Sermon for Sunday, June 4th 2023

Trinity Sunday, 2023

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Love of God, and the Communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

The last time I was here presiding at the eucharist, I found myself saying the words of the Trinitarian blessing at the end of the service twice. I’d been, in my day job that week immersed in the work of fiddling with the preparation of liturgical texts for other events and occasions. One of the things we were fiddling with in particular were the various formulae for trinitarian blessings. Writing in to texts the pronouncement of a blessing in the name of the one God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity; one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit; one God, Creator, Christ and Holy Spirit; one God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier; one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Mother of us All…   Two of these formulae for God as Trinity stumbled out of my mouth, as though my words the first time couldn’t fully contain the, hmmmm… the glory and the reality of what I was trying to reach for. Even the grand, familiar, intimate, traditional words are only an echo, of the reality, each of these trinitarian expressions a whisper, just the beginning of how we name the God who faithfully carries us, whom we try faithfully to carry with us, in whom we try faithfully to live.

“The presider is the reciter of the community’s poem.” I was reminded recently of this teaching from the great liturgical scholar Aidan Kavanaugh. It speaks of the role of a presbyter, that is to say, a priest, within the community. Even though the word presider is derived from the word “president”, my role here today and Preston’s role all the time in liturgy and in pastoral presence, is not the same as a president. A presider isn’t elected from a particular electorate in time to a particular community in a particular place to reflect back to that community what the voting majority of those people want or need or think they need right now.

No, the president of the liturgical assembly is the reciter of the community’s poem. The priest and deacon and lay readers offering the prayers of the people are the leaders in the great poem we recite, together, the great poem that is in our hearts, that we hear fully, in all its harmonies and all its connections to the past only when we are together, because it doesn’t belong to any one individual amongst us.

More, it’s not just a great poem we recite. It is the poem that captures us, that makes a claim on us, that owns us, a poem to which we owe our very lives. The poem of God speaks into our hearts, embracing all our desires and connecting them with the desires of all people across aeons, connecting us with those who’ve gone before, those who will come after us, people in the pew beside us and others on the Zoom screen and others on the other side of the globe or down the street.

The poem holds us in God, captures us, lifts us into the life of God, because the Poet has created us, and because the heart desire of the Poet is to draw us into the Poet’s own life. The community’s poem, in all its beauty and glory is only but a whisper of the life of the Triune God. But even just a whisper of the poem that is the Life of the Holy Trinity is breath for us, breath that can sustain us and breath that can lead and carry us, like a feather on the breath of God.

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Love of God, and the Communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

This is the beginning of the poem I have the privilege and responsibility of reciting with you. The whole of the eucharistic liturgy is of course fully of Trinitarian references and the structure of what we do echoes Trinitarian patterns throughout, explicitly, whether we’re looking at the Creed or the Eucharistic Prayer or our hymnody, and implicitly as well. Threefold repetitions punctuate the liturgy with powerful doctrinal exclamations: we sing Glory to God in the Highest, peace to God’s people on earth, of Jesus Christ, who alone with the Most High, lives and reigns with the Holy Spirit in the Glory of God the Father; Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts; we make our offering of praise and intercession through Christ, with Christ, and in Christ, in the Unity of the Holy Spirit, where all honour and glory is to God the Creator and Father, now and forever.

The repetition of liturgical patterns is one of the most profound ways in which we are formed as human beings, and for Christians it is all about being immersed in patterns that are about the very life of God; and more, it’s about being lifted into the life of God, of being reminded that in every moment of our lives, sleeping and waking, conscious of it or not, we are held by God, not just as though in the palm of the hand of God the Father, or just as walking holding the hand of our friend and Lord Jesus, not just as being comforted by the Holy Spirit. Being held by God, belonging to God means living our lives within the Very Life of the Holy Trinity.

There are jokes amongst clergy about Trinity Sunday, you know… and I think amongst some a not too insignificant anxiety about how to preach on Trinity Sunday, as though the job of the preacher is to explain, logically, clearly, in ways everybody can grasp intellectually, to parse and to problem-solve the mystery of the Trinity. But God, the community that is God, the communion that is God, is not a puzzle to be solved, but a mystery into which we are invited to enter. And the greatest and most beautiful mystery of all is that it is this Mysterious Communion of Love who is God, who invites us in.

