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Trinity Sunday
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A Sermon by
The Rev. Anne Mallonee
✛
A Sermon for Trinity Sunday
Introduction
Thank you to Father Carl Turner for his kind invitation to preach here this morning. To agree to preach on a Trinity Sunday, especially in this pulpit, could suggest dubious judgment on my part. However, I am absolutely delighted to be here.
The Anglican Tradition is defined by our practice, our common prayer, rather than by a set of doctrines. Trinity Sunday is exceptional, as it is our only “Doctrine Sunday.” This is the day we focus on the fact that we have a Triune God: One God, three persons, unity of substance. We get some insight from Jesus’ farewell discourse in John’s Gospel.
Brilliant Theologians have tried to explain the Trinity throughout many centuries. Today it is not my plan to contribute toward that important scholarship. Instead, I would like to pose the very practical question:
Why does it matter?
What difference does it make to your lives and to mine, that the God we worship has a Trinity of being? I will tell you right now that I believe it does matter, and in the next few minutes I will explain to you what difference it makes that our God is a three-person God.
Why it matters
Our God is a God of relationship. At God’s very essence, there is a community of three: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And relationships are essential to us, being made in the image of God. The Church is a community of relationships.
This is not happenstance; it is by design. Jesus called a group and formed them to carry on his transforming work in the world. They were not sent off as individuals. He sent them out to do the work the Father had given him to do, to develop new communities, formed of new relationships, extending beyond all boundaries, in an ever-expanding movement that continues to this day.
Which is where the third person of the Trinity comes into play. The Holy The Spirit was sent by God to be present among us as Jesus had been, providing the guidance and resources to create and develop an ever-expanding network of relationship and community, revealing new ways in our new day for us to continue this work.
What this looks like locally & globally
A healthy, thriving Christian community has a purpose beyond itself – to continue God’s redeeming work in the world, made manifest through Jesus, and made possible through the Holy Spirit today.
Pentecost gave us a hint. Not even language would be a barrier to people hearing of God’s deeds of power–reaching all peoples to the ends of the earth. We are to reach outside of ourselves. Connect outside the church doors.
We are to emulate Jesus, just as his first disciples were sent to do. We know he did everything with love, in a spirit of hospitality, and forgiveness…these are all resources available through the Spirit for us to continue the work today.
The Spirit strengthens the relationships that are intrinsic to our common life and essential for our common mission across the Church.
This spiritual interconnectivity is crucial to our identity and our effectiveness as the Church, as the Body of Christ. The Spirit strengthens the relationships that are intrinsic to our common life and essential for our common mission.
Fresh Eyes
I have 30 years in parish ministry, and am now with the Church Pension Group. My role involves a lot of travel across the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. This gives me a remarkable view of the relationships that form our church.
As the Body of Christ, the Church is what it is
• because of our relationships with one another
• and the connections we make
• in order to love and heal this broken world
In the last year and a half I’ve been able to meet with hundreds of lay leaders, deacons, priests, and bishops. The purpose of our conversations has been to hear how the church is doing, to learn how ministry is changing so that CPG can continue to serve the Church well (in our second hundred years, beginning in 2017). There is some hand-wringing out in the church, because of diminishing resources.
But that’s not the dominant story!
I have been inspired by the passion, commitment, and creativity in our church in spite of – perhaps because of – financial constraints and difficult demographics. There is amazing vitality in the Episcopal Church, and areas of real growth. Viable communities: cities and towns, rural and suburban, low church, high church, white, black, brown, and yellow, lots of people on Sunday and some don’t meet on Sunday at all, many have a church building but some do not: there is no single model of vital, viable ministry community.
What they do all have in common, every one of them, is a sense of commitment outside of themselves.
Every one of them understands that their reason for being is not just to tend to their own comfort but to reach out to a broken world – in the Spirit of Jesus – and continue to do his work. The relationship at the core of our Trinitarian God is not a closed loop. The same must be true of the Church. Any community that loses track that its raison d’être exists beyond its own interests is a dying community.
Disruption reveals relationships
Metro North suspended service this week due to a fire. I was caught, perhaps like some of you, in Grand Central Station Tuesday evening. The trains were not going anywhere, hotels quickly booked up, my options were limited. I called a friend to see if she could take in a stray. She said yes in a heartbeat.
It is in life’s disruptions that we learn where our relationships are strong. What disruptions have you had, where you learned who your true friends were? The Spiritual Infrastructure of the Church is revealed in times of disruption.
Earlier in the year we held a clergy conference for the two dioceses in Ecuador. Amazing, committed Christians who do much with little, who were excited about ways they were making their ministry more sustainable. Then last month, there was an earthquake. Rather than just a vague news story of something bad that happened far away, faces of people I had met came to mind. My prayers were personal. There was a foundation of relationship in place.
Another example: we held a clergy conference for the European Convocation of the Episcopal Church. The churches have ministered amidst two terrorist attacks and the Refugee Crisis. I was deeply moved to meet the clergy who had been serving in that context and to hear their stories. They need our prayers and understanding of their difficult mission work in societies that are often not welcoming.
In both cases, the clergy I met were aware of their need to draw on their spiritual relationships across the church in order to continuously expand the reach of Jesus in their contexts. We need to be aware of this too.
When any of us hurts, we all hurt. In times of crisis and disruption we count on these relationships. We must cultivate them so they are strong and stable.
Conclusion
Why does it matter that ours is a Triune God, and why is the Doctrine of the Trinity worth paying attention to at least once a year? Because the nature of our God is community, and for us, being made in the image of God, relationships matter. Because we, too, have been designed to have relationships at our core. It is key to our identity as a church.
Our church community, important as it is internally, and imperfect as it may be, is the necessary platform for reaching out, to be God’s loving presence in the world today.
On this Trinity Sunday, may we be reminded yet again: We cannot be church without being a good steward of our common life with a vigilant eye always for ways to reach out to the world around us, as Jesus modeled for us.
We do this all:
For the glory of God the Father,
In the manner of Jesus the Son,
Through the guidance and power of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
