Trinity Sunday C
June 15, 2025
St. Dunstan’s
The Rev. Patricia Templeton
“Blessed be God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”
For much of the church year, we begin our worship service with those words, as Christians have done since the first century.
Today is Trinity Sunday, the day on the Church calendar when we pay tribute to this understanding of God that is unique to Christianity.
The Trinity is never overtly named in scripture in either the Old or New Testaments, although certainly the roots of the understanding of God as Father, God as Son, and God as Holy Spirit can be found there.
The concept of the Trinity arose after Jesus’ death, when early Christians struggled to find a way to express their experiences of God. Those first followers of Jesus, who were also devout Jews, were monotheists, believing strongly that there is one God, who created the heavens and earth.
That belief in the transcendent, powerful God was not diminished, but those early Christians knew that they had also experienced God in the person of Jesus.
And after Jesus’ death, they continued to experience God’s presence with them, not in the Jesus of flesh and blood, but in the Spirit moving among and within them as individuals and as a community.
One God, experienced in three different ways – that is the essence of the Trinity.
One of my favorite theologians, Elizabeth Johnson, acknowledges that speaking of the divine this way may lead some to believe that Christians worship three Gods, not one.
“Such, however, would be a mistaken impression,” she writes. “Christians do not believe in three Gods, but in one.
“What is particular to our faith is the belief that this one God has graciously reached out to the world in love in the person of Jesus Christ in order to heal, redeem, and liberate – in a word, to save.
“The experience of salvation coming from God through Jesus in the power of the Spirit set up such a powerful encounter with the Holy that it required a new language,” Johnson says. “That language is Trinitarian.”
Trinitarian language began as dynamic words used to interpret who God is in light of the good news of salvation.
“It lifts God’s gracious ways of being active in the world through Jesus Christ and the Spirit, and finds there the fundamental revelation about God’s own being as the self-communication of love,” she says.
Johnson uses the beautiful icon painted by 15th century Russian artist Andrei Rublev as her model of the Trinity. That icon is on the cover of today’s service bulletin.
One of the things I love about it is that it is based on one of my favorite Old Testament stories, in which three strangers, who are really angels in disguise, appear unannounced at the home of Abraham and Sarah. Although the travelers are totally unknown and unexpected, they are welcomed with gracious hospitality.
As the strangers are leaving they tell the aged and childless Abraham and Sarah that they will soon have a son.
The icon shows the three angels, representing the Trinity, at Sarah and Abraham’s home, which is depicted as the dwelling place of God. The three figures sit around a table on which there is a cup, or chalice.
Notice that the figures are seated inclined toward one another in a circle that is not closed.
“The image suggests that the mystery of the triune God is not a closed society, but a communion in relationship,” Johnson writes.
“This divine communion is lovingly open to the world. As you contemplate you begin intuitively to grasp that you are invited into this divine circle – indeed, by gazing, you are already a part of it.”
This icon shows that God is not a monarch living in isolation, “but rather a living communion with the world. God is a God of immense hospitality who calls the world to join in the feast.”
A God of immense hospitality who calls the world to join in the feast, a God whose own being is revealed as love, a God who brings glad tidings of salvation by entering into the world in flesh and blood and staying present in the world through the Spirit – that is the God of Trinitarian language.
But over the centuries the dynamic language of the Trinity – words that told of the personal God of Israel encountered in the concrete life and destiny of Jesus of Nazareth, and present through the Spirit in the life of the Church and the world – instead became transformed into an abstract, complex, literal and oppressive Trinitarian theology, Johnson says.
The convoluted abstractions many theologians use to talk of the Trinity may make us want to give up on the whole idea. But to do so would be a mistake.
Johnson reminds us that Christians do not believe in just any God or some generic idea of God. Instead, we believe in the God revealed in Jesus and experienced through the power of the Holy Spirit.
To ignore the Trinity leaves “only the bare and empty name of God flitting about in our brains,” she says. “Talk of God as triune, by contrast, points to an unfathomable divine plenitude who has a history with the world, one that includes knowledge of suffering and death.
“The intent of this Trinitarian symbol is to acclaim the God who saves, whose divine life is structured in love.”
If, as Johnson suggests, the Triune God’s purpose is to reach out in love and to offer salvation, and if, as Rublev’s icon suggests, we are invited into the life of the Trinity, then we might ponder how we are to live.
How are we to reach out in love? What kind of salvation do we need, and should we offer?
Johnson says that as we are nourished in the Eucharist at a table of love, we are called to use that nourishment to practice justice and peace so that all people and all creation may share in the divine communion.
The Trinity calls the Church – calls us – to make God’s love visible in the world, to work always for justice and peace and healing for all of God’s people and all of God’s creation.
The Trinity reminds us that God’s desire is for salvation for all creation.
Of course, that leads to the question that was once asked in Sunday School – what are we being saved from?
There is no universal answer to that question. As theologian William Porcher DuBose wrote in the early 20th century:
“What salvation means, and specifically what our salvation means, is a matter primarily determined not by creeds, not by scripture, not by divine revelation, but by the facts of our own nature and condition.
“All salvation is deliverance from some evil; our salvation can only be deliverance from the evil to which we are subject.”
In other words, the salvation which God offers is specific to our own needs and situations, as individuals and as a nation.
Evil, then, is anything that keeps us from entering into that divine communion with God, from taking our seat in the circle with the Trinity.
As a nation, evil is anything that blocks the kingdom of God, anything that is unjust or does not promote peace among all people.
The list of things from which we need saving can be daunting. But the Trinity tells us that we do not need, indeed cannot, save ourselves.
The God who created heaven and earth, the God who took on flesh and blood and walked the earth, the God whose Spirit continually breathes life into the world, is with us, reaching out to us in love, empowering us and saving us.
And so on the Trinity Sunday we do as our opening hymn proclaims.
We bind unto ourselves the Name, the strong Name of the Trinity,
By invocation of the same, the Three in One and One in Three
Of whom all nature hath creation, eternal Father, Spirit, Word:
Praise to the Lord of our salvation,
Salvation is of Christ the Lord.
Amen.