Sermon for Trinity Sunday (June 15, 2025)
Sermon for Trinity Sunday (June 15, 2025) at St. James’ Episcopal Church in Hyde Park, NY. View the scripture readings and the Collect of the Day.
Rublev’s Trinity—an icon written in the early 15th century.
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Transcript
May only truth be spoken here and only truth be heard. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.
I have a handout today. That's what happens when the Holy Spirit doesn't inspire you till some might say a little late, but that's fine. Okay, so what I'm passing out is an icon of the Trinity. It's Trinity Sunday and Dear Deme is going to pass out the rest of 'em so I don't have to vamp all the way up and down the aisle. Thank you. So I wasn't, in fact, I told several people this week, I said the thing about Trinity Sunday, because preachers hate Trinity Sunday and especially extemporaneous preachers because when you're trying, if you do kind of dare to attempt to do a sermon on the doctrine of the Trinity, which is a mystery, and then if you're an extemporaneous preacher, you might do a heresy just by accident.
So there's a school of thought that when it comes around to Trinity Sunday, you can do what you do most Sundays, which is you focus on a particular scripture. You don't have to worry about kind of diving into that doctrine. And the doctrine of the Trinity, you can see, you can even hear in our scriptures this morning, you can hear kind of hints of it, right? All of our New Testament reading our Gospel, they're talking about the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Nowhere in scripture is there a line saying the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are three persons of one substance, co-eternal united, there's nothing like that. But you see these sort of persons show up in both the Old Testament and the New Testament.
But the early church didn't develop the doctrine of the Trinity right away, the teaching of the Trinity, the Nicean Creed that we say every Sunday, which dates to the fourth century. This is where all the bishops of what was then the church in the known world kind of got together and tried to hash out what is it that we can all agree on? What brings us together? What can we set aside and what is kind of essential? And one of the things that the Nicean Council understood to be essential for Christians is this doctrine of the Trinity. That's why you have all this repetition, God from God, Light from Light, very God of very God. They're trying to be very clear that the Trinity, this essential mystery really matters.
By the 14th century, one of the popes said, in fact, this one teaching is so important that we should have a Sunday about it. That's this Sunday. And earlier Popes through the medieval period had argued, we actually don't need a Trinity Sunday because as you know, we say Father, Son and Holy Spirit over and over, right? Every Sunday is a worship, a glorification of the Holy Trinity. We don't need a day for it. But by the 14th century, this Pope said, no, we really do. So the Sunday after Pentecost was chosen as a day when the church would focus on this teaching about who God is.
And so I'm curious today, and what I want to explore is why does it matter so much? Why does it matter so much? Now, someone needs to give me back one of these because I need to look at it myself. Thank you. Alright, why does it matter? Why does it matter to the church that God is like this? In the 15th century, Andrei Rublev wrote this icon. Just raise your hand if you've seen this before. So a few of us have seen this before. This icon dates back to the 15th century and it's called the Trinity.
And as you can see, there are three persons. If you look closely, you can see the faint outline of what might be wings. And this kind of has a Middle Eastern feeling to it. You can see what looks like could be a palm tree. It's an oak, but it's the kind of tree that grows in an arid climate, right? You can see the bare feet. And these three people are seated at a table. This icon, which is an icon of the Trinity, refers to a story in the book of Genesis where 3 men come to the tent of Abraham and Sarah and Abraham invites them, extends hospitality to them, says, come on in and sit down and prepares for them a banquet. And when the three men have sat down with Abraham and Sarah, that is the point at which they tell Abraham that Sarah is going to have a child. You might remember this, Sarah's listening behind the tent flat, but she laughs.
In the letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament, the writer refers to this story and says, do not be afraid to extend hospitality to strangers for many by doing so, have entertained angels unawares. That's a reference to this story. In Genesis, these men reveal themselves to be messengers from God, not ordinary men. But over time, the church has come to understand that what Abraham knew well, which is whenever we open our door to welcome somebody in, whenever we lay out a table and share what we have with others, we are indeed entertaining angels.
Every person to whom we extend our love and our hospitality, our communion, is revealed to us to be, as we often say, here, a face of Christ. May you see the face of Christ in everyone you meet. May you see the face of Christ in everyone to whom you open your door. May you see the face of Christ in everyone who sits at your table.
So we have three seated at this table. What many people don't realize about this icon is that there's a fourth person in it. Did you find them yet? So everyone is looking for the fourth person, it's you. What the Trinity teaches us is that the nature of God is to draw you in. The nature of God is not one lonely self-contained being. The nature of God is three, is multiple. The nature of God is not still, but rather the movement that happens in a relationship, the nature of God is not isolation and self-sufficiency, it's communion and generosity. The nature of God is to open and to draw you into the dance of relationship.
Deacon Gale and I often talk about the news just a little bit in the morning before church. And this week has been so hard, it's been so hard, maybe more than any other week. I sent emails to Deacon Gale. I sent text messages to her. You probably already saw this, but let's make sure to include that state senator who was assassinated in Minnesota. Let's be sure to include her in our prayers today. Let's be sure to include the people who died in that plane crash. And it felt like one thing after another, this increasing escalation of war in the Middle East, the week has been painful and frightening and anxious.
But there is something true and essential about the Trinity that we need to hang on to because so many of these painful things that are happening in the world, especially the violence, the dehumanization, the snatching of rights, increasing callousness; they stem from an essential misunderstanding of what the world is, of what reality is. Too many human beings and too many of us too often feel essentially separate. The illusion that we are not all tangled up in one another's lives, that we are not intricately woven into creation gives rise to the idea that we can take food or take rights from one, right, and not ourselves all suffer; that we can strike out against what we hate or fear and not find ourselves stricken.
The reason that the teaching of the Trinity matters is because if this is true about God, that the truth of God is communion, never separation. The truth of God is the movement of love from one to another and the inviting of you and of everybody into that unity. That is what is true about the world. An icon is a window. And when we gaze into an icon, we are meant to look through it and to see God, to see what is real. When we look through this window, we see that the reality is God reaching out to you in love.
When the anxiety of the world increases and fear is all around, we might feel like we need to get up and do something. And you know what happens to me when I feel like I have to get up and do something, but I'm not yet sure what it is. The anxiety and the fear get worse. And so many of us are caught in that cycle right now, feeling helpless. So I invite you instead to pause and to look into this window and to ground yourself in reality. This, the love of God, communion is what is most real. You know it in your heart.
You are sitting at this table and the table is getting bigger and bigger and bigger as you invite others to sit down too. Every time you come to church, every Sunday, you are coming to the table. You are sitting down and you are being nourished by the riches of God's grace for God's people. And you take that reality, communion, and you go out into the world to extend the friendship and the fellowship of that table with everybody you meet. And when you feel anxious, I want you to remember where you are and who you are with; the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit one God in communion, in communion with you, now and forever. Amen.