Sermon for June 15, 2025 (Trinity Sunday)

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The Rev. Taylor Vines

There’s an old joke among priests that Trinity Sunday—the first Sunday after Pentecost—is the day when all the senior clergy mysteriously find themselves “away,” leaving their associates or interns to preach. And honestly, if you’ve ever tried to explain the Trinity—especially to a child—you understand why. One God in three persons. Not three gods, but not just one God with three names either. Try using a metaphor like water, ice, and steam—or the sun, its light, and its warmth—and some well-read parishioner might inform you, correctly, that you’ve just wandered into heresy.

The summer before my final year of seminary, my internship mentor invited me to preach while she and her husband ran a Vacation Bible School in Belize. Guess which Sunday it was?

That’s right—Trinity Sunday. But I was undaunted. I gave the good people of Mount Airy, North Carolina a full-on lecture—I mean sermon—on the themes of perichoresis, mutual indwelling, and other exciting theological concepts from the Prayer Book. It was so… educational that someone in the congregation shook my hand afterward and said, “Well, Taylor, we all know you went to seminary now.”

But I promise not to do that again today.

Because while Trinity Sunday is the only feast in the church calendar devoted not to an event in Jesus’ life but to a doctrine, I want to invite us to see it not as a theological riddle to solve, but as something else entirely. What if we thought of the Trinity as a story of love to enter, a pattern to perceive, or a movement to join?

Every church, among other things, is a kind of schoolhouse. And over the course of the liturgical year, we move together through the curriculum of the Christian story. From Advent to Pentecost, we trace the arc of Jesus’ life—his birth, ministry, death, resurrection, and the sending of the Spirit. And next week, we enter what’s called “Ordinary Time.” Not “ordinary” as in dull or boring like my sermons, but “ordinal,” meaning counted and structured. For the rest of the year, we’ll walk with Jesus through the Gospel of Luke, step by step.

But before we begin that long stretch of discipleship, we pause—like standing at a trailhead—to ask: Where are we going? Who are we following? What kind of God is calling us forward?

And that’s where the Trinity comes in.

Now, the doctrine of the Trinity didn’t fall out of the sky ready-made. It arose from the early church’s real experiences of God. When they encountered Jesus, they believed they were encountering God directly—healing, forgiving, teaching, and loving. And yet Jesus also prayed to God, spoke of the Father who sent him, and submitted to the Father’s will.

After Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, his followers began to experience someone else—the Holy Spirit. The Spirit filled them with courage, knit them together in community, and guided them into truth. Again, the Spirit was God—but not quite the same experience as Jesus. And not the same as the Father Jesus prayed to.

So the question became: How could God be One, and yet show up in these three distinct ways?

That’s the seedbed from which the doctrine of the Trinity grew—not as a theological puzzle, but as a testimony to how God had actually shown up in people’s lives.

Our reading from Proverbs offers one such testimony. Lady Wisdom isn’t just a poetic flourish—she’s a dynamic presence, calling out in the city gates, at the crossroads of daily life. She says, “When the Lord established the heavens, I was there,” like a master craftswoman, rejoicing in creation. Early Christians read this passage and saw a whisper of Christ, the eternal Word.

And then in today’s Gospel from John, Jesus tells his disciples, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” The Spirit is coming, he says—not to replace him, but to lead them deeper into the truth he has already begun to reveal.

Revelation is ongoing, and God is still speaking.

And that’s a key point. The Trinity isn’t a static formula—it’s a living invitation: to keep listening, to keep watching, to keep following God’s movement in history, in Scripture, and in our lives.

And there’s something else the Trinity reveals: not just what God does, but who God is.

The one God is not a solitary figure, like a monarch in the sky. God is relationship. God is communion. God is love—not just as an action, but as an identity: a mutual, eternal, dynamic giving and receiving between Father, Son, and Spirit.

Which has profound implications for us. Because if we are made in the image of this God—the imago Dei—then we, too, are made for relationship. Not as a side note, not as “bonus points in life” but as the very core of what it means to be human.

That is a message we desperately need right now. In a world of increasing individualism, curated selves, and profound loneliness, the Trinity calls us back to something deeper. It tells us: relationships aren’t just what we do. Relationships are who we are. To be created in the image of a relational God means we are created for interdependence—for love, for belonging, for community.

The English author and theologian C.S. Lewis offers a beautiful image of this. He says to imagine a Christian at prayer. She is praying to God—but the desire to pray came from God already stirring in her heart. And as she prays, she does so “in Christ’s name,” with Christ as her companion and mediator. In that one moment, Lewis says, God is the goal she seeks, the power moving within her, and the one beside her in love.

That image mirrors what Paul describes in our reading from Romans. We have peace with God through Christ, the Son. God’s love is poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. And it all originates in the God the Father who justifies and renews us. The Trinity, then, is not a theory. It’s an experience: an experience of being caught up in divine life, transformed by divine love, and sustained by hope.

So today is not just about checking the right box on a theological pop quiz. It’s about entering a mystery. It’s about tuning our ears to the voice of Wisdom at the crossroads. It’s about trusting that the Spirit is still leading us forward—even when we don’t understand everything yet.

And most of all, it’s about remembering that we are not alone. We are made in the image of a God who is dynamic, relational, alive—and always reaching out. And who is also, right now, inviting us to reach back. Amen.

St. Luke's Episcopal Church, Ypsilanti, MI

All are welcome!

Sermon for June 15, 2025 (Trinity Sunday)