Sermon: Wisdom and Trinity

First Presbyterian Church

June 15, 2025, Trinity C

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Romans 5:1-5

 

Wisdom and Trinity

 

It's an almost stereotypical image, one found in comic strips or editorial cartoons or any number of other visual media. In it you see a lone sojourner, or maybe a pair, hiking or even climbing their way up a mountainside or cliff. When they get to the top, they find a lone figure, typically an elderly man, probably seated with legs crossed, appearing as a guru or sage of some sort prepared to dispense wisdom. 

The scene is often used for comic effect, but it trades on something of a traditional image of a seeker of wisdom as being one who is cut off from society, engaged in solitary contemplation in that withdrawn setting. The writer of today's reading from Proverbs would not necessarily agree with this image of withdrawal in search of wisdom.

Today's reading is part of a more extended rhapsody (my word) on wisdom, briefly touched on in chapter 7 and then taking up most of chapters 8 and 9. It follows a discourse on a different character, one who would lead astray (in many different ways) the young student to which Proverbs is directed. In this rhapsody Wisdom is personified; most of chapters 8 and 9 are depicted as wisdom speaking to that young student. 

Let's go ahead and make this clear: yes, Wisdom really is personified in this rhapsody as a woman. Take that, guys. In context, the character in the previous discourse who would lead the young student astray is also a woman, so the passage works as a clever literary device to present the two different paths set before the young student. Still, Wisdom (divine wisdom, clearly, as the rest of the discourse makes clear) is personified as female. Right out of the Bible, folks.

The opening four verses of the chapter set forth the character (sometimes called Woman Wisdom in the scholarly literature), and our author's depiction of Wisdom at work doesn't quite square up with the mountaintop guru of comic-strip notoriety. Far from having to be sought out in some isolated place, Wisdom is out in the world, calling to anyone who would listen:

At the highest point along the way, where the paths meet she takes her stand; beside the gates leading into the city, at the entrance, she cries aloud...

 

This isn't wisdom in hiding or in secret. She's out there, calling out for all to hear. 

"All fine and good," you may say, while either being excited or offended to see something of the divine being portrayed as a woman. "All fine and good," you may say, "but what does any of this have to do with Trinity Sunday? Why aren't you preaching on something more obvious like that reading from Romans where all the persons of the Trinity are mentioned? Why is this Proverbs bit in the readings for today?" That's where verses 22-31 come in. 

That section opens with Wisdom's declaration that "The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old." It may surprise you to hear that this description was the subject of heated debate at no less than the Council of Nicaea, the first meeting of which took place way back in the year 325, and which was the initiator of that statement of faith we know as the Nicene Creed (we tend to say it in worship on Sundays when the Lord's Supper happens). In their extensive and often testy debates over the nature of the Trinity, this passage, with its confusing Hebrew about being "created" or is it being "begotten" or "made" or "born" became a shorthand for discussing whether the second Person of the Trinity - the one we call God the Son, or Jesus - was "created" or "begotten" or "made" or "born" in John 1. Indeed, for some years, this character of Wisdom was sometimes discussed as a foreshadowing of the Son of God (notwithstanding Wisdom being personified as a woman here!) and of that Son's being "in the beginning with God," as John 1 says, or being one through whom "all things were made" as the Nicene Creed ends up saying.

If that's how the second Person of the Trinity is involved here, the largest part of the reading names the first Person of the Trinity as the great Creator of all. Most of the text describes Woman Wisdom's bearing witness as God engages in the various acts of creation and even being God's "delight, rejoicing before Him always" and also "delighting in the human race." 

While the third Person of the Trinity is less directly invoked here, it has not escaped notice that the way Wisdom is described in this rhapsody looks and sounds a lot like the way the Holy Spirit gets described in various other corners of scripture. All that business about not being hidden off on some mountaintop but being out in the streets and at the gates of the city is awfully similar to the doings of the Spirit, after Pentecost in particular.

None of this should be taken as a "proof" of anything. Obviously, this was written many, many years before the Nativity or Pentecost. What this quite exuberant passage does show us is that God's people have been, literally for centuries, even millenia, seeking ways to understand and comprehend how God moves in God's world. We aren't the first to struggle with it. The Council of Nicaea wasn't the first to struggle with it. And no doubt even the writer of Proverbs wasn't the first either. Outside of the more dramatic interventions revealed in scripture - say, the Exodus, or Pentecost, or the very life of Jesus - God's people have been challenged by the work of putting together all that we have been shown and instructed in order, not to have God completely figured out, but at least not to get God egregiously and harmfully wrong. 

