Triptych

Lia'linelm, by Angel Axiotis

Propers: Trinity Sunday, AD 2025 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“We have peace with God in Christ.”

That is as good a summation of Christian faith as we are like to find.

Everyone seeks God, even if we do not call Him that. Everyone pursues the Good, the True, and the Beautiful to the best of his or her ability. Each of us has a summum bonum, a greatest good, that gets us out of bed in the morning, that makes our life make sense. Whatever that thing is, that is your god. And however you shape your life around it, that is your religion. There is no irreligious species of humanity.

Most cultures learn pretty quickly that finite things, earthly things, can’t fulfill this role. We may think, for a time, that money or sex or power or fame are the greatest things in the world, worth whatever price we have to pay. But eventually they fail us. They cannot make us happy, can’t fulfill that void inside. At some point we’ve sampled all the pleasures, seen all the novelties, wrought all of our revenge, and so we’re left to ask ourselves, “Is this all there is? Is there nothing more?”

I mean, we all seem to want to be rich and famous, but have you ever stopped to pay attention to just how miserable most of our celebrities appear to be? The richest man on earth has to use copious doses of ketamine in order to make it through his day. Money, like fire, is an excellent servant, but a terrible master. Such is the nature of idolatry.

Thus we have religious and philosophical and spiritual traditions that yearn for something more, that reach for the transcendent. We all know, deep down, that there is more to life, more to humanity, than merely that which we can see and touch. The finite depends upon the infinite both as its source and its horizon. And so we seek communion with the divine: mystical union, through whatever means, with goodness and beauty and truth, with the eternal, with the real.

Buddhists meditate. Jews debate. Muslims memorize. Shamans drum themselves into higher realms of consciousness, all of us seeking the bliss of oneness with the All. And our way, the Way, is Jesus Christ. He is our peace with God. He is our union with the divine.

The oldest of the Christian Scriptures—the Epistles of Paul, the Gospel of Mark—are saturated with the understanding that Jesus is the Godhead. They aren’t exactly subtle. From walking on water to stilling the storm, forgiving sins to raising the dead, Jesus does the things that only God can do, according to the Hebrew Bible. And that scares people, scares just about everyone whom He encounters. But it also overawes them, and wraps us up in wonder. To see the face of Christ is to see the face of God, mirabile dictu.

Nor is this a break with all that’s come before. First-century Judaism, in dialogue with the greater Greco-Roman culture of which they were now a part, often spoke of “two powers in the heavens,” the notion that the unknown God, infinite and eternal, makes Himself known to us in love, through His Word and His Spirit. We see this in evolving notions of messianic expectation, especially in the Prophets of the Exile. Daniel speaks of one “like a son of man” who is clearly a deity sent from the Father above—not just an angel, not merely mortal, but somehow God on earth.

Indeed, God can be many things and still be one God. He can be utterly transcendent in the heavens; He can impart life and reality to all things here below; and He can even manifest Himself as man, while still remaining God, still remaining who He is. Every major faith tradition—pagan, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, what-have-you—has some understanding of multiplicity within the unity of God; whether that’s one God in many forms, or God possessing several attributes which each are also God.

The Good, the True, and the Beautiful I have mentioned. But there’s also Consciousness, Being, and Bliss; Creator, Preserver, Destroyer; Ein Sof and Sephirot; Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit. Christians speak of God as a triple unity, or Trinity, but we aren’t the only ones. Other faiths have similar terms for parallel ideas—almost as though we’re glimpsing the same transcendent reality.

Basically it boils down to this. We know God in Jesus Christ. He is the visible Image of the invisible Father, God made flesh. When we are one in Jesus, then we are one with God. But how are we made one in Christ? We are made one, by the Spirit, in the Church, in the community who is His Body and His Bride. Here we read the stories Jesus read. We pray the prayers He prayed. We remember the life that He lived, in hopes of living it out for ourselves. He gives to the Church His Name and His Spirit and His Body and His Blood.

Because He is still with us, is He not? He is with us in Word and in Sacrament; in bread and wine, in oil and water; in the Holy Spirit, who is the life and breath of Christ within us. Only God can join us to God. And so Christ must be God, because He joins us to the Father; and the Spirit must be God because She joins us all to Christ. That’s the long and the short of it: union with God in Jesus, for Jesus is our peace.

The Trinity is less an explanation than it is an expression of a mystery. And I know that might sound like prestidigitation, but in religion a mystery isn’t something entirely beyond us. Rather, a mystery is something that we can only begin to understand once we experience it for ourselves. We experience God as the Father; we experience God as the Son; we experience God as the Spirit; and those experiences are real, are reality itself.

I think it’s the language that muddies things. When we speak of wonders beyond all words, we end up using a lot of words. And some don’t do well in translation. Take the typical formulation of the Trinity in English: One God in Three Persons. Well, honestly that sounds to me like a committee, like three separate guys who just happen to agree. But that isn’t what it says in the Greek.

A better way to put it would be that God is substantially One, and we encounter Him in Three “underlying realities.” That’s a more literal translation of οὐσία and ὑπόστασεις. Hence, when we encounter Jesus, that’s really God, not just a mask or a messenger. When we encounter the Holy Spirit, that’s really God, not some wispy echo of His Being. And when we encounter the Father, beyond all mortal ken, that’s really God, the same whom we know in His Spirit and His Son.

Each of them is a face of God—the original meaning of persona—a face, mind you, and not a mask. There is no secret, truer God lurking backstage, hidden behind the characters of Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit. Each of them is truly God and God is truly One. Even that Oneness, in theology, has a name: Sophia, the Wisdom of God.

There are other ways to speak of this, other analogies for the ineffable. One that I particularly like is to imagine God as a perfect eternal moment of infinite Being, infinite Knowing, and infinite Love. At once He is, and He knows that He is, and He loves that He is. Yet for the sake of simplicity—for the sake of what’s truly important—Holy Trinity Sunday is all about Jesus: how He makes God known to us; how He makes God one with us; and how He remains God-With-Us even now.

Thus we return to our beginning: that we have peace with God in Jesus Christ.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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