Sermon for June 15, 2025

June 15, 2025

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott


Trinity Sunday


If you ask a pastor or a seminary professor how to understand the idea of the Triune God, you might be directed to any one of the Christian creeds that the Church crafted long ago. They came into being because various churches had very different beliefs about the nature of our Triune God. Does the Son come from the Father in a different way than the Spirit comes from the Father? Did the Spirit exist before Jesus? Did the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist out of time, before time, all together?

Out of the efforts to settle these questions came schism. When I study church history, I’m amazed at what has split us apart. I have friends who would advise us to turn to the Bible, to see what the Bible tells us about the nature of the Triune God. When we do that, we get a variety of answers.

One of the most common ways of seeing God is as a creator. The creeds keep it fairly simple, “Creator of heaven and earth.” But even this image is not as straight forward as it seems. In the first few chapters of the Bible, we see contradictions. In the first two chapters of Genesis we see a God that is pleased with creation, a God who creates and proclaims creation “Good.” There are no rough drafts here, just a joy in everything created. But just a few chapters later, we get a different view of God, a God who is willing to get rid of creation and start over, most notably with the Flood. The God of the Old Testament often seems very different from the God of the New Testament.

Some Christians reconcile these differences by focusing on Jesus and what Jesus tells us about the Divine.

If we read all of the Gospels, we see that Jesus contains apparent contradictions too. Many of us have been taught that Jesus came for all, but as we read the Gospels, we find that Jesus doesn’t always see his mission this way. In places, Jesus is a shepherd who worries about all the lost sheep; in other places, Jesus wants to limit his ministry—but people like the Syrophoenician woman remind him of the benefits of reaching out, letting the dogs eat the crumbs from the table.

If we study the Bible to get a unified view of the Holy Spirit, we might come away mystified. We see the Holy Spirit moving through the book of Acts—we give the Holy Spirit credit for what those first disciples were able to do. We might go back to the Old Testament to see if we see the Holy Spirit there—for example, when we meet Wisdom in today’s reading from Proverbs, is that the Holy Spirit? Or God? Or wisdom, as we understand it, either book learning or common sense, but not an incarnation of the Holy Spirit?

Trinity Sunday asks us to wrestle with the idea of God in three persons. Trinity Sunday is also an opportunity to think about what it would mean if we enlarged our view of God. We’ve spent several weeks watching Jesus pray and preach that we, too, are part of our three-personed God, which is not any part of Trinitarian theology that I have ever been taught. I’ve been taught that God created us and declared us very good—I’ve also been taught that God created us with flaws that meant we needed divine intervention. I’ve been taught that Jesus came to show us how to live our best lives as humans. I’ve been taught that the Holy Spirit came to lead us to brave new places as we live our best lives. But I’ve never been taught that God wants humans to be part of the Trinity too.

At the Central States Synod assembly, Bishop Eaton, leader of the whole Lutheran church, reminded us that the Holy Spirit makes a home with us. She said, “The Holy Spirit is a homemaker and is closer than our breath.”

We might feel uncomfortable with this level of intimacy. What does it mean to be part of the Trinity in this way, that God’s breath is our breath? We might feel unworthy.

Today’s Psalm tells a different story than the one we might tell ourselves—in fact, all of our readings tell us that we are wondrously made, and made for times such as these, our current time of disunion. We watch the news and the lead story is almost always a narrative of society becoming ever more severely unraveled, with war and rumors of war filling the airwaves and the digital spaces where we spend so much time. We might wonder how we can ever come together again.

At this point, we might turn to our readings hoping for some sort of point by point plan for reunification. And while we don’t have that action plan, we do have all sorts of reassurance. Our reading from Proverbs reminds us that God has a master plan, and Wisdom delights in humanity. Our reading from Psalms reminds us of the glory of creation, a creation that includes us. Paul’s letter tells us that the Holy Spirit is with us, and we won’t be put to shame. Jesus tells us that we have what God has—wow! What a resource.

Trinity Sunday gives us this good news: we are not alone. We are not abandoned. We have work to do, but we are not left orphaned to figure it all out by ourselves. In fact, our creeds and our scriptures tell us that we are much stronger together. If we only had a creator God, we’d miss out on knowing Jesus the teacher and healer and community builder. If we only had Jesus, we might have had a much smaller cosmos. If not for the Holy Spirit working through and in people to show them how to bring the Good News to the world, we might not have heard that we are worthy creations, crowned with glory and honor, as Psalm 8 tells us, filled with hope, as Paul reminds us.

The world is full of division--this is true now and has always been true. We may not be able to agree on the issues that threaten schism any more than the early church fathers were. But hear again the promise of Jesus: “All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”

The wisdom that was part of the creation of the cosmos is yours. Feel the power that comes from being woven into a tapestry with the Divine in all the ways that we have known our three personed God, from being braided into a community that stretches across time and space. God’s expansive love has already been poured into your heart.

Breathe into that love. Let that love flow out of you. It is not too late to live into the delight that God has for you and for all of creation.