In the end, perhaps such words as "wonder," or even the "delight" that Wisdom herself invokes in today's reading, might be at the last the best place to end up in such pursuits. To borrow the Apostle Paul's words from 1 Corinthians, we are still in that place where we see "in a mirror, dimly"; the time when we "will see face to face" is not yet here. Would that this age of contemplation would be, rather than a source of dispute and anger over the nature of God, be a source of delight, perhaps with the help of good old Woman Wisdom.

For wisdom and her delight, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise noted): #1, Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty; #8, Eternal Father, Strong to Save; #2, Come, Thou Almighty King

For those who miss the non-heretical kittens...

Sermon: The Power of Three (in One)

First Presbyterian Church

May 26, 2024, Trinity B

Isaiah 6:1-8; Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17

 

The Power of Three (in One)

 

“Three is a magic number…”

At least that’s what I was taught by one of the “Multiplication Rock” cartoons I so eagerly watched as a child, part of the "Schoolhouse Rock" series I similarly devoured. The song went on to describe all sorts of things that came in threes. It also taught me a little ditty to remember my multiplication tables for the number three: “Three six nine…twelve fifteen eighteen…twenty-one twenty-four twenty-seven…thirty.” I would always be grateful for that in math classes.

Of course, there are lots of other places where I was taught that three was somehow an important grouping of things. It was, after all, three blind mice and three little pigs, not two blind mice or four little pigs. Even other songs, like the Jackson 5’s “ABC,” made a big deal out of that number: “A, B, C, it’s easy as 1, 2, 3, oh, simple as do, re, mi, A, B, C, 1, 2, 3…” (Sadly, that tune has gotten completely corrupted by being appropriated for some awful prescription drug commercial, with the 1, 2, 3 part now made ugly to remember.) And threes of various sorts pop up in all sorts of literature, art, music, you name it. You could almost be persuaded that three really is some sort of magic number.

Now I’m not a scholar on popular culture and how it gets that way, but it’s hard not to suspect that part of the reason that the number three carries such cultural significance is because of exactly the thing we commemorate on this day of the liturgical year. For all of the significance it holds in the church’s understanding of God, the whole idea of the Trinity is one of the least understood corners of the church’s doctrine and has been virtually since the beginning. Our reading from the gospel of John gets chosen mostly because if you read it with brain fully engaged, you can sort of see how all three members of the Trinity are found in the discussion, with “God” here being used to represent that first member of the Trinity known through much of the church’s history as “God the Father.” The Spirit gets much mention here with the comparison to the wind blowing where it will, and of course the “money verses” at the end speak directly of the Son and his work in the world. So yeah, you can sort of read this as a “Trinitarian” reading. This shouldn’t be taken to suggest that this is what Jesus (or John) meant this passage to be, although Nicodemus would hardly be the only person to be baffled by a discussion of the Trinity if that had been the case. 

The Spirit is introduced as an entity separate from the flesh, as in verse 6's terse formula that "Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit." The other two members of the Trinity are forwarded in verses 16 and 17. Again, by no means is it Jesus's or John's purpose to explain or even propose any kind of doctrine of the Trinity; here it simply happens that in attempting to get through to the baffled Nicodemus, Jesus speaks (and John records) and invokes the distinct members of the Trinity to demonstrate how one comes to see the kingdom of God.

The reading from Isaiah, while a spectacular portrait of the grandeur of God and one of the central “call stories” of scripture, really doesn’t help us much with the idea of the Trinity specifically, aside from providing the inspiration for today’s last hymn. On the other hand, the short passage from Paul's letter to Rome does at least address all three persons of the Trinity, it is primarily focused on the work of the Holy Spirit; it could easily have been part of last week's lectionary. Even here, though verse 13 - "For if you live according to the flesh, you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live" - is closely akin to 3:6 from the gospel reading. Here, though, it is the Spirit that does the work of leading us towards God and reminding us that we are children of God, "heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ." 

The whole concept of Trinity has been so vexing that many of the church’s most ancient creeds were created specifically to address the Trinity and the many ways the church risked getting it wrong. (The Nicene Creed, which we do use on communion Sundays here, is perhaps the most prominent such example.) The challenge isn’t merely about being able to count to three, but it resides in the central paradox of the nature of God: even while we recognize what that last hymn today calls “God in three persons, blessed Trinity,” we are also compelled to recognize that, in the words of another hymn that didn't make it into Glory to God, “God is one, unique and holy.” God is three, and God is one. God is one, and God is three. 

