Trinity Sunday
+ In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
So - Trinity Sunday! Let’s get into talking about this super easy and understandable topic!
So, the other night, Alex (my husband, not me speaking of myself in third person!), and I were watching the 1995 Martin Scorsese film Casino. It follows several characters running and scamming and scheming the Tangiers Casino in the late 70s - 80s. In the film, the characters were trapped in cycles of greed and violence that ultimately lead to their downfalls.
And I couldn’t help but notice that almost every single relationship within the film was a transactional one. You do this for me, and I’ll do this for you. Everyone needed their cut, everyone had their part to play - but when they failed in their part, that was it; typically, ending with their lives.
I think this reduction of relationship to function and service is a relevant social critique today.
Throughout human history, we have been tempted to understand the significance of one another in terms of function. That is, our worth is primarily determined, in social contexts - especially, I think, in our society today - by how much we produce, how much we consume, by what we do.
BUT, human relationships boiled down to transactions are antithetical to how we are hard-wired; which is for deep, intimate, flourishing relationships.
A study by Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad in 2024, published in World Psychiatry, notes that social connection is a fundamental human need, “linked to higher well-being, safety, resilience and prosperity, and to longer lifespan.” [1]
Relationships are necessary for human flourishing.
And, on this festal observance of the Holy Trinity, relationship is central to the very nature of God - which is, in part at least, why the need for relationship is stamped into the very fiber of the human being.
Now, the Trinity is a belief of Christian faith which comes to us as a doctrine. A doctrine being a core church teaching, drawn and interpreted from the Scriptures, which influences belief, theology, morality, ethics, and so forth.
The doctrine of the Trinity is said every Sunday as we recite the Nicene creed: We believe in one God, in three Persons, revealed to the Church by progressive revelation and self-disclosure of God across millenia rooted in the Holy Scripture.
Now the word doctrine may cause some people to shudder.
We may think that doctrine implies blind obedience or oppressive dogma. And at times ecclesial doctrine has been used for profound evil - such as the Doctrine of Discovery, coming from a papal bull in the 15th century which essentially made it a Christian duty to colonize and exploit indigenous lands not inhabited by Christians. The Doctrine of Discovery functionally legitimized on a theological basis the system of colonization, the slave trade, and centuries of human exploitation, suffering, and horror - the effects of which are still very much at play in modern geopolitics and human experience around the world.
The Episcopal Church was the first Christian body to formally repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery in our 2009 general convention.[2]
So it is meet and right that we ought to scrutinize, ponder, discern, and question doctrine.
And doctrine shapes and informs how we come to understand the very God we worship, and thus to God’s call and demand on human life, and to how the Church ought to live and respond to God.
Doctrine informs theology, ethics, morality, and so much more.
Take, for instance, the core doctrine of theological anthropology that human beings are made imago dei, in the image of God. This doctrine is drawn from Genesis, and from it we draw the conclusion that all human beings are inherently worthy of respect, dignity, freedom, love, and have infinite worth because all humans are stamped, imprinted, created as Divine image bearers.
From this, for example, we understand that the treatment of all people - especially the most overlooked and oppressed - are worthy of care, kindness, liberation, and so forth.
This doctrine thus shapes the political, moral, and ethical core of much of the Episcopal church.
So: Doctrine is important! It is not just niche theological nonsense. It has true, real-world implications as we, the Church, strive to follow God’s will in our lives for the sake of the world.
The Doctrine of the Trinity is… complicated, to say the least. But, the 20th century reformed Theologian Jurgen Moltmann had a very important and profound contribution to the doctrine of the Trinity.
In his book The Trinity and the Kingdom, Moltmann builds on the idea of what he refers to as the Perichoretic reality of the Trinity. The word perichoresis meaning mutual indwelling. That is, in poorly attempted summation, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are continuously pouring divine life and love and receiving love into one another forming the unity of the Godhead.[3]
What Moltmann functionally articulates is that a critical component of the nature of God is relationship.
This co-equal and co-eternal relationship of the Godhead makes the Trinity to be relational within Godself. The Persons of the Trinity are mutually and eternally relating to one another in love and life;
This means that, prior to anything ever existing, God was never in isolation. Rather, God was, is, and ever shall be eternally in relationship to Godself as a community of Persons, one in Essence, co-eternal, co-equal, receiving and giving of love simultaneously.
Relationship, then, is a fundamental component of the very nature of God.
Turning to Genesis in today’s reading, the very cosmos is created out of the relational love of the Triune God.
Of course, we know too, that sin fractures our relationship with God, one another, and creation. But through the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ, we are restored to relationship with God, and caught up into the relationship of life and love which is the Trinity.
Moltmann summarizes the central claim of his development of the doctrine of the Trinity by noting that, “To throw open the circulatory movement of the divine light and the divine relationships, and to take men and women, with the whole creation, into the life-stream of the triune God: that is the meaning of creation, reconciliation, and glorification.”[4]
That is to say: The doctrine of the Trinity provides us with the ultimate purpose of all creation - which is to come into perfect union with Godself - and also that relationality is critical to the call of the church; that we are not meant to be isolated, individualistic, people; but rather people drawing all the world towards relationship with God and one another, a giant, divinized community.
The doctrine of the Trinity disrupts and dismantles the purpose of relationship. It destroys the idea that relationship between humans, or humans and creation, ought to be transactional or functional or dependent on anything other than the inherent divine worth of relationship itself.
Because in relationship, in community, in serving and being served, in loving and being loved, we see an aspect, a glint, a glimmer, a delight, of the very God we worship who is, in a way, unfettered and unfathomable Relationship.
The doctrine of the Trinity thus centers and divinizes relationship.
When we walk Tumamoc hill, and see the profound beauty of nature, of which we are a part - we experience the relationality of the Trinity.
When we come home from work and see our beloved pet waiting for us, to greet, to love us, and us them, we experience the delight of relationship which is rooted in the reality of God.
When we see our spouse or partner, and experience the profound gift of desire and love in relationship, we experience an aspect of the delight of relationship in God.
When crocheting and sewing and knitting together on a Thursday morning, and someone teaches someone else how to sew and repair fabric, there too is an experience, an aspect, of the delight of relationship in God.
Every relationship, every encounter, then, becomes a profound, cosmic opportunity to understand and experience the very God we worship.
Every encounter no longer becomes merely mundane - every encounter, every smile, every joy, every delight, points us towards the one who we worship.
Every encounter becomes a divine encounter. Every moment becomes divinized.
The Doctrine of the Trinity, then, is no mere niche theological dogma.
It promotes a theology of profound liberation because in it we come to understand the true value of relationship is neither functional nor transactional, but rather a gift from God who - in God’s threeness and Oneness, is Relationship itself.
Thanks be to God for that!
And all praise and thanksgiving be unto the most Holy and Undivided Trinity, One God, Amen.
[1] Holt-Lunstad, Julianne. 2024. “Social connection as a critical factor for mental and physical health: evidence, trends, challenges, and future implications.” World Psychiatry 23:312-332. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/wps.21224
[3]
[4]