Trinity Sunday: June 15, 2025

Sermon Transcript

May I speak with the breath of God, from the Word of God in the name of God. Please be seated.

I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. Amen. [laughter]

Just kidding. Happy Father’s Day, we’ll start Father’s Day off with a Dad Joke. Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, there’s an interesting dynamic in the church, because of course they always fall on a Sunday. So we can’t just ignore it.

But it’s interesting to me that Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are separate holidays, which very strongly implies that Mothers and Fathers are different. And obviously they are different in many ways. But I know many mothers who act like fathers, and fathers who act like mothers, and especially in modern society there’s more of that.

No, we don’t have fathers physically giving birth to children. But for pretty much everything else it seems like it seems like it’s kind of up to you. And when we’re at Hallmark going through the aisle for Father’s Day cards, it’s all about golf, and barbecue and sports, and maybe not all dads like that.

It begs the question of gender. And it begs the question of, what is masculinity and what is femininity? And I’m going to use that as an excuse to talk about Father’s Day, and also Trinity Sunday.

Some of you follow me on Facebook, and may have seen what I posted a few days ago: “God is not he/him, though he doesn’t mind if you call him that. God is not she/her, though she doesn’t mind if you call her that, if that’s what resonates with you. But God, as three-in-one, as Trinity, as Unity, might be best described as they/them.”

Don’t worry, I’m not going to start changing all the liturgy to ‘they/them’. But it’s something we’re confronted with in our society, because our language we’ve started using they/them almost without thinking about it. Because English lacks a singular neuter pronoun. So if you’re talking about an individual person of indeterminate gender, we’ve started saying they, we’ve started saying them, without even thinking about it.

And then it became a political thing, with people identifying as they/them, and some people being really confused by that. But we’ve already been saying it, it’s just harder to apply it to an individual we know, and whose gender we think we know.

So that was a really messed up paragraph I just gave you, but it’s kind of appropriate, because it is muddled. It is confusing, and sometimes we don’t like that when we feel like it isn’t necessary. And we apply that to God. Because we have been raised to think of God as ‘he’, as ‘him’, as Father, our whole lives.

And “How dare you step in and mess that up for me? I’m confused about everything else in life, but I’m sure about this.” It’s hard. So maybe that makes ‘they/them’ the perfect kind of pronoun for God because it’s not clear cut, it’s not black and white. It’s ambiguous.

So let’s talk about the Trinity, let’s talk about the Three Persons and where gender enters into that. I’ll start with the Holy Spirit, in that order. It may feel backwards to you but it feels forwards to me. The Holy Spirit is the most mysterious, the most ethereal, and we hear that in the term: Spirit or Holy Ghost. And although we hear even Jesus talking about the Spirit, as an Advocate, as a Teacher, and using masculine pronouns, the word we have in Hebrew and in Greek for Spirit are feminine words.

Now, does that mean the Holy Spirit is definitely female? No. Can we say the Holy Spirit has gender? Also no. But it opens the door for us to consider the feminine qualities of Spirit that God has given us. And if we’re in Hallmark in the Mother’s Day aisle, we’ll see those qualities being praised. We can read through the cards and start thinking about the Holy Spirit. And all those things we praise mothers for, it’s easy to apply those to the Holy Spirit.

God has given us a Divine Feminine, in the Holy Spirit. Now does that put a box around it so now we can say we understand the Holy Spirit? No, don’t understand the Spirit. But we can give thanks for these things, and a different way we can be shown God than what we’re shown by society, especially a patriarchal society.

So that’s the Spirit, let’s talk about the Son. Son obviously being a masculine term. And there’s no way around that, that Jesus of Nazareth, during his 33 years on earth, was physically male. But I was thinking back to a conversation last Sunday, at Debbie Page’s table after the service, when the Bishop came over to talk to her and her family (especially Allison). And we were talking about things like gender, and some of these assumptions came up. So I stepped out on a limb and said I had a pet theory that the resurrected Christ is actually non-binary. Neither male nor female.

And maybe that’s why nobody could recognize him. We have multiple scenes in the gospel of people not resurrecting Jesus after he was raised from the dead – the disciples on the road to Emmaus, Mary Magdalene in the garden. Maybe he didn’t have a beard! “We don’t recognize any men in this society if they don’t have a beard.” It’s a fun pet theory.

