This is my sermon manuscript from Sunday, June 15th.
Today is Trinity Sunday; a vitally important day to remember as the church, and a day that is also often overlooked on the church calendar. Trinity Sunday is always the Sunday right after Pentecost and has been since the 10th century. For as the title suggests, this is the day that we consider the doctrine of the Trinity… and as best as we can we attempt to make sense of 1 person, 3 beings.
If you have ever sat in on a confirmation class with me, then you know that when we discuss the doctrine of the Trinity in that setting, I play a short cartoon video from the YouTube channel Lutheran Satire where a pair of twins asks St Patick to explain to them the Trinity. And since they are poor farmers, the conversation does not go well.
I cannot fully remember the dialogue, but it ends something like. A frustrated St. Patrick blurts out to the boys: “The Trinity is something which cannot comprehended by human reason and is best understood through faith alone…”[1] He huffs and puffs through a long response that makes the audience laugh. But the doctrine of the Trinity is foundationally serious for us.
God’s revelation of Himself to us as Triune is indeed a mystery, and one that we all agree is vitally important to our lives, and as it is important, I want to take this time today to speak about it on Trinity Sunday.
Using Romans 5 as the way to consider how the Triune God is with us in our everyday life, I believe Paul gives us a good direction forward in this consideration. For what good is this doctrine as crucial as the Trinity is for us, if we cannot take it from the worship space and share its impact with the people who we see each day? What good is the confession that God is with us in all three persons of the Trinity if we cannot feel, seek, and find God when we need the Lord?
And the word that Paul uses to access or approach the Triune God is: Hope.
Move 1- Defining Hope.
To begin, we need a definition of hope because as a church, both locally church here at Bethesda, and the larger Church Universal who has been a witness to all that occurs in this world daily since the ascension of the Lord, we are seeing a rise in suffering, pain, and evil.
And while I do not need to specifically point out the places, people, and moments, where we have seen this, I know that your minds have already begun to identify where we have felt the sting as recently as 2 weeks ago in this place and as part of this community.
But this suffering which we endure is not limited to a short season—and it will continue in the future that we have together.
Times of tribulation are the seasons that the church has dealt with, and will deal with consistently, until the Lord returns. They are a sign that the end is coming… but they are also a sign that the dawn is also coming.
And so, as we gaze into that liminal, that middle space, we HOPE for what is coming. We hope. And we need to see the place and moment of hope when what see does not appear to contain God personally even if we could state that God does not leave us.
So, when pain comes, we need to find moments to ground and hold our faith in. we need something that is worthy of hope. But what are we talking about? What is hope?
If you grabbed a copy of the Oxford dictionary, or used google to search that same for a definition of hope, you would find a choice of two definitions. Hope is defined as either:
a: a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.
b: a feeling of trust.[2]
Both of those sound correct, but yet neither contain any theological language that might help us find God when we need the Lord. Yet God is present, and God is the source of our hope when we witness the struggles in our lives, or in the lives of other people, we need theological language to make sense of what is happening. We need a source of hope. A grounding in hope.
On Trinity Sunday, understanding hope helps us to locate the God who is already present and waiting. We need the God who is inviting us in.
Move 2- Theological Hope
Three times in this text, Paul reminds the Christians in Rome to ground their hope in God. And while he does not use the traditional Trinitarian formula as other texts in scripture might, we can hear it if we are listening.
We hear, and we see, each person of the Trinity actively present in Paul’s thinking as he helps the church, in hope, access the God… peace with God… faith in our Lord Jesus Christ… God’s love poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. It is all right there for the Christian, the church, and the community who needs the Lord.
And further in using Hope, Paul also reminding the people hearing his words to practice their faith—or to have a faith that this same God is with them, relationally, in whatever they are enduring each day. The Trinitarian God, the God who they have come to trust, come to believe in, has not abandoned them in their time of need.
But as God is in perfect union and harmony in the Trinity, as God is in perfect relationship, we are invited to join that relationship with God. And this too stokes the fire of hope in us.
For the hope that the Roman Christians have, and the faith they practice, it is all experienced, with the triune God fully present and fully inviting them into the relationship. We see this throughout the entirety of these 5 verses. And so, we have a theological hope to fall back upon.
For as members of the Body of Christ, hope should always point us always towards the Risen Christ. Even when we the substance of our day makes finding hope hard, we reach out to God, and we hope. For Christians ‘to speak of Hope is to speak of [the person of] Jesus Christ [in union with God].’[3] For Jesus is our hope, and as the text says in verse 3, that hope causes us to rejoice! And further our ‘hope is never put to shame.’[4]
For God, the source of our hope is reliable, and He is consistent and present. Philosopher Alferd Whitehead said, “God is the fellow sufferer who… understands.”[5]
In a passage about Hope, we also find the Trinitarian presence being lifted up to us.
Move 3- relationship
And more than simply being lifted up doctrinally, Trinity Sunday is an invitation to relationship with God. And more than simply a general invitation that we could blindly take or leave, the relationship is further strengthened by God’s choice to never be, except, to be with us in this relationship knowing all that we will endure and all that we do endure.
And in this choice by God, we again come back to the mystery of Trinity Sunday—and the mystery of Hope.
Remember those definitions that I gave you earlier for Hope: “trust” and “a desire for a certain thing to happen.”
In the trinitarian relationship that Paul teaches us about in Romans 5, Paul is helping the church to relationally find deeper trust and an ultimate desire for this relationship to prosper and grow… and we call both of those things, both of those aspects: faith.
We are practicing our faith as we seek God and seek a deeper relationship with the one who is Emmanuel, the one who in Romans 5:1 justifies us and gives us peace. This is not just a ‘in the sweet by and by’ doctrine or relationship only from God because that would be of no comfort to God’s people who live amid ill health, violence, poverty, and so on… This hope, this relationship that God offers us invites us to hope for a better future that we find together with God in new and remarkable ways.
Some obvious. . . and some less than obvious, but all grounded and held in the Triune God who offers us the peace that Paul speaks about as well in this text.
Conclusion
Today is Trinity Sunday so let us take that doctrine and all that it represents and means and take Hope in it. Let us wonder about the God who welcomes us into this relationship and more than just wonder about it distantly, I wonder if you will invite one more person to locate the placement of the Triune God in their lives and help them to find, and share, the Hope this week?
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