Trinity Sunday at St. Alfred's, May 30, 2026

Buyer Beware

I don’t know how old I was when I first heard the phrase caveat emptor. I can place it within a couple of years. I took Latin all through junior high and high school. And I can remember when I first heard the phrase and it registered that it was Latin. "Oh, I understand that!," I thought. I was far enough into my 6 years of Latin that I recognized it. So it would’ve been maybe ninth grade.

Caveat emptor. Buyer beware. You should beware any time you hear somebody preach on the Trinity. I'm no exception.

Many years ago a young woman and mother came to me asking me to explain the Trinity to her. She didn't get it and she didn't believe it. She had been attending our church for a year or so and had integrated well into our ongoing life. She had taken leadership with the young people, including my children who were four and six old or so. She said, "I’m having a real hard time with all of this Trinity stuff, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." I said, "Let’s get together and talk about it." So I visited her house one afternoon and we had tea or coffee.

Well, after our talk that afternoon, I don’t think I saw her in our church ever again. My words clearly had not had the effect I had intended.

In many ways, I don’t know what to do with a sermon on Trinity Sunday, even though I’ve given dozens of them over the years. Many preachers on this day will begin by saying that this is the day when more preachers preach heresy than any other day of the church year.

Over the centuries both famous and not so famous preachers have given their shot at illustrations or analogies to try to say who and what the Trinity is. Father Son and Holy Spirit. St. Patrick’s Shamrock. Saint Augustine argued that since human beings are made in the image of God, the human mind itself reflects the Trinity. We have a memory (1) an understanding (2) and a will (3). Three different things but we are just one.

With considerable humility, I want to talk about three ways of approaching God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Trinity. Call it three ways of understanding the Trinity if you want.

The first of those ways is precisely by way of understanding.

The second of those ways is by way of action or response.

The third way is by way of relationship.

Intellectualizing the Trinity

Perhaps the oldest way of approaching the Trinity is by way of understanding. People have written about it from the time the Gospels were written. God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is at the bedrock foundation of what it means to be a Christian. We are reminded of that each Sunday as we say the Nicene Creed. Blessings are pronounced in the name of the Trinity.

The Trinity has been used to distinguish Christians from their nearest religious cousins: Jews and Muslims. A name that has been used for this use of understanding God is Orthodoxy. It's a word that means "correct" + "belief". By the 3rd century writers were contrasting orthodoxy with heresy. Orthodoxy was correct. Heresy was misguided.

Trying to understand Trinity sounds a whole like either seeing 3 manifestations of God or 3 gods. Both of those are "heresies".

Beyond "understanding" God

More recently many writers have turned away from using orthodoxy as a way of talking about God. Rather than trying to "understand" God, we might focus how we respond to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It would focus on how we put our faith into action. How we live out our faith. The name given to this approach is orthopraxis. It's made of two parts: "right" + "doing or action."

If the Creeds are examples of an orthodox understanding of the Trinity, the baptismal promises in our prayer book are an example of focusing on our response to God. I have thought frequently that we ought to be repeating our baptismal promises as often as we do the creed. We did that last Sunday, Pentecost, because of its association with baptism.

To paraphrase one of my mentors in the church, "We should repeat our baptismal promises until we finally get it. Then perhaps we could move on to the next step."

Problems with talking about Trinity

So I’ve identified two “ways” we can talk about God. One from the point of trying to “understand”. Orthodoxy. The other from the point of view of “Well, there’s God, what am I going to do about it. Doing. Orthopraxis.

There are problems with each of these approaches. Orthodoxy has been used to distinguish between us and them. Orthodoxy says there is a right way to think about God and there is a wrong way to understand God. Orthodoxy says, "If you’re not with us you’re against us. Christians against Jews. Christians against the Roman Empire. Christians against Muslims. All of them heathen".

I frequently hear and read people referring to a “Jewish” god or a “Muslim” god. Early in my youth I knew about those who believe in “many” gods as somehow woeful mistaken and on the wrong side. How can there be multiple gods and only One God. Either there is or there isn't. I'm on the side of there is one God.

We can intellectualize the Trinity, but that perspective is limited. We can consider God from the perspective of what we’re gonna do about it, but that somehow is not the whole story. I’m persuaded that there must be a third way. It is not a choice between believing and doing. It’s not about dividing or finding ways to live together while disagreeing. Surely there is another way of approaching God that doesn't divide us but unites us.

I remember a story that one of my mentors from seminary told me. He said that in his travels around the church, as he had visited countless congregations, he found two kinds of congregations. It didn't have to do with conservative or liberal, high church or low church, political or not political. He saw congregations that believed in the living God and those that didn’t.

The way I might put it today is that there are those who recognize the awesome, sometimes terrifying, frequently mysterious, powerful, intrusive, disruptive, and also merciful and kind presence of the living God. And there are those that don’t.

