Sermon for Holy Trinity Sunday

May 26, 2024, Holy Trinity Sunday
By Kristin Berkey-Abbott


John 3:1-17


Today we celebrate Holy Trinity Sunday, which comes just after the season of Easter, just after the festival of Pentecost. Today, we contemplate the mystery of the Holy Trinity. Christians have been contemplating the mysteries of the Holy Trinity since the earliest centuries of the faith.

Unless you’ve studied the first several centuries of Christian history, you might not realize how deeply the doctrine of the Trinity has divided the faithful. In fact, we have the Nicene Creed because in 325 A.D., the ruler of the Roman empire, Constantine, called an assembly to settle the question of what Christians believe. Did the Father create the Son and the Holy Spirit? Did they all exist together? Are they made of the same stuff? Do they have equal authority? Questions about gender would come much later.

I do realize that most of us here in this worship space spend our time thinking about issues other than Trinitarian theology. We may think that the identity of God has been established, and we may wonder why we return to it each year. We might say the Apostles Creed or the Nicene Creed on Sunday and not realize the bitter history that brought about these creeds.

What does it mean to worship a God who is three Gods in one? Why does it matter? Why do we have a special Sunday to talk about the Trinity?

Our texts for today aren’t very helpful. On a day like today, I yearn for a text where Jesus tells us in a more straight forward way what he’s talking about. Instead, we get Jesus asking Nicodemus a variation of this question: “What? You, a scholar, don’t understand? You’ve done all this studying and you don’t understand what I’m saying?” Jesus might say that to me, too: “You’ve had Systematic Theology class for 9 months, and you still can’t explain the mysteries of the Trinity?” Well, no, not in a short sermon I can’t. Systematic theologians often take 10 or more books to explain theology completely.

When I think about my need for explanations, I think about what Jesus says in verse 8 of the text for today, “8The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” And yet, Jesus spends a substantial amount of time trying to help people understand what it means to be part of the inbreaking Kingdom of God that he announced wherever he went.

Nicodemus takes Jesus literally, asking about a literal rebirth, how we can climb back into the wombs of our mothers. Jesus is talking about a spiritual rebirth, as he often is. As I think about the text for today, I’m struck by how often Jesus talks in figurative language. Jesus often talks about a mystical process, and so many of us talk about the process in literal terms.

Let’s take that most famous passage, John 3: 16. Many Evangelicals can tell you the exact time that they invited Jesus into their hearts to be their Lord and Savior, the exact way that they were born again. Many Christians proclaim this passage as the one that tells us that Christians are saved and others are damned. Many of us treat Jesus as our “Get out of jail free” card, the “Go to Heaven when You Die” card.

Jesus doesn’t see this world as our jail, though, certainly not creation itself, not creation as made by the creator. To be sure, there are parts of this world that imprison us, and Jesus does come to set us free from those. Some of us are in literal jails, but many more of us are incarcerated in cells of society’s making: the tangle of injustice that can leave us feeling powerless, the hopelessness that tells us not to bother with trying to believe anything but our own worthlessness, the death of joy that comes from hearing the relentless beat of doom that comes from every corner. Maybe it’s the doom of economic inequality or the doom of climate change or the doom of various forms of corruption. On and on the list could go.

Jesus comes to give us new life. We must be born again—but not so that we get to go to Heaven when we die. God comes to us in the form of Jesus to proclaim that we can experience divine love right here, right now. We don’t have to wait. We don’t have to complete a list of tasks. In fact, parts of today’s reading from John lead some scholars to say that being born again is something that the Spirit does, not something that we choose to do.

God is at work in the world, as much as the Creator was at work in the world in the creating of this planet that we call home. God is at work in the world today as much as the Redeemer was at work in the world when Jesus taught Nicodemus and others. God is still moving through the land, in the same way that the Holy Spirit motivated those first Christians to go out and preach the same Good News that we proclaim today.

The Good News is so much more than life after death, eternal life; if we stop there, we, like Nicodemus, have misunderstood what Jesus meant. Jesus is about so much more than a ticket to Heaven. Jesus comes to transform the very lives we’re living. Jesus talks about the quality of the lives we’re living, and so many of us hear him talking in terms of quantity.

Although it happens much less frequently now, occasionally, someone still asks me if I’ve been saved. My first response, although I don’t usually blurt it out, is to ask, “Saved from what?” Jesus might ask us that same question—are we saved, and if we are saved, as we believe that we are, then what are we saved for?

Holy Trinity Sunday celebrates God who lives in community, and this God who believes in community invites us into this communal relationship. The braided bread that I created for today’s Eucharist is the simplest kind of braid; there are some bread braids that incorporate 5 or 7 or more strands woven together.

Jesus comes to reweave this loaf of life that humans are only too happy to rip apart again and again. Happily, the Holy Spirit continues the work done by the Creator and Jesus. The Holy Spirit comes and enables us to be part of the great re-weaving, right here, right now. And tomorrow, the Holy Spirit will still be here, inviting us to be part of the inbreaking Kingdom of God, inviting us to be part of the braided community, many strands, coming together, woven into one community.