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Trinity Sunday: June 7, Martha Rogers

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all. Amen.

I just love a good mystery. To curl up with a good mystery book or to watch a mystery movie are some of my favorite things to do.

There are many things in life that I just don’t understand and I look at them as mystery. I still don’t understand how a voice can travel through wires or cell phones and be in my own phone as a voice--that’s mystery to me. Then there’s the mystery that someone suggested to me regarding my high cholesterol level. They said take a garlic tablet each day--I did and I do. My cholesterol level dropped and is now low normal and I don’t understand it. But I still participate with it.

Lately in our everyday lives, we have answers to so many things with all the knowledge that we have available right at our fingertips that many mysteries of life are no longer mysteries.

Except for what we celebrate today.

Today we celebrate the greatest mystery of life--God! Today is Trinity Sunday.

Trinity--three in one. For me and maybe for you too, the Trinity is one great big mystery. Theologians have spent their entire careers trying to explain what God is. And in the end, God remains divine mystery.

The first Sunday after Pentecost is always Trinity Sunday. This feast day of our church is different from all others in our church year because it does not celebrate a historical event from the life of Christ or the             Apostles.

Instead, Trinity Sunday celebrates the theological doctrine, the religious truth, of the Trinity which says that the one God is three beings: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The fact that Trinity Sunday is not tied to a specific historical event is refreshing for me as a preacher. Some preachers don’t like to preach this day because there are just no words to use for the Trinity. Except mystery.

This is a day when we don’t have to remember any particular stories or rituals. Instead, it’s a day when we can simply put our energies into celebrating God.

All our Scripture readings today show us a portrait of our God as Creator, as Sprit and as our Lord.

Creator, Lord, Spirit.
Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier.

No matter how you say it, we honor and celebrate all three persons or attributes of our one God.

Trinity Sunday is about praising God in the highest, taking the time in our worship to marvel at the sheer greatness of God who created everything that is. Including us.

Our Scripture lessons today point us to a God who is greater than anything we can grasp hold of.
The Old Testament lesson from Isaiah gives us a peek into the order of angels attending the prophet Isaiah, the seraphs, who give us those words of praise that you’ll hear repeated today during our Eucharistic prayer in the Sanctus: Holy, Holy Holy….heaven and earth are full of your glory.    The other lessons give us some concepts and language of a God that is described in human terms as three in one: Father or Abba, Jesus the Christ and Holy Spirit.

Our Gospel reading today from John gives us the words of Jesus as he speaks of God, Holy Spirit and himself. Father, Son and Holy Sprit. Jesus’ own words.

So today we come together in worship and in prayer to praise the majesty and eternity of God who is the God of heaven as well as earth.

Today we have the opportunity to praise the God who stands outside time as well as the God who acts within time. Our God who isn’t defined but experienced throughout all time. Experienced as a relationship called the Trinity; experienced by us in a relationship of love which eventually spills out into all of creation.

It is a day to offer praise as far as the very limits of our minds and imaginings will take us, and then beyond those limits of our minds to a universe and a creation which we do not fully understand. Divine mystery.

All our prayers today, our Nicene Creed, our Eucharistic Prayer, all of them, point us to God the creator and Father. Our prayers focus us on Jesus the Christ who is the redeemer and son.

And our prayers turn us towards the Holy Spirit, who moves through us and in us, to bring us closer to holiness, to living faithfully as best we can understand.

We confess that we believe in these three, even if it is a mystery.

And our Eucharistic prayer at the altar will not be complete until our prayers have included all three attributes of God. The sacrament of holy communion is not complete until we have praised and thanked God, have recalled Jesus’ words and actions and have prayed to ask the Holy Spirit to make holy, or sanctify, the bread and the wine. That’s how we celebrate the Eucharist, our holy communion.

Celebration--which exactly what you and I do when we share the blessed bread and wine. We celebrate. Have you ever noticed that when an ordained person leads us in the Eucharist they are called the Celebrant? Because that is what we are about: celebration.

We celebrate because we have hope.

We celebrate because we have a God who is greater than our imaginations, wiser than our wisdoms, more dazzling than the universe, as present as the air we breathe and utterly beyond our control.

Preacher Barbara Brown Taylor says that’s why she is a Christian. Barbara says:

As a creature of God who is greater and wiser and dazzling and present, as that creature, she says, I need a God like that, I need a mediator, an advocate, a flesh-and-blood handle on the inscrutable mystery that gives birth to everything that is. While Jesus is, in his own way, just as inscrutable, he is enough like me to convince me that relationship with God is not only possible, but deeply desired by God.

Jesus teaches us that relationship with God is not only possible, but deeply desired by God. And God wants me to believe that love is the wide net spread beneath the most dangerous of my days.

To believe that, says Brown-Taylor, is an act of faith--not a one time decision, but a daily and sometimes hourly choice to act as if that were true in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.

Sometimes, she says, it feels like pure make-believe.

We read the newspaper, full of stories about violence, addiction, corruption, disaster, and I wonder who we are kidding. Or our own lives begin to spring leaks and we lie awake in the middle of the night
weak with fear.

We want a safer world. We want a more competent God.

Then, Barbara Brown Taylor says, then I remember that God’s power is not a controlling but a redeeming power--the power to raise the dead, including those who are destroying themselves--
and the red blood of belief begins to return to my veins.

I have faith. I lose faith. I find faith again, or faith finds me, but throughout it all I am grasped by the possibility that it is all true: We, you and I, are in good hands; love girds the universe; and God will have the last word.

God will have the last word.

So let us together turn to this altar today and not only celebrate, but try to listen to our wonderful, marvelous, divine, loving, mysterious, almighty God with all the praise and thanksgiving and honor that we can muster. Let us remember the wonder and splendor and mystery of God’s work in and for our lives.

Let us listen once again to how it is that God has spoken God’s word in our lives.

And if we can come to the altar in this way, then our prayer will really be:

Glory be to God and glory be to the Christ and
glory be to the Holy Spirit,
as it was in the beginning,
is for us now, and will be for ever more. Amen.

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