Sermon for Trinity Sunday

The curious thing about Trinity Sunday is that it’s one of the few festivals in the Church calendar that celebrates a doctrine. Many feasts of the liturgical year commemorate events recorded in Scripture – and very often on the date or during the season of the year when we believe them to have happened. Easter falls in the spring around Passover, the time of year when Jesus died and rose again. And following the New Testament chronology exactly, Ascension comes forty days and Pentecost fifty days after Easter.

The date of Christmas is admittedly arbitrary, and appropriately occurs on the date of an old Roman midwinter holiday celebrating the triumph of light over darkness around the time of the winter solstice. But then the Church coordinated the dates of the Annunciation, the Visitation, and the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist to fit in chronologically with the putative date of Christ’s birth at Christmas. Likewise, we keep most saints’ days on the anniversary of the saint’s death: his or her “birthday into heaven.”

But Trinity Sunday is different. We could really observe it at any time of the year, for the mystery it celebrates is timeless. Such events as the Birth of Christ, the Baptism of Christ, and the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost all represent definite historical moments in God’s revelation of himself to his people. For this reason, theologians sometimes speak of the cumulative record of these moments as “salvation history.” But there is no single historical moment when God revealed himself as Trinity. Rather, over several centuries of sustained reflection on the biblical revelation, the Church developed the doctrine of the Trinity – as summarized in the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds – as the only way of speaking about God that could adequately account for the reality of people’s actual experiences of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

So, why do we celebrate Trinity Sunday when we do? The reason is simple: For the past six months, from Advent Sunday through the Day of Pentecost, we’ve been retracing the history of God’s self-revelation to his people, from the preaching of the Old Testament prophets, through the Incarnation, death and Resurrection of Christ, to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the Church. Today, we step back and do precisely what the early Christians did: we reflect on what we’ve learned. And the whole history of revelation that we’ve been recapitulating these past six months adds up to this picture of the Triune God given expression by the Trinitarian doctrine.

The word Trinity never occurs in Scripture. It appears to have been coined by the Second Century Roman theologian Tertullian. But the Christians of the first four centuries found that the doctrine made sense of so much: such as the threefold “Holy, Holy, Holy” of the cherubim in the vision of Isaiah; and God’s strange use of the first-person plural in the opening chapter of Genesis: “Let us make man in our own image.”

Most important of all, the doctrine of the Trinity helped the early Christians understand the words and actions of Jesus, who was himself God Incarnate and yet spoke of his Father in heaven and of the Holy Spirit he would send down upon the Church after his Ascension. Moreover, Trinitarian language helped them make sense of their own experience of God: for at one and the same time they had a vivid sense of God as their heavenly creator and father; of Jesus as their Lord, Savior, friend, and brother; and of the Holy Spirit as the guiding and empowering divine presence within. God was indeed one in being, and yet had revealed himself as three Persons.

A good exercise on Trinity Sunday, rather than trying to resolve the paradox of how God can be one and three at the same time, is to ask ourselves how we’ve experienced the three Persons of the Trinity in our own spiritual lives: In what ways have we known God as our Father in heaven; as Jesus our Savior; and as the Holy Spirit who indwells us and gives us inner counsel and strength?

Most of all, the doctrine of the Trinity speaks to us of God’s very nature and being as love. Our God is not a solitary monad subsisting in splendid isolation, but rather a community of three Persons eternally united in mutual relations of perfect self-giving love. And because God has created us in his image, it follows that we find the fulfillment of our nature not in rugged individualism, but rather in relationship and community. In other words, because God is love, we realize our God‑given purpose in life by learning to love and to be loved! And our eternal destiny in Christ is to be caught up forever into that perfect circle of divine love that is God’s own inner life.

So, Trinity Sunday remains a superb way to wrap up and summarize the completed cycle of the liturgical year before we move into Ordinary Time. And it invites us to celebrate the most unique aspect of the Christian revelation: our faith in God who is one in three and three in one, whose very nature and essence is love.

Easter VII -- Year C [Sunday after the Ascension]

John 17:20-26

The opening chapter of the Acts of the Apostles tells us that after our Lord’s Ascension into heaven, the Apostles together with the women and Mary, the mother of the Lord, returned to Jerusalem. And: “All these with one accord devoted themselves to prayer …” This period of prayer culminated, of course, in the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost.

