Trinity Sunday

 

May 31, 2026

 John 16:12-15

 +When I was a new priest, the common advice to a new priest for preaching on Trinity Sunday was this:

 Let your curate or deacon preach instead.

 I don’t have a curate.

 And Deacon John, though always willing to preach, shouldn’t have to do my dirty work for me.

 But, the reality is that no preacher likes preaching about the Trinity.

 I think because there’s a temptation every Trinity Sunday to somehow explain the Trinity.

 Preachers reach for tired analogies.

 (and I have done every single one of these)

 Water, ice, and steam.

 The shamrock of St. Patrick.

 Three candles, one flame.

 Three notes, one chord.

 Or remember this one?

 Perichorisis—the divine dance.

 Lord!

 As someone who taught systematic theology for ten years, I also used did this quite often.

 I think the anxiety is based on a fear of somehow preaching something heretical.

 Well. . . Father Jamie ain’t a new priest anymore.

 And you know what I think about heresy?

 I just don’t care about heresy.

 And I know few of you do either.

 How many times has someone called me a heretic?

 As some point, you just start embracing it all, while at the same time thanking God they don’t don’t burn people like me at the take for it anymore.

 At least not yet.

 The problem really comes down to believing that the doctrine of the Trinity is some kind of puzzle that needs to be solved.

 It is not a theological math problem.

 And, as one of my favorite memes so succinctly puts it: the Trinity is not two men and a bird.

 The Trinity is not an answer to a question.

 So then, what is the Trinity.

 Well. . .

 I don’t know.

 I’ve never known.

 And I probably will never know.

 And I’ll even be more honest with you:

 I don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about it or pondering it.

 Because the more I do, the more evasive it all becomes.

 But what I do think what the doctrine of the Trinity actually does attempt to convey is something we all consider and struggle with on occasion:

 The mystery of God.

 For me, the Mystery of God is the more compelling thing about this Sunday.

 I wish this Sunday was Mystery of God Sunday.

 I think it would be less dreaded.

 Because that’s really what all of this is about.

 The first Christians experienced God in multiple ways.

 They experienced God in Jesus.

 They encountered God working in the risen Christ and found themselves transformed by this encounter.

 Then, after Jesus' ascension, they experienced the Spirit of God still moving among them—guiding them, comforting them, challenging, them and inspiring them.

 And through it all, they remained convinced that there was only one God.

 But they were experiencing this one God in such a variety of ways.

 In ways that transformed language and basic rational thought.

 So, being humans, they tried to take the Mystery of God and quantify it and definite it and pinpoint it.

 They tried to confine it with language and words and rational thinking.

 But the Mystery of God is so much more than our strange, limited understanding of anything.

 And perhaps that should tell us something important.

 The deepest truths in life are often the ones we cannot completely explain.

 In mystery.

 Can you explain love?

 Not define it.

 Just explain it.

 Can you explain why one piece of music or poetry moves you to tears?

 Can you explain beauty?

 Can you explain why certain memories stay with us for decades while others vanish almost immediately?

 Some realities are larger than our ability to describe them.

 God is one of those realities.

 In today's Gospel Jesus says, "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now."

 I find those words comforting.

 The disciples do not get everything at once.

 They are not handed a complete and perfect systematic theology.

 They are not given all the answers.

 Instead, Jesus promises that the Spirit will continue leading them into truth.

 Notice that truth is not presented as a destination but as a journey.

 The Spirit guides.

 The Spirit leads.

 The Spirit accompanies.

 Faith is not about arriving.

 Faith is about following.

 The Trinitarian Mystery of God, as I like to call it, reminds us that God is dynamic rather than static.

 God is relationship.

 God is movement.

 God is communion.

 From all eternity, God is love given and received.

 Long before creation, before stars or galaxies or human beings, God was already love.

 At the heart of reality is relationship.

 At the heart of reality is communion.

 At the heart of reality is love.

 And if human beings are created in the image of God, perhaps this tells us something about ourselves as well.

 We become most fully human not in isolation but in relationship.

 We need each another.

 We belong to each another.

 Our lives are woven together in ways we sometimes fail to see.

 We like to think we are self-made individuals.

 The Trinitarian Mystery of God  tells a different story.

 The Trinitarian Mystery of God tells us that relationship isn’t weakness.

 Dependence isn’t failure.

 Community isn’t optional.

 Love is written into the very structure of reality itself.

 And perhaps this is why Christians have struggled with the Trinitarian Mystery of God for nearly two thousand years.

 Not because it’s easy to understand.

 But because it points toward something true.

 Something we glimpse whenever people care for one another.

 Something we glimpse whenever forgiveness triumphs over resentment.

 Something we glimpse whenever a community gathers around a table and discovers that they belong to one another.

 The Trinitarian Mystery of God reminds us that God's deepest nature is not power.

 Not domination.

 Not control.

 But love.

 Love shared.

 Love given.

 Love received.

 Love flowing endlessly among eternal, amazing Mystery.

 And the astonishing claim of the Gospel is that we are invited into that life.

 Not merely to believe in it.

 Not merely to admire it.

 But to truly participate in it.

 To be drawn into the divine life itself.

 To be drawn into the Mystery.

 That is what happens at this table.

 That is what happens in prayer.

 That is what happens whenever we practice mercy, compassion, and forgiveness.

 We are being drawn deeper into the mystery of God.

 Not a mystery to be solved.

 But a mystery to be lived.

 And perhaps that’s enough.

 In a world that demands certainty, the Mystery of God invites wonder.

