Trinity Sunday, 2026
GENESIS 1:1-2:4a; PSALM 8; 2 CORINTHIANS 13:11-13; MATTHEW 28:16-20
So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them
It is Trinity Sunday today, and each year on this particular Sunday I am reminded that my Church History professor, Rebecca Lyman, told all of her students, me included, that we were most certainly to preach on the Trinity come Trinity Sunday.
And while I appreciate her sentiment, I do wonder how many bad sermons on the Trinity she helped propagate in the wilds of the church. (Whether this turns out to be one of those bad sermons on the Trinity, I will leave that for you to decide …) And while I will preach on the Trinity today, what I will not do is to talk about the Trinity as an egg with a shell, a yolk, and a white; or about the Trinity that is like water, in the form of ice, liquid, and steam; there will be nothing today about three-leafed clovers, either.
Mostly because all of these fail, in some way, and make for misleading sermons in the Trinity, largely because the unity of God doesn’t allow us to speak of God as if there were three distinct parts to God, and most images fail to capture both the unity and the triunity of God. So we aren’t doing analogies, or metaphors, or images today—partly because I don’t want to focus first on understanding the Trinity. Instead, I don’t want to miss an opportunity today to speak about what the doctrine of the Trinity implies about two things: first, the Christian life; and second, what it is to be a human being. The question I’d like to pursue is: what does believing in a Triune God mean for human being and for the Christian life?
Why, though, would the lectionary start with that long account of creation? It seems odd, doesn’t it? Because it’s a reading that doesn’t really have much to say about God as Trinity, at least not on the surface. So we will have to come back to that question: what does creation have to do with the Trinity? Instead we will start elsewhere, partly because it is much easier to see how the other two readings (aside from the Psalm) speak to the Triune God.
The reading from the Gospel of Matthew offers the one instance in Scripture where we find the Trinitarian formula we are familiar with in the liturgy, where Jesus gives the command to baptize “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” And while it doesn’t give much insight into how this one in three thing works—it does speak to what the Trinity has to do with the Christian life. To be baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is to be welcomed into the church, a new society, or a family, that share together a vocation, a calling, to life with the God we know as “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” And in this new community, we are caught up in a divine life that seeks the justice of the God who has made all things well, a divine life that seeks mercy and reconciliation, a divine life that that is always being renewed. That’s to say: in being baptized into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we are welcomed into the life of Jesus, the life of discipleship and of following Jesus, and a life of teaching, learning, and relearning this way of Jesus.
And it’s easy to see why the passage from Second Corinthians is one of our readings too. Paul assumes, here, that there is a threeness to God, inviting God’s people into the “grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit.” Is this a fully formed doctrine of the Trinity? No—and it doesn’t need to be. But it does speak to the way in which the one God is in some way plural, and invites us into a relationship with a God of a particular sort: the God of grace, the God of love, and the God of communion (or fellowship as we usually put it when we share the Grace with one another.)
And here we see the ways in which the threeness of God speaks to how we are invited to relate to God and to one another: the Jesus of grace invites us to hold fast to God’s grace and to be graceful to one another; the God of love invites us to love God and to love one another; the Spirit of communion invites us into communion with one another and into the communion that the Holy Spirit shares with God and Jesus.
But then we come to Genesis and that long reading about creation. Why in the heck do we read so much of Genesis 1 on Trinity Sunday? What can I say. I’m not sure I know! Well that’s not entirely true. But we do have to read Genesis in the context of the whole of the Bible.
It is here in Genesis 1 that the church finds, in the very first words of the Bible, a reference not just to a God who creates, but to a God that shares in some way a creative power that is not simply “God,” but a creative force translated here as a “wind from God,” which both Hebrew readers and Greek speakers would quickly hear as something akin to the Spirit of God: “ruach” means both wind and spirit; “pneuma” also means both wind and spirit. And John’s Gospel will eventually speak not just to the presence of the Spirit of God in creation, but also to the Wordof God in creation—
and so in a roundabout way, through reading the Bible as a whole, we find that the God who creates is not a God who creates alone, but a God who creates as a God with a Spirit, in the presence of a Word that was with God and that is God.
