unfold. The Spirit of truth guides us into all the truth, revealing new chapters to the story of a God who can’t bear not to be with us; a God who doesn’t know how not to love us; a God who pours love into our hearts.
We were given the gift of paradox.
Elegant attempts are made in systematic theologies to understand the impossible—-attempts that, clearly, have not satisfied our knowing, since they continue to be written.
The theologian Sarah Coakley suggests that the Holy Trinity is better entered into through prayer and contemplation than academic discipline.
Behold the paradox.
Behold the love poured out to make the impossible possible.
Behold a God both tangible and transcendent, within us and beyond us, kataphatic and apophatic, swirling in and out of what we can grasp.
God is the lover and the beloved. We can never fully know, so we never stop yearning for, the God who confounds the laws of the universe to be with us—the God who yearns for us too.
The gift of paradox safeguards us from certainty.
Who can claim to know God? Who can understand the impossible?
A God small enough for humans to comprehend isn’t a God who can redeem this world through love. A God small enough for us to comprehend would certainly be used to divide and diminish.
Thank God for our ancestors who resisted the cheap satisfaction of simple explanations.
The story of the Trinity invites us into the exuberant freedom of a wedding dance, brushing truth as we twirl and change hands.
We do not understand.
We do not understand.
But we yearn for God. We reach for our lover and beloved, who reaches back to us in confounding and impossible ways.
We are bearers of this story now too: in dance and prayer, poetry, music, and sometimes, yes, even in systematic theologies.
We tell the story of a paradox: the Holy Trinity, three Persons in one God.
The story goes like this: God is our Father and our Mother, who made all things in goodness. God loved the world so much that God became a human being, Jesus Christ, to teach us, heal us, and bring us back to God. When God enfleshed ascended to heaven, God poured love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who guides us into all truth.
Now it’s your turn. How will you tell the story?
Artwork: Latimore, Kelly. Trinity, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=57123 [retrieved June 15, 2025]. Original source: Kelly Latimore Icons, https://kellylatimoreicons.com/.
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