But at the same time, it makes a lot of sense. You know, the Pharisees had this question about marriage in heaven, and Jesus said there will neither be marrying nor giving in marriage after we die, but we will be like the angels in heaven. And we have no reason to assume that the angels have gender. I mean, we see St. Michael and we’re pretty sure Michael is a dude, right? But there’s no evidence that Michael is male, or Raphael or Gabriel or any of the angels.

So maybe we will all become non-binary in heaven. Or maybe not. But it cause us to question gender, and how we may identify different with God, based on our gender.

That brings us to the Father, because so many Father’s Day sermons are like, “let’s talk about God the Father!” We don’t get that for Mother’s Day but we do for Father’s Day. How do we identify with this person of God the Father, this God of the Hebrew Scriptures? Many will say that the way we see God, and the God of the Old Testament in particular, is often through the lens of how we see our own father.

But why should that be? I think God the Father gets that emphasis because of how God is depicted for us. And we see that in the Sistine Chapel or wherever, with the white beard. God is basically Zeus or Gandalf or something. If this is the picture of God given to us, then we will apply all our daddy issues to God, or even the amazing things about our experience with fathers, we’ll apply those as well. And God is better even than that.

God gets limited by our labels, and our images that we create. And so to bring that back, you know I talked about the Spirit, and the Son and the Father, and I put them in that order all the time by the way. You’ll notice how I begin every sermon with “May I speak with the Breath of God, from the Word of God in the Name of God.”

I start with Breath, because Spirit and Breath are the same word, in Hebrew and Greek. Next the Word. The Word of God is Jesus. Jesus as the Word. We see John opening his Gospel “the Word was God and the Word was with God”. That’s Jesus. The Name of God is the Father. Jewish people refer to God just by saying “HaShem” which means “The Name.” And you see “The Name of the Lord” all throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, referring to the God we think of as the Father.

Breath of God. Word of God. Name of God.

Now, I don’t have time in this sermon to talk about why I put them in that “backwards” order, or why I like that sequence.

But to bring it all together, I think the theological history that we have in the church, with the Trinity, is extremely fraught. And I think most of the heresies that have been named, where people have been burned at the stake, or exiled or whatever, have had something to do with messing up the Trinity. (According to some.) They didn’t toe the line.

And in my Newsletter I called the Trinity that thing that we’re all expected to believe and nobody’s expected to understand. And yet, if you mess it up, you can be in big trouble.

And I think this is an example of a sin of leadership, throughout the history of the Church. I think we were given a beautiful mystery. And then some of us who had power chose to use it as a weapon. They say “Well I went to seminary or I studied history and theology all these years, so I somehow have this mysterious ability to something that you people can’t understand. So you have to listen to me. Or else you might be kicked out of the church. Or you might be burned at the stake. Or you might burn forever. If you get this wrong.”

Shame on us.

As much as possible, I’d like to be part of the solution, and not part of the problem. And I stumble with that. But I’ll put it out there, that I don’t want to be afraid to see the “three-ness” of the Trinity. I think that as we teachers have tried to push those together more, we’ve made it even more ambiguous than it needs to be, and more of a mathematical conundrum, this three-in-one.

But God is so relational. God is so loving in how the Father loves the Son loves the Spirit loves the Father… and it’s out of that love that we have been created, in that image. Created in love, to love. And the more we try to force the Trinity together the more we lose the concept of how the Father loves the Son who loves the Spirit who loves the Father.

Maybe we should continue to think of the Trinity as more of Three. Because in all the Hebrew proclamations through Scripture that God is One, that Hebrew word Echad, also means “unified”. God is perfectly unified. And I’m not trying to make it “three gods.” But let’s think a little harder about the three-ness that is perfectly unified for all history, in all the universe.

Because when we see the relationship of God, within God, we start to clearly see the love between God and us, and the love we are being called into as we strive for that divine unity.

To me, no theology matters at all until the rubber meets the road. And hope this is where the theology of the Trinity starts to matter for us. That just as the Father loves the Son loves the Spirit loves the Father, so I can love you, you can love me and we all can love one another.

Amen.

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