Taken all together today, this brings some real depth of meaning to what we read in Genesis about what it is to be a human creature of this particular God, the Triune God. Amongst all the creatures of God, there is only one sort of creature that is made in the image and likeness of God: “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness,” says the creating God; “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them.”
Pope Leo, in his recent encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas”—and I would urge you to read it, or to find a good summary of it. It will be an important document for Christians of all sorts, as it says some very important things, and not just about Artificial Intelligence—Leo also speaks to the way in which we are made in the image and likeness of God.
And while Jesus, in Matthew, speaks to the way in which being baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit invites us into a church in which we are followers of Jesus, and learners and teachers of the way of Jesus; and if Paul speaks of the way that Jesus, God, and the Spirit encourages us to be a people who share the grace, love, and fellowship of Jesus, God, and the Spirit; Genesis speaks to the Trinitarian shape of all human life, not just the Christian life.
Each of us are made in the image of this TriuneGod, and for Pope Leo, and for the Christian tradition more generally, this means we are called to communion with one another and with God, discovering self-giving as life-giving, invited as we are “into the Trinitarian dynamic of love received and shared.” This in turn speaks to the inherent dignity of all human persons—each of us made in the image of the Triune God, where “[h]uman dignity does not depend on a person’s abilities, wealth or position in life, nor on the right or wrong choices made; instead, it is a gift that precedes and transcends each person, endowed by God as an expression of his unfailing love.” That is, to be made in the image of the Triune God endows us with the dignity of the God whose own life is characterized by three persons giving and receiving love; and as such we are invited into God’s own life of self-giving, of sharing and receiving love.
What I’m hoping you will go home with today is not that God as Triune is like an egg, or water, or a clover-leaf. It almost seems trite to reduce the church’s teaching on the Trinity to such banality. Because the teaching of God as Trinity speaks to far more than who God is. To speak of God as Trinity is to speak about the fullness of human life.
To be made in the image of the Triune God speaks to the way in which we are made with a dignity that cannot be taken away, a dignity that has its roots in the God of three persons, the God whose internal life is characterized by love received and love shared; and that to be made in the image of this God leads us to a love for one another, and into relationship with one another characterized by self-giving.
This conviction of the inherent dignity of every human person leads many of us into the church—a church that explicitly, if not always successfully!, follows the God of grace, of love, and of communion; a community following Jesus, a community learning and teaching about Jesus, and above all a community that finds its expression in self-offering—in the cruciform life that leads not to death, but to the fullness of God’s own life, shared with his chosen people, and offered to all who are made in God’s own Triune image.
Angus Sinclair was appointed Director of Music of St. John the Evangelist on February 1, 2023. Having graduated in 1981 (Honours B.Mus.) in organ performance from Wilfrid Laurier University, he went on to distinguish himself as a church musician, recitalist and accompanist touring in both Canada and the UK. For over 40 years Angus has served parishes and congregations throughout Southwestern Ontario as director of music. He experiences his present appointment to St. John’s as a welcome homecoming, both spiritually and musically.
As our parish musician, he provides both support and leadership so that a variety of parish programs can find musical expression and attract participation. When our handbell choir is in season, he is one of our ringers. At parish dinners, he provides popular piano music for the guests to dine by. For both worship services and concerts, he will rehearse and accompany vocal and instrumental soloists from our congregation on piano, organ, or even accordion.
Angus Sinclair was appointed Director of Music of St. John the Evangelist on February 1, 2023. Having graduated in 1981 (Honours B.Mus.) in organ performance from Wilfrid Laurier University, he went on to distinguish himself as a church musician, recitalist and accompanist touring in both Canada and the UK. For over 40 years Angus has served parishes and congregations throughout Southwestern Ontario as director of music. He experiences his present appointment to St. John’s as a welcome homecoming, both spiritually and musically.