I remember in my early 30s when I was a parishioner with young kids here at St. John’s, and I’d just started some volunteer work for a General Synod committee and we used to meet at the convent of the Community of the Sisters of the Church in Oakville. The convent is now gone, and the several sisters have turned a set of condos into their new holy residence. Anglican nuns. I remember – at that level of memory where everything comes back, sights, sounds, scents – I remember the first time joined in worship with them. It was a service of morning prayer in the daily office, but it could have been any one of their other five Offices prayed daily, because they all began, and still begin, with the same words: People of God, we now enter into the life of divine prayer that Jesus the Christ is continually offering to God the Creator, in the communion of the Holy Spirit.”

Entering into that prayer. Do we think of that, any time we pray? That when I’m just being honest with God to God about my fears, hopes, failings, desires, and concerns for others – which is what prayer is – when I’m just being honest with God, praying, in words of the liturgy or with my own tears or my own overflowing gratitude, what is actually happening is that I am entering into the very life of community, the communion, that is the life of God, the Holy Trinity. Do I think of this often? Nope. I forget. Do I need Trinity Sunday to be reminded of this and of any number of other glories to do with the mysteries of God that have everything to do with the stuff of my own life too? You betcha I do!

There are plans emerging around the world for a major celebration in 2025 for the 1700^th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. That was the council of the bishops of the church in, do the math, the year 325 at which the major doctrines that led to the formula of the Nicene Creed were decided. The thing was that there were heresies abounding by the 10^th or 12^th generation after the first witnesses to the resurrection and clarity was needed. The basics had to do with whether Jesus could be considered fully divine and fully human, or was it more like fractions adding up to a whole, or some other explanation. But it was never about doctrinal clarity for its own sake as though God requires our efforts at puzzle perfection in explaining God’s own life and purposes for us. Sometimes I really think God gets a good laugh out of theologians. But no, Nicaea was crucial – literally of the cross, important – because the church was seeing the effects in community of heresy. When we are truly living what we believe to be true about God, our lives are witnesses to that life of God. Big generalizations coming here, but it can be said that communities that believed that Jesus wasn’t truly human showed tendencies to not really care much about the actual lives of suffering people around them, and saw their own sufferings as punishments parts of some purification to become more like Christ. And communities that didn’t believe that Jesus was truly divine were less likely to emulate Jesus especially in things like humility and service and self-giving love, as they saw these as less important, or maybe not even really as attributes of God, only of a lesser quasi-deity. So that’s what was at stake then. I think it’s still at stake today.

The point is that we become what we worship. God wants it that way, so much so that God has made it so that in worship we are reminded that what we offer is part of the same offering of love and gratitude and praise and honesty before God that is the offering of the persons of the Trinity to and with each other. In worship we are reminded, in these repeating threefold patterns that form us so deeply, that we live and move and have our being within the very life of God, enveloped by the Holy Trinity, and our lives are called to join in that Trinitarian dance every day we draw breath until we no longer need to breathe this earth’s air, and then we will dance with utter freedom in love with God.

So, the doctrine of the Trinity as such may not have been fully worked out in the philosophical grammar of that context until the Council of Nicaea, but that’s not to say it’s not fully biblical. I mean, that tells us something about what doctrine is, right? That it has to do with human needs for boundaries and definitions and careful vessels in which to steward this complex and beautiful and fragile and volatile thing that is living Christian, Trinitarian, faith. And if you really want to see living Christian Trinitarian faith, look to St. Paul.

Thank you, editors of The Revised Common Lectionary, for giving us these words from Paul today. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit. There it is, Trinitarian doctrine. We use it as the invitation to our eucharistic worship; it feels more and more to me as I ponder these things, like an invitation to Life itself, the Life of God. Our life. What is that life? Paul lived it. The Trinity became his grammar, one commentator I read this week says. Created by God, we are people of the resurrection, empowered by the Spirit.  Loved into being by God, forgiven and set free through Christ, we are bound to each other and to God through the Holy Spirit. This is all Paul… describing us! The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit is with us. Because we are with them, them who is one.

And how will our lives manifest what and whom we worship? If the God who calls us into being and is truly shaping us as we sit in honesty about ourselves with them, if that God is a God of three Persons in right relationship with each other, devoted in mutual love to each other, each with their own integrity, together whose values are justice and mercy and whose energy is the grace of always being able to enter and re-enter a path to new life, fresh starts as our taste of eternity today, … well…  what an invitation to what a beautiful life! How then are we to live? We live as who we are… people who are formed by the fact that we know that we live our lives within the Life of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, One God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Mother of us all.

The Reverend Dr Eileen Scully