The Rev. Kristin Krantz, St. James’, Mt. Airy
Trinity Sunday, May 30, 2021
Isaiah 6:1-8, Psalm 29, Romans 8:12-17, John 3:1-17
Gracious God, take our minds and think through them; take our hands and work through them; take our hearts and set them on fire. Amen.
Today is Trinity Sunday, the day every preacher is said to be a bit of a heretic as they try to illustrate something that is notoriously hard to understand and ultimately steeped in mystery. So here’s me trying not to be a heretic – I’ll save that part for the end.
The ancient doctrine of the Trinity arose of out of early Christian reflection on scripture and their experience with Jesus and the Holy Spirit.[1]
For them, encountering Jesus was somehow encountering God directly – and at the same time, Jesus spoke of God as both distinct from him and yet nevertheless “one” with him. There was in some way both a “two-ness” and a “oneness” in play, and so Christians sought out ways to express this mystery.
Likewise, the earliest disciples experienced encounters with the Spirit as encounters with God directly – and at the same time, Jesus spoke of the Spirit as a guiding, challenging presence distinct both from him and from the one to whom he prayed.
And so arose, over time, the church’s doctrine of the Trinity, the idea that God is properly conceived as both Three and One. Not three Gods – that would miss God’s oneness. And not merely One – for that would miss God’s threeness, and wouldn’t do justice to the sense of encountering God is Jesus and the Holy Spirit.
Indeed, rather than an esoteric picture of God “up there” (as is too often portrayed), the teaching quite practical upshot is to cast a vision of God “down here and everywhere,” creating, redeeming, and sustaining all of creation at every turn.
In short, the doctrine of the Trinity is ultimately about a world saturated with divine presence, and a God “in whom we live, and move, and have our being” – to quote Acts 17:28.
So that’s my basically non-heretical elevator pitch for Trinity Sunday, and now let’s turn our focus to the amazing reading from the Prophet Isaiah.
Here in the sixth chapter of Isaiah we see the prophet reporting about a vision he’s had about being commissioned to deliver a message to God’s people.
We’re given a huge clue as the timing and placement of this event with the opening line: In the year King Uzziah died… This places it in about the year 740 BCE in the southern kingdom of Judah.
Standing in Jerusalem’s royal temple, located in that kingdom, Isaiah’s vision imagined the temple as the earthly representation of YHWH’s heavenly throne – an axial point in which heaven and earth come together from which Isaiah could see into the throne room above, and somehow be present with the heavenly host surrounding the Lord.
There are so many interesting details to ponder in this passage, from the seraphs with their six wings covering their faces and feet while they flew, to the way their words shook the pivots on the thresholds and somehow filled the house with smoke.
The detail that caught my attention all week that I kept coming back to was the live coal taken from the altar that was touched to Isaiah’s mouth.
The whole choreography around the coal is a ritual of penitence and absolution. It begins with Isaiah’s confession that he is a man of unclean lips. He is touched by the coal, but instead of being burned and maimed, absolution is declared: your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.
It is another instance of divine power being linked to fire throughout scripture. From the bush that burned but was not consumed in front of Moses, to the pillar of fire that led the Israelites during the Exodus, to the flames of Pentecost we witnessed last Sunday – here we encounter the divine refiner’s fire, burning away impurities leaving only what is good, and just, and true.
But as powerful as Isaiah’s cleansing is, this ritual of reconciliation is only the prelude to the main action of the vision – the sending.
The climax of this passage is verse 8 where YHWH says, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” to which Isaiah replies, “Here am I; send me!”
Where and what he’s being sent into is almost irrelevant because of the power of his declaration. Even all these millennia later we can hear the faith and dedication in the words Isaiah proclaimed: Here am I; send me!
He drew from the deep well of faith and dedication that faithful people have drawn from down through the centuries. It is the same deep well we draw from every time we come together to worship – praying, confessing, and being sent out to do the work God gives us to do.
As we leave the celebration of Eastertide behind and step into nearly six months of “Ordinary Time” starting next week, it is the perfect reminder of one of the essential patterns of living faithfully.
Being sent by God doesn’t have to happen through a dramatic vision, it can be as simple as showing up in community to be nourished by word and sacrament and fellowship, and then being sent out into the world to share God’s love and light.
And you don’t have to be perfect to walk this path, because you’re already something better: you are made in God’s image – complicated just like the Trinity, and yet all the more holy for it.
And on that note, I’d like to close with perhaps a touch more heresy, or least a beautiful imaginative reflection on this Trinity we celebrate today, written by Steve Garnaas-Holmes:
The Holy Trinity, as someone has said,
is not two men and a bird.
It isn’t a doctrine, it’s a mystery:
not a puzzle to be solved
but a wonder to beheld.
The Trinity is an icon you gaze at
free of the distracting hubris of understanding,
an image of God’s shape-shiftiness,
God’s three-dimensionality
(the three dimensions being Here, There, and Everywhere),
God as This and the Opposite of This
and None of the Above.
The Trinity is
the sound of three hands clapping.
There are not three separate people: there is One.
There are not billions of things in the universe:
there is One.
The Trinity is an image of God as loving community
(God is crazy about themselves)—
the Lover, the Beloved, and the Love flowing between,
the Three-In-One in which you are the fourth member.
The Holy Trinity is the gate of heaven
which is always closed,
preventing you from trying to figure out a way in,
so instead you just give up and fall in love.
I mean, look at them. How could you not?
Amen.
[1] Entire reflection on the Trinity adapted from SaltProject’s Lectionary Commentary for Trinity Sunday.