Trinity Sunday (May 30, 2021)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

Today is Trinity Sunday, the conclusion of the Church Calendar Cycle that begins in Advent and follows the life of Christ. After this, we go into what is called Ordinary Time, which is marked by Sundays after Trinity. Now, if you’ve ever been to a Roman Catholic Church, you might notice they number their calendar differently in that Ordinary Time is marked by Sundays after Pentecost. The reason for this is that Trinity Sunday was only formally observed in the English Catholics in the 11th century. It wasn’t until the year 1260 that the Synod of Arles made Trinity Sunday its own Feast in the broader Western Calendar. Even then, it’s likely the Feast wasn’t broadly celebrated in the Catholic Church until the end of the 14th century. So that’s why we date the weeks in Ordinary Time differently—the local custom in England emphasized Trinity Sunday as the end of this cycle while the rest of the Western Church used Pentecost to end the cycle.

There is a theological reason this matters. John Henry Blunt, in his commentary on the Book of Common Prayer, remarks that “the feast of Trinity, on the Octave of Pentecost, commemorates the consummation of God’s saving work and the perfect revelation to the Church of the Three Persons in one God, as the sole objects of adoration…the Church Militant looks upward through the door that is opened in Heaven, and bows down in adoration with the Church Triumphant.” We walk through Christ’s life together by our calendar and we end by being taken up into the divine life and love shared between the Three Persons of the Trinity.

But it raises the question: How important is the Trinity really? For most of us, the Trinitarian debates of the early Christians can feel overly intellectual and too far removed from our day-to-day lives. While the impulse may be understandable, it is gravely mistaken because nothing could be more important than the Trinity because the Trinity is the source of all reality. In Genesis 1, we see that the divine act of creation is a Trinitarian movement: the Spirit hovers over the waters as the Father speaks the Word. Similarly, the Work of Redemption is a Trinitarian action. Christ offers himself to the Father for us and sends us the Spirit as a Counselor.

The thing about our theology is that it’s all interconnected: we saw it last week at Pentecost in that we cannot have a theology of the Church without a theology of the Holy Spirit and vice-versa. If we get our theology about one of them wrong, we’re wrong about both. This is also true of the Trinity in that if we contradict the Catholic Faith as disclosed in our liturgy and the Apostles, Nicene, and Athanasian Creed, we will inevitably skew other areas of our theology. However, when we properly understand the Trinity (at least to the extent that we can understand it), we see how the one God in three persons affects our salvation. And this is what was played out for us over the course of this Church cycle. In Advent, we meditated on the Incarnation of the Son whereby our human nature is renewed. In Passiontide and Holy Week, we remembered the free offering of the Son to the Father for the sins of the world. During Eastertide and Ascension, we focused on the Father’s vindication of the Son. And at Whitsuntide, we reflected on the coming of the Holy Ghost and the birth of Christ’s Church. And we close this cycle here on Trinity Sunday, a chance for us to explore the mystery at the heart of our faith.

In this morning’s Gospel lesson from John 3, Nicodemus, “ruler of the Jews” comes to visit Jesus by night. Now the time of the visit isn’t incidental because it plays into larger Johannine themes of darkness and light where darkness symbolizes ignorance and sin while light stands for enlightenment and righteousness. There is an interesting contrast between Nicodemus and the woman at the well in the following chapter. The Samaritan woman at the well had been married five times and was living with a man not her husband — this encounter occurs at noon, when the sun is at the highest point and there are no shadows; this woman is brought into the light as she is fully known and she comes to know the truth about who Jesus is. But Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night, a symbol of his ignorance because, by the end of their conversation, he seems more confused than when he started.

Their conversation begins with an admission of Jesus’ divine origin (John 3:2): “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” Of course, Nicodemus is close to the truth, but even here, he’s stuck in darkness. God is not just present with Jesus. Jesus is not merely sent by God. Jesus is “very God of very God” and “of one substance with the Father.” Jesus is God.

Jesus seems to abruptly change the subject in his response (John 3:3): “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” His point is that whatever Nicodemus has realized about Jesus, it must reconfigure his reality — he must be born anew and see the world for the first time through new eyes.

But this befuddles Nicodemus. He can’t understand. How are we to be born anew when we’re old? he thinks Jesus is speaking on a purely literal and physical level and that the rebirth being spoken of here involves going back inside the womb. Nicodemus lacks understanding of the sacraments. How are we born again? “No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit” (John 3:5). A sacrament is a physical and outward sign of an inward grace. Baptism is a physical action in which water is poured on a person but the inward grace is that the Holy Ghost makes them regenerate, makes them a Christian because in that Baptism, the person is identified with Christ’s baptism. As we said last week of Walter: “SEEING now, dearly beloved brethren, that this Child (this Person) is regenerate, and grafted into the body of Christ’s Church, let us give thanks unto Almighty God for these benefits; and with one accord make our prayers unto him, that this Child (this Person) may lead the rest of his life according to this beginning.” In Baptism, the Holy Spirit unites us to Christ so that we are accepted by the Father as his Children.

On Trinity Sunday, then, we remember that our salvation is wrought by the Triune God—the one God in Three coequal, comajestic, and coeternal persons. Not three gods, but one God. In response, our lives should become those of perpetual doxology where we worship the Trinity in Unity and the Unity in Trinity because, as St. Anselm says, “That honor certainly belongs to the whole Trinity; and, since he is very God, the Son of God, he offered himself for his own honor, as well as for that of the Father and the Holy Spirit; that is, he gave his humanity to his divinity, which is one person of the Triune God...For what compassion can excel these words of the Father, addressed to the sinner doomed to eternal torments and having no way of escape: ‘Take my only begotten Son and make him an offering for yourself;’ or these words of the Son: ‘Take me, and ransom your souls.’ For these are the voices they utter, when inviting and leading us to faith in the Gospel.” And so, we join with the Angels, Archangels, the Twenty-Four Elders, and the Four Living Creatures in their worship (which includes incense, by the way) and say:

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty who was and is and is to come! Worthy art thou, our Lord and God, to receive glory, and honor, and power, for thou didst create all things and by thy will they existed and were created.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.