This is where people get into trouble. Some have tried to argue, for example, that Father-Son-Spirit (to use the old formula) represents three different modes in which God manifests to humanity. No. This gives rise to the term modalism to label that as heresy – God is “God in three persons,” distinct and individual, yet one. 

On the other hand, you get some kind of attempt (even today in some more fundamentalist circles) to emphasize the three distinct persons of God by, for example, placing them in a hierarchy – God the Father being the big boss and Son and Spirit being subordinate, secondary figures. Nope. God is one, unique and holy – not some corporate hierarchy.

We are perhaps best left with the last stanza of today’s first hymn – “To thee, great One in Three, our highest praises be.” The power of three in one should perhaps be first understood as the power of mystery. It stands against our tendencies to reduce God to the comical grandfatherly figure of comic strip stereotype, or to reduce Jesus to our “best friend,” or to pigeonhole the Holy Spirit as the raucous thing that gets Pentecostals all excited. We don’t get it, and we won’t get it, and, ultimately, what of it? The Spirit, for example, does not rely upon our understanding of it to work on our behalf. We are not going to get everything down pat this side of eternity, and the sooner we get that in our heads the sooner we can get to work on what we do know; the work God has called us to do, the work Jesus showed us how to do, the work the Holy Spirit is leading us to do even now, in the in-between time in which we live, knowing that the God who is one and the God who is Trinity is with us at all times and in all ways. 

When we finally get that understood, we are left with the realization that some things are best left for the musicians to express in song.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #2, Come, Thou Almighty King; #---, We sing of God, Creator high; #1, Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty!

Sermon: Accidental Heresies

First Presbyterian Church

June 4, 2023, Trinity A

Genesis 1:1-3, 26-31; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20

 

Accidental Heresies

 

If you've been wondering where the blessing I tend to use at the end of the service comes from, now you know. 

It shows up in today's lectionary scriptures for obvious reasons, but that doesn't change the fact that for preachers, Trinity Sunday is a field of landmines. 

As one of the few special Sundays on the liturgical calendar that takes a doctrine as its subject rather than an event in the church’s tradition, it can easily seduce a preacher into a futile attempt into explaining said doctrine. Not only is such sermon unlikely to be very successful at engaging hearers, but it also puts the preacher at risk for any of a multitude of errors that have, at some time in the church’s history, been denounced as heresies.

I’m not kidding.

If you saw my Facebook page this week, you might have noticed an odd little animated example of these pitfalls attached to the Trinity. In the cartoon St. Patrick attempts to explain the Trinity to a pair of supposedly simple Irish cousins (at their request) through a series of metaphors, only for those “simple” Irish country folk to shoot Patrick down with the name for the heresy expressed in the metaphor. Water appearing in three different forms – liquid, ice, vapor? Denounced as “modalism,” which was named as heresy at the council of Constantinople way back when. The three-leaf clover? A violation of the teaching that the three persons of the Trinity are of one substance, and are not distinct “parts” of God. This goes on until Patrick finally rants: 

All right, fine! The Trinity is a mystery that cannot be comprehended by human reason, but is understood only through faith, and is best confessed in the words of the Athanasian Creed, which states that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in unity, neither confusing the persons nor dividing the substance; that we are compelled by the Christian truth to confess that each distinct person is God and Lord, and that the deity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is one, equal in glory, co-equal in majesty!

 

To which those “simple” cousins respond, more or less, “well, why didn’t you say so?”

Easy, right?

So no metaphors here. Accidental or not, I don’t need any heresies to deal with right now. Preaching is hard enough as it is.

But if it’s all that difficult, then what’s the possible benefit of having a whole Sunday devoted to this mysterious and seemingly inexplicable concept? Why have a Trinity Sunday at all if all it does is get preachers in trouble? (I realize for some people this is a good reason...)

I think there are a few reasons. 

I doubt this is a primary reason, but one of the great benefits of the doctrine of Trinity to the development of a real, humble, mindful spirituality is precisely that it is so incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to explain or to comprehend. We need to learn that there are things we aren't going to understand or comprehend, and the sooner we learn that, the better.

Today's reading demonstrates how any scripture (and there are a few) that seems to reference or gesture towards God as Trinity tends to do so almost in passing, not at all trying to explain the point but seemingly taking it as given. Even the reading from Genesis seems to have just a little bit of such talk; the "wind from God" in verse 3 somewhat sounds a little bit like the Holy Spirit, and notice how in verse 26 God says "Let us... in our own image...". While one might imagine it as some kind of divine "royal 'we'", it's at least suggestive choice of pronoun. And plenty of readers have bit on that suggestion and run with it, in most cases running too far for the evidence such a two-word phrase can provide.

