Trinity Sunday (June 12, 2022)

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. This marks the end of the first half of the Church calendar where we have celebrated each Person of the Trinity. We have walked through the life of the our Lord, celebrating his Incarnation, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension. We have further celebrated the sending of the Holy Ghost by the Father and Son to the Church on Pentecost. And now, today, as we end this cycle and enter into what we call “Ordinary Time,” we are, as Anglican priest John Henry Blunt says, “gathered into one act of worship, as the Church Militant looks upward through the door that is opened in Heaven, and bows down in adoration with the Church Triumphant.” Now some may call today, “Heresy Sunday” because it’s very easy, when we talk about the God as Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity to lapse into some form of heresy. We can consider the many heretical sects who couldn’t get the Trinity right: the Arians who argued the Jesus was created by the Father and had a beginning in time; the Pneumatomachians who, accepted that Jesus and the Father are God but denied that the Holy Spirit was God; Monarchianism was a heresy that denied the different persons of the Trinity, insisting on a kind of modalism, that God merely appears as the Father, the Son, or the Spirit at different times but that there aren’t three separate persons; similarly, Patripassianism believed that the Father and Son aren’t distinct and thus God the Father suffered on the cross as Jesus; and a final heresy is Tritheism, the idea that the persons of the Trinity are actually three separate gods.

Why does this matter? Does it really impact your daily life to believe in the Trinity? Did the Church just reject the teachings of Arius and the Pneumathomachians, and other heretical sects for political reasons or because they were just sticklers for language? It is true that theological discussions about the Trinity often feel obscure and dense because they require us to plunge into an immense mystery but hard things are worth doing and the mystery of the Trinity is not insignificant. I’m reminded of a story about St. Augustine, who as you might know, is one of my favorite saints. The story goes that he was deep in the process of writing his book On the Trinity and decided he needed to take a break to meditate on the mystery of a God who is three-in-one and one-in-three. And so he went for a walk on the beach where he encountered a child who had dug a small hole by the sea and was scooping water from the ocean into the hole. Augustine asked him what he was doing and the child said he wanted to scoop all the water from the sea into this insignificant hole. Augustine remarked that this was impossible because the sea is much too large and the hole much too small, to which the child replied, “Indeed, but I will sooner draw all the water from the sea and empty it into this hole than you will succeed in penetrating the mystery of the Holy Trinity with your limited understanding.” The child was right: we will never perfectly comprehend the Trinity; we have to use language of analogy (like Father and Son) for our minds to even begin to apprehend what God is. But, just because this is difficult doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. In fact, what I would argue is that while theological writings, Church Councils, and Creeds are beneficial, not necessarily as means to an end but because they aid our Prayer. Prayer, according to the great Anglican priest Martin Thornton, is a term “for any process or activity qualified by a living relation between human souls and God.” Dogmatic statements, then, aid that relationship because they help us know more about the God we’re praying to. Just like when you’re dating someone, you need to learn all about them. But it’s not a purely academic exercise to get to know someone; its’s something we jump into with our whole being. Similarly, as we learn about God, we don’t do it purely academically; any acquired academic knowledge is absolutely worthless unless it serves the relational element. This is why it’s such a travesty that there’s been such a divide between the Academy and the Church in that many academic theologians study religion but don’t practice it; a good theologian is, before anything, a person of deep prayer. And if you think about who did theology in the Church, it wasn’t done in ivory towers; the best theologians of the Church were people of prayer: St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Anselm, and St. Athanasius. Notice how they all have “saint” attached to their name; this is because they weren’t just thinkers, they were believers and doers. What they learned and taught helped them live holy lives.

The doctrine of the Trinity is that God is complete in himself; the relations between the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are perfect love for each other. They have no need of anything outside of their relations; they are complete. But for some reason, God decided to create the world; not because he needed us but because it is an overflowing and outpouring of his love.

Because we have been created from him purely out of his goodness, we owe him worship. To worship is to render someone what is due; in the English Prayer Books the husband pledges to worship his wife; and, in England, judges were called Your Worship. We owe different people different degrees of respect and dignity: you might stand at attention for the president, stand as the judge enters the courtroom. But God isn’t like a judge or the president, he’s our Creator which means he’s worthy of everything because he’s our Creator. So the main job of the Christian is to offer their lives as a perpetual adoration of God (which is what Paul means in Romans 12 when he talks about being a “living sacrifice”).

We get a peek into this idea of constant worship in the Epistle reading today which comes from Revelation. Revelation is a piece of Apocalyptic literature which is more about showing reality as it is than it is about depicting the end of the world (though sometimes the end of the world can show us how things really are). In effect, St. John is peeling back the layers of reality so that we see what’s at the center of everything. And where does he take us? The throne room of heaven where we get these fantastic images: Christ, who looks like a jasper and sardine stone sitting on this throne with a rainbow like an emerald and a glassy sea around it; he’s surrounded by these twenty-four elders, almost assuredly the 12 patriarchs of Israel and the 12 Apostles, and 4 beasts, who many interpret to be the Four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, all worshipping as thunder and lightning comes from the throne. Now I won’t spend time on the fact that John is in heaven watching this scene and, if the 24 elders include the 12 Apostles, he’s also there worshipping, and if the 4 beasts are the 4 Gospel writers, then he’s also in that group, meaning he’s in three places at once. These are the kinds of things that often keep me up at night. But this image that John gives us in Revelation 4 is the very core of reality: everything revolves around worship.

We find ourselves in the midst of busy lives, going from one thing to another. Further, our attention is often rapt by other things, like 24-hour news cycles, sporting events, entertainment, and technology. But these things are distractions, because what we’re supposed to be doing here and now is training. Even more than that, we are supposed to be joining our lives to that worship in heaven: “With angels, and archangels, and all the company of heaven.” So we need Trinity Sunday, we need the Apostles, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds, we need the Shield of the Trinity which can be found towards the back of your bulletin, not because these make us more erudite theologians for the ivory tower but because they help us become people of prayer who understand that our liturgy points us to this transcendent reality in which we join with these saints in heaven as we adore our Lord.

“Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come. Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.”

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