TRINITY SUNDAY – C, June 6, 2004

Today is Trinity Sunday, probably the most important feast day in the church’s liturgical year. By the glazed looks on your faces I can see how excited you all are. Granted, Trinity Sunday does not draw the crowds as do Christmas and Easter, feast days of Jesus. That is quite obvious when we look around. Nor does Trinity Sunday have all the pomp and circumstance surrounding Pentecost, the Feast of the Holy Spirit. As for God the Father, every prayer we make is to or through him.

But the Trinity is what we are all about as Christians. Our faith in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is what sets us apart from all other faiths in this world. We Christians are different from Jews and Moslems and Hindus and Buddhists and all the rest. So why do we not celebrate Trinity Sunday so that it is indeed our major feast day, our major celebration? I’ll tell you why: it’s the clergy’s fault. We don’t like Trinity Sunday because we can’t explain the Trinity even if we tried. So we don’t try and we hope that this day passes quickly without anyone noticing we are not giving this day its due. So let me give it a try, at least this once.

Again, the problem we all have with the Trinity is that we simply cannot understand or comprehend it. When we try, we make matters even worse. What we need is one of those books that smart people write for dummies: AOL for Dummies, WordPerfect for Dummies, Cell Phones for Dummies, the list is endless. We need a Christianity for Dummies, do we not? In fact, there is indeed such a book. This is a copy of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Life of Christ. This takes Christianity for Dummies one step further down the road. While these books may help, they have it all wrong. They try to dumb down our faith.

There is a difference between dumbing down and explaining, much as there is a difference between what we are doing here this morning and what are called "Seeker Services," services for those who know very little about Christianity. At those services we sing praise songs that have little theology and are often bad music to boot. We keep things simple in hopes this dumbing down of our faith will be attractive. But when we do, what we are in fact doing is being dishonest.

Remember the summary of our faith, the Great Commandment? It tells us that we are to love God with all our heart and mind and strength and love our neighbor as we love ourselves. The operative word here is "mind". We are to love God with our mind. Christianity, if it is anything, is a thinking person’s faith. As Episcopalians we are always proud to assert that our church is a thinking person’s church. It is a church where one does not have to park his or her brain at the door of the church before entering. Christianity is not for dummies and we had better not try to dumb it down. And, in fact, we do not.

If we want proof of that, all we have to do is think about what we are going to do in a few moments. We are going to welcome Raman James Rockwell into the Christian faith through his baptism. The baptismal ceremony screams "think, think, think" at us. It does not dumb down what it means to be a Christian and what our faith is all about. It lays it out very clearly and very plainly. It says to anyone who is listening, anyone who is taking part, "This is what it means to be a Christian. Do you still want to go through with it? Do you still want to commit your life to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit; God, Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier? Do you really want to do this?"

Think about it. The first two questions we ask of the parents and godparents are if they are ready and willing to see to it that the child they present will be brought up in the faith and to do so by their prayers and personal witness. And then they, and all of us, in fact, are asked two basic questions. First, do we renounce, give up all sinfulness and selfishness and second, do we turn our lives over to God? Those are very serious questions. If we have any hesitation, we should call the whole thing off and go home. Then we as a congregation promise that we will do all we can, all in our power, to support the one about to be baptized. If we have any hesitation about doing this, we should go home too.

Seriously. Then, to point out how serious we are about what our faith means, we recite the Creed. We publicly profess what we believe. We believe in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and even define some of what that means in the words of that profession of our faith. Then, to make matters worse, if "worse" is the word, we again publicly attest to what we are going to do because of that faith, that belief in the Trinity. We assert that with God’s help we will strive for justice and peace in this world, respect the dignity of every human being, be faithful to Word and Sacrament, and so on. The Christian faith is certainly not for the faint of heart, as Paul reminds us in today’s Epistle. Suffering is part and parcel of what it means to live out our Christian faith. That’s heavy. That’s a heavy load to bear.

Top those who do not believe it would seem that only a dummy, or as this book suggests, a complete idiot, would assent to such faith and such faith lived out in ones daily life. Only a dummy, someone who has not the foggiest notion what it means to be a Christian, would commit his or her life like that. Baptism is a reminder that we cannot and must not try to dumb down our faith. For when we do, it is no longer the faith. It may be a feel-good religion. It may be some New Age lifestyle. But it is not the faith handed down to us over the centuries.

Christianity is not for dummies or idiots or the faint of heart. But there is a correlation, if you will, to those computer books for dummies. First of all, when it comes to our faith, we need to "log on", as the computer would have us. Someone once said that there is a difference between training to do something and trying to do something. Our faith is not just to be studied, learned, understood. It is to be tried, lived out in our daily lives. We logged on at baptism and got going. But we must keep on going every day.

It is also, as we have discovered, a multi-task project, this living out of our faith. It demands much of us, as those five questions after the Apostles Creed to which we are asked to assent make quite clear. Living out our faith, Christianity, is not about one thing but about many, not about one task but a multitude of them. It is work, hard work, work, as Paul reminds, that demands suffering, endurance and character.

To continue the computer analogy, there is a lot of copying and cutting and pasting involved. As we live out our life of faith, we make mistakes, but we learn from our mistakes. We sin and try not to sin the same way again. We never stop learning, growing, becoming more and more skilled at living out that faith. We never get it right all the time, but we also never give up when we fail. In computer terms, we save what we have learned and we delete that which should be deleted.

And finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need to use the "F1" key, the "help" key on a regular basis. We do not have all the answers. We have not experienced everything so that we can avoid making the same mistake twice. As Paul would say, we only see in the mirror darkly. We need to ask questions, seek answers, request advice and help when we are lost and do not know what to do next. That is why this faith community, this church family is so important to us. We cannot make it alone in this life. We need the help and support of one another.

The celebration of the Feast of the Trinity is a reminder that this faith of ours is never to be taken lightly. It is not for dummies and it cannot be dumbed down. Whenever we recite the Creed, we are saying more than we can ever understand but which we believe nevertheless. It is a serious responsibility we take upon ourselves both to present Raman for baptism and for us as a congregation to promise to support Raman and one another as we strive to live our faith to the fullest each day.

Trinity Sunday, the day when we celebrate the fullness of our faith, a faith we must never dumb down but will never fully understand, yet one which we grow up into each day of our lives: let us rejoice and be glad in it!