Unfortunately, humanity has this terrible, destructive habit of taking very scant scriptural evidence and turning it (or trying to turn it) into hardened dogma to be used for judgment rather than instruction for the purpose of edifying the body of Christ. Even a few years ago, once when I was supposedly on vacation, I ended up in a conversation (on a different subject) in which I ended up being asked “so who am I supposed to say wrote it,” ("it" being one of the New Testament epistles of dubious authorship), to which I could only respond “you’re supposed to say you don’t know,” which is actually something Christians should probably say a lot more often than we do.

Today's scripture readings fit into that category pretty well. Much ink has beenn spilled using these readings to "prove" some arcane point about the doctrine of the Trinity that simply can't be sustained by Jesus's final words to his disciples or Paul's benediction to the Corinthians. The point is that these scriptures don't prove God as Trinity at all, but they take it as given.

It does cause one to wonder why think we will win the world to discipleship by logic and factual argument, or by having an airtight system in which no one can poke holes. No, that really isn’t how it works. The sooner we give up the idea that we’ve got God pegged, the better. Really, what kind of God would an easily explainable God be? We are called to live with mystery, folks, and the Trinity is one small but important corner of that mystery. 

Following on this, another possible value of the Trinity as a subject to consider is perhaps in its suggestion of community and togetherness even in the very nature of God; God is inherently in relationship. God is One, even as God is Three – Father, Son, Spirit in a relational sense and in the formula we usually speak in many churches, but we might also describe the Trinity as Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer, emphasizing ways that humanity has experienced God working in God’s world from creation to the redeeming act of the cross to the ongoing sustaining presence recognized in the form of a mighty wind and tongues as of fire at Pentecost. It’s possible we would be well served to widen our vocabulary for speaking of the Persons of the Trinity, rather than being tied down to a single exclusive formula that fails to teach us and bring us into a deeper experience of God as One and God as Three, an experience that might lead us to reconsider our own experience as community, as the body of Christ, as the recipients of the fruits of the Spirit, so that we understand ourselves much more as “we” and get less hung up on the “me”.

This last also points to something that is most useful about these scriptures offered for Trinity in the lectionary. As noted before, both the passages from Matthew and 2 Corinthians more or less seem to assume a three-in-one God even as they also put forth God as still one even as three, so to speak. Matthew’s record of Jesus’s parting words to his disciples places the now-familiar Trinitarian formula so regularly used at baptism – “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” in the context of Jesus’s charge to the disciples to go – “go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them… .” While there’s a certain moment of pause when we, recognizing Jesus as Son of God, note that he’s evoking himself in this formula the way Matthew describes it, we don’t really think about it too much; it has simply become so commonplace that it is part of the sonic furniture of worship, so to speak, only examined more closely on an occasion like today.

Paul’s closing salutation, on the other hand, is born of a much more difficult situation. 2 Corinthians is a hard letter, written to a church that had brought great stress and humiliation upon Paul, and the letter consists a great deal of Paul letting them have it theologically. Nonetheless, as the letter comes to a close Paul chooses to use this salutation to remind them of what they have in common, the experience of God that binds them together to one another and also to the God they worship in common.  (It's worth noting that Paul's usual closing salutation only invokes one of those three elements.)

While we don’t want to get hung up on trying to make this into Trinitarian dogma – “grace must come only from Christ, love only from God, and what does communion even mean?” – we do want to take note of how such an evocative greeting points us again to how we are bound together in God. We are bound together with all the saints in the grace that brings us before God, the love that builds us up in God, and the communion or fellowship we share with one another in God. Paul points the Corinthians (and us) to the fact that while we have experienced God in these differing ways, they are all experiences of God. Three in one, one in three.

Maybe that’s the point here. To speak of this inexplicable mystery of a three-in-one, one-in-three God is perhaps to force ourselves to be sensitive to how we have experienced God. The unspeakable grace and mercy of a Savior who suffered so in redeeming us and restoring us to God; the unspeakable love of a Creator God whose providence is truly limitless; the unspeakable sustaining power of the Spirit that perhaps we don’t recognize until the end of a day we were absolutely convinced we would never get through, only to discover that somehow, we did. 

Even the sacrament we are about to take points to the Trinitarian work; the Redeemer calls us to the table, the bread and drink are given from God's creation, and the Spirit dwelling among us ministers to us in the sacrament. 

