Trinitarian Mission

by the Rev. Dr. Paul S. Nancarrow

An audio version of this sermon is available here.
Today we are celebrating Trinity Sunday — which is a pretty special day for us at Trinity Church. Today is our patronal feast; today is our church’s name-day! Trinity Sunday is a pretty big deal for us.

But Trinity Sunday — indeed, the entire doctrine of the Trinity — is for many Christians today kind of a head-scratcher. We know it’s important in our tradition; we know we use “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” language in our liturgies and prayers; we know that in the 4th and 5th centuries many of the Church’s best minds labored long and hard to work out the details of Trinitarian doctrine for the good of the whole Church. But for a lot of Christians today, the formal doctrine of the Trinity seems pretty remote from their experience. A lot of Christians today wonder why the teaching that God is one Being in three Persons really makes a difference in how they live and how they pray and how they make decisions and how they do service and mission in the world. One author on a preaching website I researched this week even said “Here’s my rule-of-thumb regarding the Trinity: People who say they understand it aren’t to be trusted. Which means, I think, that trying to explain the Trinity in a sermon is a really, really bad idea.” If that’s the kind of advice given to preachers, then is it any wonder that many people-in-the-pews don’t quite get why a day like Trinity Sunday is very meaningful for their life and work and ministry?

But lately, over the last few years or so, I’ve been seeing a kind of resurgence of interest in the doctrine of the Trinity — and precisely for its practical value in thinking about Christian life and mission. More and more, I’ve seen theologians and spiritual writers and ministry leaders saying that the Trinity is a key element in the Christian imagination, and that reflecting on the Trinity actually helps to motivate us for mission.

Their line of thinking goes like this: At the heart of it, when you burrow through all the metaphysical subtleties and unpack all the technical terminologies, at the heart of it, the doctrine of the Trinity teaches us that God is relationship. It says that at the heart of God, at the center of God’s being, the very thing that makes God be God, there is relationship. The Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father, and the Father loves the Spirit, and the Spirit loves the Father, and the Son loves the Spirit, and the Spirit loves the Son — and that constant and continual dance of giving and receiving in loving relationship is the way God is God. What the doctrine of the Trinity says, at root, is that the realest really real thing in all existence is relationship.

And, because it is God’s very nature to give and receive in loving relationship, God wants to expand the dance of giving and receiving, God wants to extend love to that-which-is-not-God. Therefore God creates a Universe, God brings forth a world, God makes a cosmos full of creatures that God can love, creatures that can evolve and grow and struggle and strive to love each other and to love God back. The reason God creates a Universe is so that more and more creatures in more and more ways can be drawn into the dance of love that is the Trinitarian heart of God.

So the Universe has a purpose. It isn’t just a kind of cosmic accident; it isn’t just a miserable mistake we need to get out of to get to heaven. God has a goal in the Universe, God has a mission in Creation, God is always everywhere at work in the world to create moments of giving and receiving, occasions of dancing together, experiences of genuine and joyful love. Because God the Trinity lives by giving and receiving in love, God has a mission to raise up every creature in the Universe to live by giving and receiving in love, too.

But if the goal is to raise up creatures to give and receive in love, that is not something that God can just make them do: in order to give and receive in genuine love, the creatures have to participate, they have to put their own selves into it, they have to give freely and receive gratefully for there to be genuine love. And that means that God’s mission in the world is not something that God can do all by Godself: God must call and invite and empower creatures to join God in God’s mission of Trinitarian love.

And that is where we as Christians come in. We believe that Jesus has come to us as God's embodied Word: we believe that the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus is God saying "I love you" to us, saying it in the flesh and bone and breath and presence of a real, live human being, a human being like us who shows us what it means to live a human life in the fullness of divine love. And believing in Jesus, beloving Jesus, giving our hearts to Jesus, opens the way for the Holy Spirit to give us new birth, to breathe into us a new quality of life, a new vitality of love, so that we too can love just as Jesus loves. Our believing in Jesus, our following Jesus, is our particular way to join in God's mission to create in the world moments of giving and receiving in love that reflect the Trinitarian reality in the heart of God.

And we Christians gather together in churches, we congregate in congregations, so that we can support each other, and challenge each other, and hold each other accountable, and lift each other up in encouragement, to go forth into the world and join God's mission. Our purpose for being Trinity Parish is for the community we share here to shape and form us in giving and receiving in love, so that we can give and receive in that same quality of love in all our relationships — all of them, in our families, at our jobs, on the street, in economics, in politics, in the environment — all the ways we connect with people and animals and plants and landscapes and all the other creatures God has put here to be neighbors to us.  Our mission as a congregation is to help each and every one of us, in our own ways, to join God’s mission to create love in the Universe.

As a congregation, we at Trinity Church provide opportunities to give and receive in Trinitarian love through corporate activities like Noon Lunch, or the Haiti mission, or the Honduras mission, or the United Thank Offering, or any number of ministries that are identified as part of the church’s life. But as a congregation we also lift up our members individually to create moments of giving and receiving in Trinitarian love in their own lives, quite apart from any named and recognized church program, just in the ways we be ourselves in the world. Take a moment to think of one thing you’ve done recently, one occasion when you have genuinely given and received with another in love, whether you’ve thought of it as “ministry” or not, one moment when you have helped to create an experience of love and joy and peace and right-relationship — and then I want you to realize that that moment was a glimpse of the Trinity, that moment was a tiny little portrait of the Holy Trinity, right here in the world, and every time we help God make one portrait of the Trinity in the world, we bring the world one bit closer to the full revelation of love God wants this Universe to be.

Helping God make portraits of the Trinity in moments of giving and receiving in love — that is the mission God calls us to join. That is our purpose for being Trinity Church. That is how the abstract doctrine of the Trinity really makes a difference for how we live and work and minister in our real lives. And that is what we celebrate as we celebrate Trinity Sunday. Amen.