Trinity Sunday, Year A
May 26, 2002
Christ Church, Covington


“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you” (2 Cor. 13:14).


The Sunday following Pentecost is marked by a different kind of celebration, that of Trinity Sunday. The great cycle of the Christian Year, from Advent and Christmas through Lent and to Easter, tells the story of Jesus’ coming into the world, of his death and resurrection; it tells the story of God’s action and our salvation. This Sunday puts before us something else: the commemoration not of what God does, but of who God is.

Christians worship one God, a Trinity of Persons in relationship. The Father eternally begets the Son (as the Creed says), and the Spirit ever proceeds from both. Christians understand God to be the God we worship because of this unique relationship between the Three. There was a time when God was not Creator or Redeemer of the world, or Sanctifier of the faithful, but there never was a time when the Father was not in relationship with the Son, or the Son with the Father, or a time when the Spirit did not proceed as the love between them both. In understanding the mystery of God, Christians take their cue from his being, not from his creative and redemptive action in the world. The key to understanding the nature of God is the relationship of the Three. He is the eternal Father of the eternal Son (as an early Christian hymn puts it) from whom the Spirit proceeds.

This is more than an abstraction. The relationship of love between the Three sets the stage for human redemption, though that is not its determining purpose. The character of God as love doesn’t require us for its fulfillment, though our redemption flows from that eternal character. The Son is eternally begotten and we can be born again in baptism; the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son and we are taken up in the power of the Spirit into the life of God. It is the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, by which we are saved. The understanding of God as Trinity comes from Christian reflection upon the experience of redemption in Jesus Christ.

This understanding requires faith. Faith is more than a trick for getting out of the logical impossibility of three being one, and one being three. Faith is not a way in which Christians explain what is unexplainable, a way in which we account for what cannot be accounted for in our “system of belief” (though this is the view of faith a jaundiced world has). Faith is not the confession of the intellectual or emotional bankruptcy of Christian belief. Faith is trust in God: not the action of the mind or the emotions alone, but of the whole of our being. In fact, it is our way of being. We put our trust in the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

Faith comes to us through the testimony of others. It is the faith of the Church, of Christian believers, that teaches us to believe; a faithful and reasonable testimony that is confirmed by the Scriptures, by the great story of salvation. The Apostle Paul writes in the Letter to the Romans about the “obedience of faith” (Rom. 1:5) which is required when we encounter the Gospel. Obedience in this context is nothing more or less than “faithful listening”, for the root of this word obedience is “to listen”. “Faith comes from what is heard” (Rom. 10:17), Paul says in another place in that Letter. We listen to the great story of salvation, and faith comes when the testimony of the Church finds an answering echo in our being. We don’t generate that echo, for it’s the echo of a Word spoken long before, but we surely claim it for our own.

Trinity Sunday reminds us not only of the fundamental nature of who God is as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a communion of love between persons; but it also reminds us of our own fundamental identity as believers in this God. “This is the faith of the Church. This is our faith. We believe and trust in one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”

The Rev’d John Bauerschmidt is Rector of Christ Church, Covington.

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