This Week: Trinity Sunday
Gospel: John 3:1-17
Trinity Sunday is easily in the top 5 Hardest Sundays to Preach. For many it’s number one. But I reserve that spot for the day the Binding of Isaac shows up in the lectionary.
It is hard Sunday to preach, not because of the subject, but because it is merely a subject. Our context isn’t a story about Jesus or a profound teaching of Jesus. It is a day to honor a theological concept.
It also happens to be a theological concept people often struggle with. So…
We are given an interesting gospel to focus on, however. Nicodemus seeks Jesus out. Which, as I described earlier, has a fascinating context.
But we probably feel compelled to at least talk about the Trinity, no? So how do we go about it?
Well, I’m a big fan of mocking ourselves. So I tend to rib myself and my obsessions, the church and its obsessions, and historical obsessions.
But here are two ways in that can work.
Dive into the heresies.
Don’t wade into the water and see if people can handle it. Just go for it. Name the fact that we have a doctrine of the Trinity the way we have it
- To deal with heresies
- And, in so doing, we created heresies.
Getting super academic with heresies is not the way to very many people’s hearts, of course. But people also do want to know about this stuff. So why not talk about modalism, for instance. But most importantly, why it is a problem for our understanding of the Trinity.
It is a fine line and one people and people are complicated. They don’t want you to drone on about heresies, but they really do want to learn about them.
Starting with heresies as a way to get at why the doctrine of the Trinity is weird is a pretty classic approach. And one I might use one of these days.
Hide that you’re teaching about heresies.
If we think people are complicated because they get bored when you teach them something they say they want to learn about, perhaps we extend that to the doctrine itself?
The reason these particular heresies persist is because we want the doctrine of the Trinity to be easy and we’re convinced its not. So we use metaphors that sneak heresies into our thinking.
But if we talk about the thinking, we can address the problem. And we just so happen to help the room do some deep theology!
Maybe offer an alternative?
A third option could be to just not engage it head-on, but engage our experience of the Trinity or our experience of talking about the Trinity or needing to have a specific, convincing answer to the question “what is the Trinity?”
In a sense, we’re sweating a problem that is a problem primarily because we keep sweating it.
Some offer the advice that we merely quote people who have been dead for a thousand years and say “good enough for me.” But that only cuts it for some people. Our needing to cater to those who see tradition as a problem that needs solving isn’t any better. [Hint for you, dear reader: this is false binary behavior.]
Perhaps we spend less time defining the Trinity and more time exploring it. Or, at the very least, help people open themselves up to that possibility.
What does the Trinity look like for us here? Or how might this doctrine be of any value at all to us? This is what the image of the Divine Dance does. It doesn’t just help us understand the concept—it helps us see how we participate in it, too.
Or maybe we wrestle with all of it at once? It would be a Trinity Sunday trifecta.