Trinity Sunday, May 30, 2021 – Deuteronomy 4:32-34, 39-40; Romans 8:14-17; Matthew 28:16-20

You can search from the first to the last page of the Bible, and nowhere, nowhere do you find the word trinity. The Holy Trinity is not mentioned anywhere. How come? When we talk about the Blessed Trinity, we’re talking about what we call systematic theology. That is to say, the definition of a clearly delineated proposition. That’s not what you get in the Bible. What you get in the Bible, especially in the New Testament, is relational theology. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all through the New Testament. And there are hints of the three persons of the Blessed Trinity here and there in the Old Testament. The people who wrote the Old Testament would not have been able to discern those hints because they were so fixated on the idea that God was only One that any other concept would not compute.

But what you find in the New Testament, both of the writings of St. Paul and the other apostles, and the Words of Jesus himself, is talk about how we relate to each person and how each person relates to each other person. Jesus almost always speaks of God as Abba, a term of endearment for the father or the patriarch, of a clan, or the head of a family. Abba. He talks about My Father all the time. In John’s gospel he says, “The Father and I are one.” He says, “The Father and I will send the Spirit.” St Paul talks frequently about the power, the action of the Spirit within the Christian community. And so, there are two different ways in which the doctrine of the Trinity is relational in the scriptures. First of all how the persons of God relate to each other. And secondly, how they relate to us, and we relate to them.

It wasn’t until the late second century - around the year 180 or 190 - until the middle of the second century, that the church actually began using the word Trinity. And it took another century before there were Church counsels that clearly defined what we believed.

One of the greatest theologians of that early time in the Church was St. Augustine. St. Augustine was an interesting character. In his young life - his teens, early twenties and almost into his thirties - he was a profligate. He went with lots of different women, had children by more than one of them. He was also, in the eyes of the church, a heretic. His mother, born and raised a Christian, could not have him baptized because his father would not consent. And so, she prayed daily for his conversion. And it finally happened, after he dabbled in this ancient religion and that ancient religion, in this philosophy, in that philosophy, he was overcome by an understanding of the love of God, and became a Christian. In those days it didn’t take long for people to be chosen for church service. And so, by his late thirties he was a bishop in the church. And a great theologian, constantly writing essays - they called them something else, we call them essays - about various points of Catholic doctrine, and preaching all the time to huge congregations. People flocked to hear him talk. One of the treatises he wrote was about the Blessed Trinity. And almost all the time Augustine is up in his head. And every now and then, he says something very funny. And, toward the end of his life, he told a great crowd of people “You know, l wrote a treatise on the Holy Trinity about thirty years ago. I just read it again, and I don’t understand it.”

That tells us what the issue is here. We have been trying to define the Blessed Trinity since almost the beginning. You can’t define a mystery. Most people don’t know that one of the things that created Orthodox Christianity - there were several of them, most of them were political and military – but, one of the things that split the church apart into what we call the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church, is an argument about the inner working of the Trinity. How does anybody know what the inner working of the Trinity is? And yet it split people apart, never to be joined again.

There are many attempts to try to make the Trinity approachable to people. There’s the famous story about St. Patrick and his shamrock. But one of the ones I like the best comes from the early Church. They say the Trinity is the Lover, the Beloved and the Love. What a nice idea. That God is the Lover and the one he loves the most, the one he has loved for all eternity, his Beloved, is Jesus. Isn’t that what is says in John’s gospel? The voice from heaven comes to Jesus at the moment of his baptism by John and says, “You are my son, my beloved. In you I am well pleased.” That Jesus is the Beloved, but the thing that cements them together, the dynamic tension, the intimacy, is itself a living person, the Blessed Trinity.

But that doesn’t explain the Blessed Trinity. It only is an image of what the Blessed Trinity might be. And we see, in our own lives, constant trinitarian stuff. In the very first chapter of the first book of the Bible, the book of Genesis, it says, “God made man in his image, after his likeness, male and female, he created them. And he said unto them ‘Go forth, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over all the other created universe.’” That’s a trinitarian concept. There are lots of different ways to explain it. But when we go toward each other, in love and respect, something new is created. Sometimes we call it friendship. Sometimes we call it love. Sometimes we call it creativity. Whatever you want to call it, two people, two groups, two anything, who are mutually attracted to each other and who have mutual respect and honor for each other, create something new among them. Almost everything that we see in this world reflects an idea of three-in-one.

That’s why I asked you to pay close attention to what St. Matthew says the disciples did when they gathered on that hill in Galilee to see the risen Lord. He says “They worshipped, but they doubted.” They worshipped, but they doubted. Now we’re used to thinking of that doubt in a very different way, because the other stories of the resurrection appearances have it the other way. “They doubted, but they worshipped.” Not they worshipped, but they doubted. They doubted, but they worshipped because what do we get? In the one story they demand to touch Jesus’ wounds. In another story Jesus is so disturbed by their lack of perception that he asks if they have in something that he can eat in front of them so they can see he’s a real body person.

There are all these stories about how the first approach of the disciples of the risen Lord was doubt, and then their doubts were satisfied, and they worshipped him. St. Thomas says, “Oh, my Lord and my God.”
But here it’s the other way around. They worshipped, but they doubted. The thing of it is, that it’s not sequential. They did both things at the very same time. They were doing the both things together. They were worshipping and they were doubting. Why is that important to us?

Because it tells us what our approach to the Blessed Trinity ought to be. Many of us were taught from the time we were little children that it was a sin to doubt anything that the Church taught. But doubt is the normal approach of human beings to anything. Our minds are limited by all sorts of things as to what we can really comprehend. When it comes to something as difficult and mysterious as the Blessed Trinity, it’s no wonder that people would be doubtful. What St. Matthew is saying is that the correct approach to the Blessed Trinity is to hold those two things in tension. I’m not really sure what I’m dealing with here, I really don’t understand, but I’m willing to go along because it’s so beautiful, or so attractive or so compelling. That’s why at that very moment, Jesus can say to the crowd, “Now, this is who I am. I’m the one who holds all power. So I want you to go and preach to all the nations. Despite the fact that you were doubtful, go and preach, and teach and baptize.”

 It’s a relational experience in two different ways. Jesus is inviting us to have a relational understanding of the Blessed Trinity, like He did. To call God our Abba, especially when we’re depressed, or fearful, or angry. To reach out and say “Abba, Abba.” To think of Jesus as one of us, as our brother. And to enter into both the joys and sorrows of Jesus’ life. To understand that at our Baptism and again at our Confirmation, every day in some way or another, the Spirit is prompting us to draw closer to God, and closer to one another. The relational experience of the Trinity. And then, despite our doubts, we can worship.