Sermon for Trinity Sunday

“Holy, holy, holy,
the Lord God the Almighty,
who was and is and is to come.”

A friend of mine in the UK, someone whom I know mostly through Facebook, posted something around the time of the Coronation of King Charles that really stuck with me.

He said that what makes the structure in which we live and by which we exist as a nation and a people lovely, in his eyes, and different from many other ways of governance, is that at the heart of it all, the centre of our political system, is not a set of ideals, or rules, not a piece of paper or constitution, but a family, fellow people.

In the late 17th century in England following the Glorious Revolution and the ousting of King James II there came a kind of settlement with the Declaration of Right. James and his predecessors, the Stuarts, had long claimed the Divine Right of Kings which they argued placed the King above the law and gave the monarch enormous power unchecked by parliament or people.

The settlement in all of this, unlike what would happen in America some 100 years later, was not that the King was done away with but that their power was limited. The monarch could no longer execute laws without the approval of Parliament, nor could the Crown impose taxes without the approval of Parliament, the people could petition the King without fear of arrest or execution, no army could stand in peacetime without the approval of Parliament.

As my friend on Facebook said, what’s lovely about this is that when people could have simply gotten rid of the monarchy and instead made a document or set of ideas the bedrock for our political system, they rather chose to retain people as the centre. Why? Because however good a document and set of ideas may be, they cannot love, or feel, cannot hope, dream, disappoint, forgive or ask for forgiveness, they can’t mourn.

As my friend said, and as we know perfectly well from watching the news – perhaps especially the tabloid headlines at the Sobeys checkouts - in the last few years, even the family at the centre of our political life is not perfect, like us they’re fallen and broken, just as likely to offend and hurt each other as we are in our own families, imperfect as they are.

Yet there’s something heartening about the thought that the figure at the centre of our public life can struggle with cancer, loss, fear, and can rejoice in things as well. Something that a document can never do. My friend concluded by saying, “In a family, you love your father not because he’s the best father, but because he’s yours, and you are his.”

Today is Trinity Sunday, the Sunday after Pentecost, when we move from celebrating that moment when the Spirit was poured out upon the Disciples, given to us for all time, dwelling in and moving through heart and mind, to this Sunday when we celebrate and contemplate that mysterious inner life of God, Father, Son, and Spirit – the Holy Trinity.

I hope we have a better sense from the last few years how our church year, this sacred time that we submit our lives to, has layers of seasons and cycles built into it: the Christmas season, Epiphany season, Lent, Eastertide, Ascensiontide, Pentecost, etc.

And as I said last week, we come once again today to the end of one major part of the cycle of our church calendar: from Advent to now we have been following the birth, life, ministry, and saving work of Jesus on Sundays in our readings and through the week at Morning and Evening Prayer, but from now until we start that over again, and aware of the Spirit’s movement in us, we think about what it means to live as Christians. Now that His work is done, now that we have that spirit within us, what does it actually mean to be a part of this particular family.

I’m not someone that always got or always ‘gets’ poetry, I’m not sure if my mind is just too analytical or detail oriented, or if I have too much of a disconnect between brain and heart, but I often get mired in details in poetry, bogged down with trying to understand what it means, but this makes it so hard to enjoy poetry. Someone suggested to me once something that helped me a great deal in reading poetry, and that is that it’s not so much about trying to understand what it’s saying as if it’s puzzle to be solved, but poetry is about what you feel when reading it, what emotions or images are evoked within you from what the author writes, because while we can argue black and blue about meaning or intention, emotions tend to be universal and common between us all.

Trinity Sunday is a day when preachers are often wont to stand up here and wax theological about the Trinity, to regurgitate what others have said about it, what it is, how it works, how we can conceive of this God that is both three and one simultaneously, and what others have written is good and important and things we should know, but we can never let the mystery or our attempt at solving the mystery get in the way of our remembering that, like poetry, I’m not sure the Trinity is something we’re meant to understand but something we’re meant to experience.

Think of love. I can give you a textbook definition of love, I can Google what happens in our brains when we are shown affection and how that releases this-or-that chemical in us that causes us to feel one such way or another, but if a person who never knew what love was asked you to explain it to them, those definitions would do nothing. You don’t know love through a biochemistry textbook, you know love by loving and being loved.

Wise people have written beautiful and important things about the Holy Trinity, but God didn’t come to us simply to be known by a theological concept, God came to us as a person to be known – Jesus – a person who loved, who hurt, who cared, spoke, ate, walked, talked; who wanted a relationship with us as with a family member. To quote one of those very wise people, “The trinity is not some far-flung speculation, [the trinity] is that blessed family into which we are adopted.”

By our Baptism and by our faith we are adopted into a family not as guests there only temporarily, but as members of the family with a place at the table. That family, of course, is very family, the life of God Himself, Father, Son, and Spirit, but in a very real way we are also made a family with one another being adopted children of God.

We are often let down by our own human families, even those closest to us, and there are some who may never know even the imperfect love of a human family. St. Paul describes us as members of one body, Christ’s, the Church, and in our own midst things will not always be perfect, we will not always get along, making this family work will demand of us sacrifice, humility, forgiveness, and forebearance. But being adopted by that perfect Father in Heaven, into that perfect family of the Holy Trinity, a union of perfect love, we are made part of a family that can never disappoint us.

The beauty of the monarchy, to return to it, is that at the heart of our governance is a human and a family, relationship, broken people striving as we are to do their best. At the heart of our faith is a family, is love, is relationship, made known to us by One who lived our life, knew our suffering, and who desired so much to a way for us to never be alone, never without love, that he suffered and died so that we may have it, so that we might be members of that family. Amen.