I preached this sermon on Holy Trinity Sunday (RCL, Year A) at Trinity Lutheran Church in Connellsville, Pennsylvania.
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Today is Holy Trinity Sunday, when we celebrate the wonderful mystery of one God who is revealed to us in three persons. The doctrine of the Trinity is a particularly tricky aspect
of Christian belief. Attempts to explain it are either so simplistic that we
dabble in heresy and lose sight of the mystery and otherness of God, or so complex
that our eyes glaze over and we are left more confused than when we started.
So, what’s the point? Why do we need the Trinity, anyway? The
doctrine of the Trinity is an attempt to describe God by describing the ways
God relates to us. We worship only one God, and that God is and interacts with
creation as three persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy
Spirit. Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer. Each is equally and fully God, none is
greater or lesser than the others.
The early Christians’ experience of this God came first,
before any doctrine was cobbled together and written about in the ivory towers
of monasteries and universities. The same is true for us. We know that the
Triune God is bigger and more complex and more expansive than we are able to
comprehend.
And while we learn much from wrestling with these ideas and
trying to understand, ultimately what’s most important is our experience of the
God who is revealed to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We can see the
Triune God at work in the world and in our lives, even when our ability to
explain the Trinity falls short.
What we find at the heart of the Triune God is a God who is loving,
and a God who is in relationship – both relationship within the Trinity and
relationship beyond it, with all creation. These characteristics of God are
consistently visible throughout the Bible and in our own experiences. The Triune
God who is love promises to claim us as children and be in relationship with us
forever. The Triune God who is in relationship with us and with all creation
loved us so much that even sin and death cannot keep us separated. This is the
promise found at the end of Matthew’s Gospel: that the God who is Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit, is with us always, even to the end of the age.
The Triune God who promises to be present until the end of
time is also the Triune God who was present at the beginning of time. Today’s
readings from Genesis and Psalm 8 point to the wonder of creation and our place
in it.
In this poetic account in Genesis, the cadence of each day
points to a God whose presence brings order to places of chaos. This God
delights in creating, speaking into existence distinct things rooted in
interdependence. The creation of humans is no different. We were created in the
image of the Triune God. This doesn’t mean that our physical features look like
God. Instead, it means that the love and relationship that are core characteristics
of the Triune God are also core characteristics of each of us. We were created
by love, for love. We were created by relationship, for relationship. Relationship
with the Triune God, relationship with one another, and relationship with all
of creation.
Within this web of relationships and interdependence, humans
were given a blessing and a responsibility. “God blessed them, and God said to
them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have
dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every
living thing that moves upon the earth.’”
“Dominion” here isn’t really the best word to use. The
responsibility we have for creation is not about being in a position of power
and using everything to our own advantage. Instead, our responsibility is that
of stewards – tending and caring for something that does not belong to us.
When we tend and care for creation – the water and air,
plants and animals, land and sea – we are also tending and caring for our
fellow humans. Creation is an interconnected web of relationships. We know it
to be true that the most vulnerable among us are particularly harmed by
environmental disasters and the effects of climate change. Caring for the
environment, then, is a faith issue, a justice issue, a moral issue. Having
dominion over creation means that we have to care about what’s happening on our
planet. It means that we are mindful of the consequences our choices have on
the rest of creation, particularly as comparatively wealthy people in an
industrialized nation.
We are a small part of the web of creation, but our choices
and actions can have a big impact on the rest of the web with whom we are in
relationship. As we seek to live faithfully and mindfully with one another, we
do so guided by the never-failing presence of the Triune God, Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit. For this we can say, thanks be to God. Amen.
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