 In a world obsessed with answers, the Mystery of God teaches humility.

 In a world fractured by division, the Mystery of God reveals true communion.

 And in a world hungry for love, the Mystery of God reminds us that love is, as we all know, the deepest truth of all.

 Amen.

 

Pentecost

 

May 24, 2026

I honestly do not understand why the Feast of Pentecost is not on the same level of importance as Easter or Christmas.

 Because, it should be.

 It is a vitally important feast.

 And has always been seen so in the long history of the Church.

 Maybe it’s because it’s even more dramatic than Easter or Christmas.

 There’s wind.

 There’s fire.

 There’s lots and lots of noise.

 There’s. . . chaos.

 There’s this cacophony of sound as people pour into the streets speaking languages they did not know the day before.

 The Church was not born in silence or order or careful ecclesiastical planning.

 It is born in interruption.

 And maybe that’s our biggest lesson for today.

 Let’s face it, whether we admit it or not, many of us secretly want some sort of manageable God.

 A God who stays very politely inside the sanctuary of the church building.

 A God who blesses our routines.

 A God who confirms our politics.

 A God who reassures us that everything will remain basically stable and safe and nice.

 But the Holy Spirit in Acts behaves nothing like that.

 The Spirit of God comes crashing in  through locked doors.

 The Spirit disrupts certainty.

 The Spirit makes people speak in ways that disturb the established order of things.

 And the strange thing is: the miracle of Pentecost is not really that everyone suddenly speaks the same language.

 It is that they remain different and still understand one another.

 The temptation of religion has always been toward uniformity.

 Toward making all people the same.

 Carbon copies of each other. 

 Toward deciding there is only one acceptable culture, one acceptable voice, one acceptable way of being faithful.

 But Pentecost refuses all of that.

 Look at who is present.

 These Parthians and Egyptians and Romans.

 These Arabs and Jews from every corner of the known world.

 It’s interesting when we think of the diversity included in this account.

But what’s more amazing is what the Spirit does.

 Or rather, what the Spirit doesn’t do.

 The Spirit doesn’t erase their identities.

 What does the Spirit do?

 The Spirit speaks through them.

 ALL of them.

 The birth of Christianity doesn’t begin with domination, but with translation.

 It begins with understanding.

 It begins with radical hospitality.

 And nothing’s changed on that level, today

 That’s still the work of the Spirit.

 Right here.

 Right now.

 Because we are living in a world increasingly incapable of listening and hearing one another.

 Everyone is shouting.

 Everyone is interrupting one naother.

 Everyone is certain.

 Everyone is terrified.

 And fear always makes us narrower.

 Fear shrinks our souls.

 It makes us tribal and defensive and cruel.

 We begin dividing the world into the pure and the impure, the saved and the damned, the deserving and the disposable.

 But the Spirti does the opposite of that.

 The Spirit keeps breaking down those walls.

 That is why Pentecost is kind of frightening.

 Because the Spirit is not merely comforting.

 The Spirit is liberating.

 And liberation can be horribly disruptive.

 The Spirit tears off ceiling and opens sealed rooms where people have hidden themselves away in grief and fear.

 The disciples, remember, are not by any means brave when this story begins.

 What are they doing?

 They’re hiding.

 The crucifixion has shattered them.

 The Resurrection has bewildered them.

 They don’t know what comes next.

 And then what actually comes next?

 Wind.

 This almost-violent breath of God.

 Scripture says it fills the whole house.

 Not part of it.

 But all of it.

 Which means there is no protected corner left untouched.

 The fire of Pentecost is not destructive in the way human violence is destructive.

 It’s a refining fire.

 It burns away fear.

 It burns away despair.

 It burns away the lie that death and cruelty and empire will ultimately rule the world.

 And suddenly these frightened disciples are outside speaking hope publicly.

 That’s the miracle.

 Not spectacle, but courage.

 The Spirit gives them courage to become visible again.

 And perhaps that is the Pentecost we need now.

 We don’t need a louder, flashier Church.

 We don’t need mega-church crowds.

 We don’t need better branding.

 We don’t need to desperately try to impress anyone.

 Instead, we need to be people brave enough to speak mercy in a brutal world.

 We need to be people brave enough to tell the truth.

 We need to be people brave enough to love without guarantee of being loved back. 

We need to be people brave enough to remain tender when cynicism would be just so much easier.

 Because the Spirit doesn’t make us powerful in the way the world understands power.

 The Spirit makes us alive.

 Vital!

 And alive people are dangerous to systems built on fear.

 The Church at its best has always been a strange, eclectic, diverse  people, crossing boundaries, speaking across divisions, caring for those the world discards, refusing to accept that violence is inevitable, insisting that every human being carries the breath of God within them.

 That breath of God is what Pentecost is really about.

 In Genesis, God breathes life into dust.

 In Ezekiel, God’s breath enters dry, dead bones.

 In John’s Gospel, the risen Christ breathes upon the disciples.

 And in Acts, that breath becomes wind sweeping through the world.

 The Spirit is the breath of God refusing to abandon creation.

 Even now.

 Even here.

 Even among us.

 And perhaps that is the deepest comfort of Pentecost is  the realization that God has not left the world alone.

 Not to the powers of this world.

 Not to hatred.

 Not to despair.

 Not to death.

But to renewal and change and hope. 

 The breath of God still moves.

 The fire of God still burns.

 In us.

Through us.

And somewhere beneath all our exhaustion and fear and loneliness, the Spirit is still teaching us how to speak to one another again