Trinity Sunday 2020

John 3:16 - 18
Today we celebrate the Trinity.  It’s a teaching common to most Christian bodies.  The Council of Constantinople codified the belief near the end of the fourth century, although we see evidence that eve at the end of the first century christian authors were writing about it.  And formulas like that of Paul, “The Grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of the father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you” suggest that New Testament writers had some idea of the Trinity.  And yet we Christians insist that God is One.  And every time Trinity Sunday rolls around preachers have a choice to make:  Shall I try to explain the Trinity once again?  Or should I ignore the whole thing and hope no one notices?  And what’s the big deal anyway?  After all, I can go all week long without thinking of the Trinity. 
But we should think about the Trinity.  After all, human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, and our faith tells us that God is somehow three persons in one God.  Thomas Aquinas made a wonderful argument about how if God is infinite, all powerful, all wise, all loving, etc, God has to be a Trinity.  But not everybody wants to hear about speculative theology on Trinity Sunday.  Richard Rohr, the Franciscan author and mystic, suggested we contemplate the Trinity by starting with the Three and seeing how they are One.  If we do that, we get an insight into how we humans should look.
We will see that God is dynamic. Saint Hilary invented the idea of perichoresis -- that the Trinity is kind of like a dance, where the three persons move in and out and around each other, but always moving.  Nothing contains God, certainly not our minds.  And God is fluid, constantly spilling over, constantly sweeping everything into himself.  Why does this matter?  Because we humans have a tendency to be rigid, to become fixed in our ways, to limit our thinking.  And the more we do this, the further we are from that God-image.
We will see that God is diverse; if God is three persons, each person in his own way embodies those attributes of God, truth, beauty, goodness, one-ness.  When we witness the racial tension in our society, it is because we fear what is different.  That’s not my fault or yours; it’s evolution; it took millions of years to get that way.  But if God can comfortably be diverse and one at the same time, that is how we humans should look as well.
We see that God is a commune.  The persons of the Trinity never act alone.  Another old theological idea is summed up in the latin word circumincession -- that means that each person contains the other two.  Jesus said “I am in the Father and the Father is in me”.  When Jesus is baptized, the Father speaks from the heavens and the Spirit descends like a dove.  When Jesus promised he would be with us to the end of the world he also sent the Holy Spirit.  Why is this important?  Because we humans like to go it alone, if we can do something without help, we do.  And yet we know deep in our hearts how much better things can be when we work together.  Even though the second person of the Trinity uniquely becomes human, suffers, dies, and rises again, the Father and the Spirit are part of this mystery as well. 
We see that God is hospitable.  In the beginning God created humans and probably everything else because being alone is not God-like.  And he fed the Israelitese in the desert; and Jesus clearly enjoyed company; and the Holy Spirit is all about gathering in the nations through the Church Jesus established.  Hospitality is an attribute of God and we should reflect that.
Finally, we see that God is self-sacrificing love.  Theologians talk about the Father begetting the Son -- The Father pours himself out holding back nothing in that begetting.  The Son, the begotten one, pours himself out in turn; in response to the Father’s love.  Saint John says everything was created through him.  And of course we see that self-emptying love displayed most graphically in the crucifixion.  And the Father and Son breathe forth the Holy Spirit, again, holding nothing back, emptying themselves out.  And the Spirit is emptying himself out in the form of gifts given to his church and indeed to all mankind.  And we are to look like that, we are to embody self-sacrificing love. 
The Gospel passage we hear today may be the most famous one; even if you never open a bible you probably know about John 3:16.  And we confront that troublesome word, “believe”.  For us it means that we agree with some statement of fact; but in the original languages, in biblical Hebrew and first century Greek, it meant much more.  It had overtones of complete trust, of acting on the word of someone else, of allowing someone else to take over your thinking.  And when we believe in the Son the result should be that the image and likeness of God in you and I should be more apparent to everyone.  And God is Trinity, God is dynamic, diverse, communal, hospitable, and self sacrificing love.