In the cycle of the Church Year, we find ourselves in the corresponding period. We celebrated the Ascension on Thursday; and we shall celebrate Pentecost a week from today. Christ has ascended into heaven; but the Holy Spirit has not yet descended. So for us, as for Mary and the Apostles in the Upper Room, it’s a time of waiting and prayer.

Although in many places it’s become the practice to transfer the Ascension from Thursday to Sunday, nonetheless I think we lose something vital by doing so. For the Sunday after the Ascension has much to teach us about praying for the coming of the Holy Spirit. And this is particularly the case with today’s reading from Saint John’s Gospel.

The setting is the Last Supper. Our Lord is praying for his disciples on the eve of his arrest, trial, and death. He prays specifically for their unity in love after he’s taken from them. So this prayer exactly anticipates their situation after his Ascension. He’s no longer physically present with them; yet he’s entrusted them with the mission of preaching the Gospel to the ends of the earth. They cannot possibly fulfill this mission without prayer. So here he prays for them and for us as well.

A helpful hint for understanding today’s Gospel is that when we hear it read, we need to assume the posture of people being prayed for. After his Ascension, Jesus stands in the presence of the Father continually making intercession for us. And in today’s Gospel we have the privilege of hearing a snippet of what his prayer for us sounds like.

He prays that we all may be one, as he and the Father are one. During the past century, this passage has become one of the proof texts for the ecumenical movement, which has striven mightily to overcome the various divisions within the Body of Christ.

A key development in the history of Christianity in the twentieth century was the growing realization among Christians that our disunity hinders the Church’s mission and witness in the world. Thus, Christians who had once seen themselves as being in competition and rivalry – Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Roman Catholics – began to discover the rewards of getting to know each other, exchanging ideas, and exploring areas of potential co-operation.

By the 1960s and 1970s, conversations between Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Eastern Orthodox, Lutherans, and Methodists had gained great momentum, occasioning enormous optimism about the ecumenical future. Yet in the following decades, disillusionment began to set in. While these dialogues produced some interesting agreed statements on doctrinal matters, and in some cases formal intercommunion – such as between the Lutherans and us – early hopes for quick corporate reunion have largely met with frustration.

In response, some proposed changing the movement’s goals and methods. In 1995, for example, Konrad Raiser, Secretary General of the World Council of Churches, proposed that the various church bodies should give up seeking doctrinal agreement and structural unity, and instead devote themselves to co-operation on issues of justice, peace, and protection of the environment.

Others sought to ignore, minimize, or trivialize the differences between Christians. For example, also in the 1990s, when I was in my previous parish, I participated in a great ecumenical service at a local Lutheran church for the Week of Prayer for Christian unity. About forty clergy of different traditions processed and sat together. The vestments and robes ranged from Geneva pulpit gowns to cassocks and lacy surplices. The musical offerings featured traditional choral music, an African American Gospel choir, and a folk rock group. A Baptist preacher and a Roman Catholic priest both gave outstanding sermons. About four hundred people packed the church to standing room only. It was a moving and powerful witness to our shared commitment to Christian unity.

Imagine my disappointment the next morning when I opened the local paper and read the first line in the story: “Christians of all denominations came together last night to demonstrate that doctrine doesn’t matter.” What a profound misreading of that service’s meaning! Doctrine does matter! Yet in that ecumenical service we’d come together to express, first, our conviction that our shared beliefs and practices outweigh our differences; and, second, our commitment to praying and working together to resolve and overcome the very real differences that still divide us.

For the unity that we seek, the unity for which Christ prayed, is nothing less than unity in the fullness of truth and love. Such unity can’t be achieved by warm fuzzy feelings of togetherness fostering the illusion that differences in belief don’t matter. It can’t be achieved solely by new bureaucratic structures, or by carefully crafted statements concealing unresolved differences behind compromise formulas and ambiguous language. It really can’t be achieved by human effort at all. Rather, it’s a gift of the Holy Spirit, which can only be prayed for and received in God’s good time.