Towards a third approach

One of the ways of thinking about the Trinity that has been important in the last several generations has to do with focusing on relationship. By this approach, God is in some essential way about relationships. God is clearly not a thing or an individual. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are in relation to one another. They are not separate identities. They are relationships.

It turns out that the world we live in is actually like that. It is all about relationships.

150 years ago scientists understood reality to be about things and the energy that connects those things. Since Einstein, however, we can no longer understand reality on those terms. Reality – creation itself – is about relationships not about things or even energies. It requires a new way of thinking and talking. One writer put it this way:

Science's concept of the universe was changed irrevocably by quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of relativity which questioned the separate identity of energy and matter. 1

God (and reality) is far stranger than we can think or imagine.

Many people are quite comfortable with that understanding of God, Trinity, Father-Son-Holy_Spirit. It is a mystery beyond understanding and beyond speaking. We can have a relationship with the world as it is even without understanding it. We can be in relationship with God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, with or without the Creeds or the Baptismal Promises. The appropriate relationship has to do with awe. That is what I propose for the 3rd approach to the Trinity. We can approach God with understanding, with the commitment of our lives, and with awe.

"Awe"

From the early pages in the Bible the text admonishes us to approach God with "fear and trembling". Such awe is said to the beginning of wisdom. Fear of the Lord is about responding to God with awe. Fear of the Lord is about responding to God with awe.

Psalm 111:10

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom; all those who practice it have a good understanding. His praise endures forever!

This is not fear as in frightened to avoidance or inaction. This fear is a reverent awe that leads to faithful pursuit of the wisdom, knowledge, understanding, mercy and kindness, and (yes) demands of the living God.

Psalm 147:11

… but the LORD takes pleasure in those who fear him, in those who hope in his steadfast love.

To approach God with awe is to be in relation with that which is far greater than we are ourselves. It is precisely a connection between earth and heaven.

Awe

Albert Einstein describes awe as a vital sense of the mysterious.

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."

For Einstein, "awe" is at the heart of what it means to be alive as a human being. St. Irenaeus said in the 3rd c., "The glory of God is a fully alive human being."

Abraham Joshua Heschel defines awe as a spiritual intuition that reveals divine significance in the ordinary, noting it enables us "to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance... to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal."

For Heschel, "awe" is the thing that connects us to God. Bridging our reality which is fleeting and temporary with God's eternal reality.

A recent researcher into the characteristics of "awe" says this:

“Wonder, the mental state of openness, questioning, curiosity, and embracing mystery, arises out of experiences of awe. In our studies, people who find more everyday awe show evidence of living with wonder. They are more open to new ideas. To what is unknown. To what language can’t describe. To the absurd. To seeking new knowledge. To experience itself, ”2

Awe puts us in relationship with the source of all relationships, God. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

To cultivate awe is to cultivate our relationship to God.

I am in awe of the staggering violence and lust for power that human beings are capable of.

I am equally in awe of the staggering generosity of spirit that ordinary human beings show on a regular basis.

I am in awe of the way in which the frequencies of sound forms harmonies and dissonances, out of the atmosphere that we breath.

And I am in awe of the ability of those same harmonies to sound a love song that can shape a civilization.

I am in awe that after 75 years I seem to be a little bit better at making awe a part of my life.

I haven't arrived, but I feel myself on the journey.

Closing

There is no time like the present to begin cultivating within us a spirit of awe. And since a lifetime – any lifetime – is too short a time to fully enter into a life of "awe", we may as well begin now.

Awe is a way to connect us to God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

So – cultivate awe.

“The God of peace, who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus Christ, the great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant: Make you perfect in every good work to do his will, working in you that which is well-pleasing in his sight; And the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, be with you and remain with you forever.”

1. ― Gary Zukov, The Dancing Wu-Li Masters "Our comfortable ideas of a universe made up of solid little bits of matter behaving in logical ways have been exploded. A particle is not a separate entity but a set of relationships. The world is an interconnected tissue of events, a dynamic unbroken whole. Scientists are no longer observers but participants. And physics and mysticism converge in striking parallels, leading back full circle:"↩

2. ― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life highlights the accessibility of awe in daily life, observing that people experience it frequently through "everyday wonder," such as a friend’s generosity or the scent of a flower, which fosters curiosity and connection. https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/96884132-awe-the-new-science-of-everyday-wonder-and-how-it-can-transform-your-li … for example of sound, or color, or bodily sensation, or the directions thought might take during dreams or meditation. To the strengths and virtues of other people. It should not surprise that people who feel even five minutes a day of everyday awe are more curious about art, music, poetry, new scientific discoveries, philosophy, and questions about life and death. They feel more comfortable with mysteries, with that which cannot be explained.↩