No analogies here, no set answers, no easy formulas. Today a preacher can only step away from the pulpit with mystery still fully in place, challenging you – challenging us – to be utterly confident in precisely what we can’t explain, in unending love and undying mercy and unexpected support that we can know as being from God even if we could never write a doctoral dissertation to prove we have conquered it. 

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, the Creator and the Redeemer and the Sustainer, Three in One, One in Three, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #2, Come, Thou Almighty King; #---, We Sing of God, Creator High; #1, Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty

Clearly I failed to heed this advice...

Sermon: Three In One, One In Three

Grace Presbyterian Church

May 31, 2015, Trinity B

Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17

Three in One, One in Three

Today is Trinity Sunday, the last major Sunday observance before the liturgical calendar stretches into the long, green processional of Ordinary Time, at least until October or November. It’s a curious commemoration, one in which instead of a particular event, a theological concept is the subject of the day. And it just happens to be one of the trickiest doctrinal concepts of all being marked, one that contains a whole host of possibilities for leading the pastor astray.

Indeed, the early history of the church is dotted with theological attempts to grapple with the doctrine of Trinity, which later came under official condemnation of the church and led to creedal statements attempting to steer believers away from such unorthodox beliefs. Some tried to argue that one or the other of God the Son or God the Holy Spirit was somehow “less equal” to God the Father, such as Arianism, Psilanthropism, or Pneumatomachianism; teachings that stress the unity of God to the point of denying the Trinitarian nature of God, such as Patripassianism or Sabellianism; or teachings that stressed either the divine or the human nature of Christ to the exclusion of the other, including Nestorianism, Monophysitism, or Docetism, the latter of which taught that Jesus’s entire physical existence was an illusion. That would make the whole Holy Week and Easter cycle rather superfluous, to say the least.

Even attempts to draw analogies to explain the Trinity end up running aground on some sort of heretical concept, even such famous attempts as the three-leaf clover or shamrock supposedly used by St. Patrick of Ireland to explain the Trinity. According to those who spend way too much time thinking about these things, Patrick (had he actually used that metaphor, which is not certain) would have been guilty of partialism, or the teaching that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit individually could not be regarded as God, but only the three in combination could truly be regarded as “God.”

Even those attempts to explain the Trinity that actually pass theological muster can be more convoluted and confusing than helpful. Take this line from the Athanasian Creed, one of the earliest of creeds, created as a doctrinal response to some heresy or other:

“Uncreated is the Father; uncreated is the Son, uncreated is the Spirit.  The Father is infinite, the Son is infinite, the Holy Spirit is infinite.  Eternal is the Father, eternal is the Son, eternal is the Spirit; And yet there are not three eternal beings, but one who is eternal; there are not three uncreated and unlimited beings, but one who is uncreated and unlimited.”

It’s little wonder that one of the most popular social media memes of the last few weeks has been one which offered the following advice to pastors preaching on Trinity Sunday: say nothing, and show pictures of kittens. I fear, though, that somebody out there is sharpening up their critical knives for an argument that kittens are somehow heretical.

Not helping the cause is the fact that scripture nowhere explicitly states or develops anything that could be truly called a doctrine of the Trinity. That is not to say that the idea of the Trinity isn’t there; it is only to observe that the concept is more or less assumed without ever being explained to any degree.

One could point to the stories out of the Book of Acts that we’ve been examining since Easter; as Jesus – God the Son – is about to be taken up from the disciples, he promises that the Holy Spirit – God the Holy Spirit – will come to the disciples to empower them to proclaim the good news. A similar, and even more explicit, formulation is found at the end of Matthew’s gospel, in the Great Commission, in which Jesus commissions the disciples to go to all the nations and make disciples, “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28:19). 

Similarly the language of Trinity is found embedded in today’s readings from Romans and John. Jesus’s discussion with Nicodemus could easily have been used for last week’s observance of Pentecost, particularly in its observation of the qualities of the Spirit, here being described by no less than God the Son.

Paul, grappling with how to explain the great eternal inheritance of believers, makes recourse to the language of Trinity as well. The Spirit (as in God the Holy Spirit) becomes the enabler of believers, the one who enables us to put to death the works of the flesh and to be “adopted” as children of God (the Father), and joint-heirs with Christ (God the Son).

In short, scripture is a lot less interested in explaining the Trinity than it is in describing how God has moved and acted in the world, using language that expresses “God in three persons,” to quote the first hymn we sang today. And yet, as the second hymn of the morning puts it, “God is one, unique and holy,” even if “never single or alone.”