Listen again to our Lord’s words: “that they may be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they may also be in us . . . that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and thou in me, that they may become perfectly one . . .”

This unity, which Jesus has with his Father in heaven, is a complete harmony of heart, mind, and will. In John’s Gospel, Jesus emphasizes again and again that he has come to speak the words and to do the will of his Father in heaven. And here Jesus is praying that his disciples may likewise be of one heart, mind, and will—both with him, and with each other.

And such complete harmony of heart, mind, and will is humanly impossible. But notice that here Jesus is praying for his disciples. He’s not commanding us to be one; he’s not promising that we shall be one; he’s praying that we may be one. In other words, we cannot achieve this true unity on our own. We can only pray for it, and we can only receive it as a gift from God.

One of the signs of the presence of the Holy Spirit in our midst is the unity of our hearts, minds, and wills in the truth of God’s Word. A key work of the Holy Spirit is to reconcile those who are divided and at enmity. And so, in this interval between the Lord’s Ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, we join with our Lady and the Apostles praying in the upper room – the same room, incidentally, where Jesus prayed at the Last Supper – that we may all be one, even as he and the Father are one.

Ascension of the Lord

In my end is my beginning. The motto of Mary Queen of Scots famously quoted by T.S. Eliot in East Coker might well sum up the relationship between today’s readings from the Acts of the Apostles and the Gospel according to Saint Luke.

Actually, the placement of the first and third readings in today’s liturgy exactly reverses Luke’s sequence in his two books. The Acts of the Apostles is Luke’s sequel to his Gospel. So the third reading this evening comes from the very end of Luke’s Gospel, which comes first; whereas our opening reading came from the very beginning of the sequel, in which Luke tells the story of the early Church.

In any case, for Luke, the Ascension of the Lord is so pivotal an episode that he tells it twice: first at the end of his Gospel as the climax of his story of Jesus; and then at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles as the commencement of his story of the early Church. And the Ascension is pivotal for us today in our life as Christians as well.

What really happened on Ascension Day? The short answer is that we don’t know. Perhaps the story is just a symbolic way of saying that Jesus has returned to his Father in heaven. Or, perhaps Jesus really did literally lift off from the ground and soar up into the clouds. The priest and writer Robert Farrar Capon once commented that Jesus only needed to get up as far as the first cloud in order to make his point – a visual point that his disciples would have understood perfectly in terms of their own world view and cosmology. The underlying theological principle here is that God always accommodates himself to our limitations by speaking in a language, whether verbal or visual, that we can understand.

The question, then, is what difference it makes to us. It used to be fashionable for theologians to write books attempting to tease out the relationship between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith: that is, between the historical figure of Jesus about whom we read in the Gospels; and the Christ whom we worship and obey as Lord in the Church today. The Ascension teaches us, however, that the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith are absolutely one and the same person. In other words, the Jesus about whom we read in the Bible is not merely an historical figure who lived and died in the ancient past, but rather someone who is alive even now in the fullest possible sense of the word.

The Ascension is absolutely critical to our Christian faith because it addresses the question: Where is Jesus now? The answer is that he’s been exalted to the right hand of his Father in heaven, where he reigns as Lord over all creation.

Yet, precisely because he’s returned to his Father in heaven, he can be present for us in the Church here and now. We can know him not only as someone whose words and deeds we read about in the Bible as a distant figure from the past, but also as a living presence in our midst – and more specifically, as the one who still speaks to us in his Word, who still comes among us in his Sacraments, and who still claims our deepest loyalty, allegiance, faith, and obedience as our Lord and Savior.

Paradoxically, then, the Ascension marks the beginning not of the absence of Jesus from his Church on earth, but rather of his presence in a new mode. During our Lord’s earthly Incarnation, his presence to his disciples was localized in his human body. After his Ascension, however, Jesus becomes present in the Spirit wherever his disciples travel, wherever the Church gathers in his name, wherever his Word is preached, wherever his Sacraments are celebrated.

So the Ascension is both end and beginning. It marks the end of the story of our Lord’s earthly Incarnation at a definite time and place in human history. But it also marks the beginning of our story as the Church, the Body of Christ on earth, the community of those who continue his mission and find new life in him.