This Sunday is Trinity Sunday. One of the most anticipated Sundays for preachers across Christendom–anticipated with either fear and trembling or zeal and confidence. Considering only Trinity Sunday sermons, some would say a better title for the day would be “Heresy Sunday.”
How does one make sense of the Trinity? How does one describe the Trinity without falling into some theological error? Modelism, Docetism, Subordinaitoniam, Tritheism, Partialism, Arianism; adoptionism, unitarianism: no matter how hard you try to describe the Trinity in some understandable way, or how hard you fail, at least you can rest assured that it has been done before.
It is a Holy Mystery; maybe we should leave it at that.
Perhaps we simply cannot fully understand or describe the Holy Trinity–or we cannot fully understand or describe the Holy Trinity simply. Faith, however, doesn’t ask us to adequately describe or even fully understand the Trinity. Rather, faith calls us to worship the one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance (Creed of St. Athanasius).
Let us worship the One God in Trinity of Persons and Unity Being and celebrate the one and equal glory of our “Three-Person’d God” (apologies to John Donne).
And in our worship may we discover our holy calling is unity: unity with God, and in God with each other.
Happy Trinity Sunday!