Trying to nail down exactly what’s going on in the doctrine of the Trinity ends up seeming like a fool’s errand. And maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe, in fact, it has a very beneficial effect on us, when we come to realize that the more we demand certainty out of God, the more we demand that we must know exactly what’s going on, the farther we are from actually following and living in the Spirit, living a life that looks as much as possible like the life Christ lived. That the Trinity is, is one thing; trying to dissect in fine detail what exactly that is or how it works might just be what John Calvin would call “inessential.”

Still, though, there are some important lessons we can take from the understanding of God as Three in One, One in Three – enough to justify a Sunday on the liturgical calendar.

For example: If God is Three in One, One in Three, God is inherently community – “never single or alone,” to return to that hymn. If even God lives in community, how can we possibly think we are suited to go it alone?

Let’s extend that a little further. We are taught from way back, alluding to Genesis, that we are created “in the image of God.” Most of the time we tend to interpret that as saying that each one of us, individually, somehow reflects or contains something of the image of God even in our finite created-ness, and I don’t particularly intend to argue against that, but what if the idea of God as Trinity, Three in One, One in Three, opens up another possibility here? What if it is in all of us – the whole, messy, beautiful diversity of humanity – that we see the image of God? Might that possibly change how we relate to one another? Might that challenge us to take yet more seriously the whole business of being a church, being a community, being together as followers of Christ, taking care of one another? One would hope so.

But there’s also another angle to this whole business, that God expresses God-ness in three, specifically.[i] Not two: three.

Think about it. Two is an “even” number; three is an “odd” number. We say “two’s company, three’s a crowd.” We speak of the “odd man out,” or of being a “third wheel.” We speak to each other “face to face” or “one to one,” not “one to one to one” or “two to one” or “one to two”.

A three-way conversation, for example, requires more energy than a conversation between two people. There are two different trains of thought or perspectives to keep up with, not just one. It can be difficult for us to focus equally on two other folks instead of one; we can, if we’re not careful, end up being the aforementioned “third wheel” as the other two end up chatting merrily away. Three is work.

Even with God we can sometimes face the unwitting temptation to “dualize” God, particularly we in more mainline denominations. We can’t really ignore God the Creator, the one we most often simply call “God.” And the life, and teaching, and death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ makes up the core of our faith, and indeed the very one who is our way, truth, and life. Given the prominence of those two “persons” in our theology, the third “person” of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, can fall into a kind of neglect or forgetting (particularly when we haven’t just observed Pentecost a week ago), despite the theological reality that it is the Spirit who most represents God with us in our now, in our everyday living and acting.

Even the historic confessions of the church can sometimes seem to fall into this trap. Look in your bulletin at the Apostles’ Creed, the Affirmation of Faith we will speak together in just a few moments. “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth…” is the very first thing we say, and it’s hard to say much more than that. There follows a very substantial evocation of Jesus Christ, all the way from being “conceived by the Holy Ghost” to his being “seated at the right hand of the Father, from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.”

And then…”I believe in the Holy Ghost…” and without any description or explanation we’re immediately off to the church. Not much of a way to speak of the third person of the Trinity. They didn’t cover this in church history or worship classes, but I can’t help but wonder if this is why we observe that day, and do so the week after Pentecost to boot; to shake us out of our tendency to “dualize” God and forget the full triune communion through which God relates to us and through which God abides with us.

It can seem a little messy at times, it can be unwieldy, it can be hard for us to comprehend, and it certainly isn’t easy to understand. But this is how God interacts with humanity across time. One can even argue that the Bible reflects this in its unfolding of God’s action in humanity; the Old Testament, the Pentateuch in particular, reflecting God the Creator, God’s choosing and delivering of a people; the Gospels unfolding the intervention of God’s Son in the world; and God the Holy Spirit unleashed in the world in the Book of Acts and thereafter.

God relates to us as community; God relates to us in a way that challenges and illuminates how we relate to each other. We may not be very successful in explaining the Trinity, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn something from it.

For the God who is Three in One, One in Three, Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns (PH ’90): “Holy, Holy, Holy” (138); “God Is One, Unique and Holy” (135); “We All Believe In One True God” (137); “Come, Thou Almighty King” (139)

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[1] I am indebted to Karoline Lewis, “Dear Working Preacher: The Necessity of Three,” Working Preacher 24 May 2015 (http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=3627l; accessed 30 May 2015.