holy trinity sunday
the gospel of john 16:12-15
for St. Paul’s House, a Lutheran Life Community, June 16, 2019
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Beloveds, grace and peace to you from God the Creator, Jesus the Liberator, and the Holy Spirit, who is breath. Amen.
Nearly every week, Pr. Jenna opens her sermon with a similar prayer blessing to the one we just shared, extending the grace of God, the peace of Christ, and the mystery of the Holy Spirit. It’s a Trinitarian formula, modeled after Paul’s writings. While we invoke the Trinity each week in worship, today is marked for deeper exploration of the Trinity.
I consider today as an extension to Pentecost – the disciples know God, know Jesus, and have just come to know another aspect of the Holy Spirit – her fire, her energy, her joyful and sacred disruption. They are in new relationship to each other, to the fledgling church, and are still trying to make sense of the events of the past fifty days – where their leader was executed, and, resurrected, walked among them, eating and drinking, whose physical body was lifted up to be with God, and where the Holy Spirit came with noise and chaos and connection. They are grieving the loss of the world as they knew it, and trying to imagine forward into the Kin-dom of God. They are trying to make sense of God. And I would say that we are still trying to make sense of God, who is so abundant and mysterious and demanding.
In today’s Gospel, the first thing Jesus says is that the disciples aren’t ready yet. He has more to share, more good news, but knows that the disciples are already struggling to wrap their minds and actions around the commandment to love one another as Jesus has loved, a radical love that challenges the social structures they grew up in. He knows that they are struggling to wrap their minds around the reality that Jesus is heading towards the cross, that one of their own will hand him over, and that the future is deeply uncertain. They are not ready for the events of the next fifty days, but it doesn’t matter, because the passage of time is inevitable.
But Jesus also assures them that they will not be alone in the grief and re-ordering of their lives – the Holy Spirit will be with them. And they don’t know what that means yet, and they probably aren’t ready to know. Because as Jesus shows up in locked rooms, disrupting expectations, so does the Holy Spirit. She shows up when we least expect it, and asks us to sit with her energy, listening and discerning her movement in the world. And a lot of times, she is pushing and pulling us where we don’t want to go, challenging us to love each other deeper and more fervently. The experience of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit sweeping in, cements the three aspects of God, who is in relationship with us. That relationship takes different forms. God is creative energy, the spark that transforms an acorn into an oak tree, clay into flesh. Christ is a physical, holy body, blood pounding, weeping, scarred, a body so much like our own. The Holy Spirit is breath, mingling between our bodies, a mark of life. These three aspects of God resist harsh borders, because they are both unique and one.
A dance is a common metaphor used for the Trinity. Partners moving together, coordinated movements, give and take. But the Trinity isn’t a partnered dance. I think of this relationship like a line dance, a square dance, or a contra dance. It is swirls and conversation and surprise and pattern and repetition. It’s dancing with another person, and being open to dancing with your neighbor, with a stranger, connected by music. It’s knowing the steps but those steps are in a new order each time, unknown, but guided by a caller and by each other. This dance is not a binary, it is an ecosystem. It has its own energy, and power.
A contra dance is an invitation to relationship and connection. And God invites us into relationship and connection with every breath. This is a relationship that is personal and evolving. You might be in a stage of life where the story of Jesus is close to your heart. Or where the all-encompassing love of Creator God brings comfort. Or where the challenge of the Holy Spirit is encouraging new life. The images you associate with the Trinity might change over time – I often picture the Holy Spirit as breath, but her image as a Ghost sometimes haunts me. I try to have the political experience of Jesus guide my actions, and sometimes I need to rest in my faith in God’s dreams. God wants to be with us in so many ways, in our bodies, in our aging, in our breath. And the Trinity allows us to explore that relationship. It isn’t fixed, and we can’t engage with these aspects of God as separate without also knowing them as a whole.
The mystery of the Trinity is hard for us to hold. Humans like order, like patterns, like routine. That’s why the Holy Spirit can be such a challenge, because she sweeps in to disrupt our complacency, to connect us with our neighbors. It’s why Jesus can be such a challenge, as he calls us to radical love that can come at a cost. It’s why God can be such a challenge, because they rip out our stone hearts and ask us to be accountable. The Trinity disrupts our instinct to put things in simple binaries, and complicates our experience of the Divine. Every time we say one true thing about the Trinity, it is not a complete truth. We are still trying to make sense of God, the Three-in-One. And that’s a beautiful thing, because God is delighted in our exploration and deepening of relationship. The mystery of the Trinity is a gift that strengthens our relationship with God, who can hold our questions and prayer and wonder.
As the disciples were over their capacity to handle the reality of God, sometimes we are too. Being called to growth and the discomfort that comes with growth and letting go of fear is not an easy reality to live into. Resting in uncertainty, embracing fluidity and unknowing, living in a state of mystery instead of stability is hard. Staying in relationship while knowing we can never fully understand the Trinity is an act of faith. We sometimes aren’t ready for the ways God’s Kin-dom breaks into our lives, dissolves the borders we set up between ourselves and other people, and asks us to live in a new way. But the constant? Through our doubts, questions, and grief? God is with us. God is our breath and our energy and our actions. God wants so, so much to be in relationship with us that God comes in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit, and Creation, holding us in love, now and always. Amen.
Reed Fowler 