Today is Trinity Sunday, the only commemoration in our church calendar that remembers a doctrine rather than a person or event. And it’s a difficult doctrine – if you want to know how difficult, how much it vexed the earliest Christian theologians, just turn to page 864 in the Book of Common Prayer, in the section of the book called Historical Documents…

Alleluia! Christ is risen! That must have been some sermon the disciples preached. I’m sure every preacher since then has wished she or he had a copy of it. I mean, sure, the mighty wind and all those tongues of flames must have helped get the message across. And it can’t have hurt that this rag-tag band of uneducated fishermen and laborers…

Alleluia! Christ is risen! And, we remember today, is rising still. The Feast of the Ascension is, I think, a strange holiday, just as the biblical stories we tell on this day are strange stories. Jesus, who has been walking the earth for forty days after his resurrection, gives some last-minute instructions to his friends and then disappears in a nimbus of…