The Gift of the Trinity - Sermon for Trinity Sunday (June 15, 2025)

(NOTE: For today's sermon, the Book of Common Prayer is repeatedly referenced. If you do not have access to one, an online digital copy of the Book of Common Prayer can be found by clicking the link below.)

Book of Common Prayer

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Jesus said, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.” (John 16:12–13).
 
Today is Trinity Sunday, the first Sunday after Pentecost, when we take time to contemplate the Trinity together… a core teaching of the Christian Faith that has been passed down for generations.
 
And seeing as how today is also Father’s Day… it seems kind of timely as we take a closer look at this particular understanding of the Living God, that we do so by attending to the expression of the faith of our spiritual forefathers and foremothers in the Anglican Church… listening to what has been cherished and handed down to us by them as our spiritual inheritance.
 
And so, today’s sermon will also be a bit more interactive than usual. Please pick up a Book of Common Prayer, and turn with me to page 669, to the Articles of Faith.

These articles are statements developed within the Anglican tradition early on in its history, to help guide them towards a faithful expression of the Christian life. And what do we see is the first Article? What did they see as the most important place to start?
 
Article I: “Of Faith in the Holy Trinity. THERE is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”
 
This is the God we Christians believe in. There are all sorts of other ideas out there about the identity and nature of the Divine, but this is ours. This is what the Christian Church believes and teaches. And where did we get this distinct understanding from? We got it from the Holy Scriptures… the Bible.
 
Let’s turn now to Article VI, found on page 700:
 
“Of the Sufficiency of the holy Scriptures for salvation. HOLY Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.” In other words, unless it is found in or proved by Scripture, it’s not considered essential for Christians.
 
Article VI goes on to explicitly spell out which books are considered Scripture: that is, both the Old and New Testaments as we know them. And they also affirm the books sometimes known as the Apocrypha or Deuterocanon as worthwhile reading for Christians, but not on the same authoritative level as the Old and New Testaments.
 
But to get to the point: Anglicans teach that the story of Holy Scripture contains all things necessary for salvation. There’s no essential secret out there waiting to be revealed by some obscure spiritual guru, or charismatic leader, or best-selling author. The story of Scripture truthfully points us to all we need in order to receive God’s gift of salvation.
 
But that raises an interesting problem for us, because the word “Trinity” is not found in the Bible itself. If our Christian faith is to be based on the witness of the Holy Scriptures, what is found in or proved by it… how can we claim that the Trinity is so essential if it is never mentioned in it?
 
Of course, this is not a new question. It was also important to our forefathers and foremothers in the faith as well. And they were convinced that, although the word “Trinity” may not be explicitly used in the Bible, the story of the Bible is the story of the God who is Three-in-One, and One-in-Three. That is, the Bible itself points us towards a specifically Trinitarian picture of the Living God. And this conviction can be seen in the Trinitarian shape of the ancient statements of the Church’s faith that we call the Creeds.
 
Let’s turn now to Article VIII in the BCP, on page 701:
 
“Of the Three Creeds. THE Three Creeds, Nicene Creed, Athanasius’s Creed, and that which is commonly called the Apostles’ Creed, ought thoroughly to be received and believed: for they may be proved by most certain warrants of holy Scripture.”

Again, although the Creeds are not direct quotations from the Bible, they are based on and flow from what the Bible tells us of the Living God. Both the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed uphold this Trinitarian form, and are framed around belief in God the Father, Jesus Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit… but do not specifically use the word Trinity.
 
These Creeds were meant to be authoritative articulations of the Christian faith, as found in the Holy Scriptures, affirmed by the early Church, to establish the boundaries of our faith. They came to form and affirm these Creeds, these statements of faith, through the careful reading of the Scriptures in their entirety… the Old and New Testaments… out of the desire to help present and future generations to stay faithful to the story that the Scriptures are telling us.
 
Why is this guidance needed? Think for a moment about how many people in our world today take this or that passage from the Bible, and twist it around to say what they want it to say, completely ignoring its intended meaning, or how it fits into the larger story of the Bible.
 
Never mind those who do this intentionally… think about how easy it can be for us to simply misunderstand the meaning of a passage, or lose our way when it comes to reading the Scriptures on our own. Think of how much easier it is to put a puzzle together if you have the picture on the cover of the box to work from!
 
There’s one more image used by early Christians to make this point that I find really helpful:
 
Imagine a beautiful mosaic… an intricate picture of a King, made up of hundreds, or even thousands of coloured stones arranged just so. Each in their proper place.
 
Then imagine that someone takes those same stones and rearranges them to depict, not a King, but a fox, or some other creature that bears no resemblance to the King at all. Just so, we can take apart the story of the Bible… taking the pieces and passages we want, and re-arranging them the way we want to, in order to come up with a picture of God that we prefer… worshipping our own creation, rather than honouring the Creator, who has revealed Himself to us.

In order to make sure the mosaic offers the picture that it was originally intended to display, some kind of guidance is needed. Early Christians called this guidance the “rule of faith”, the traditions passed down to help us read the Bible rightly, so we can recognize the glorious face of Jesus, our Saviour King, and turn to Him in faith… instead of picking and choosing the parts of the Bible that we like, and end up missing the whole point.
 
So then, the Creeds are a gift from our forefathers and foremothers in the faith to help us read the Bible faithfully… guiding us away from error, and towards the One who is Himself the Truth.
 
And because they appear in our Sunday worship, many of us are kind of familiar with the Apostles’ Creed, and the Nicene Creed. But what about that other one mentioned in Article XIII? What about the Creed of St. Athanasius, as it is called? What’s that Creed about?
 
Well, St. Athanasius was an early Christian cleric and theologian who had a huge impact on the way Jesus’ identity came to be understood by the Church. But he didn’t write this Creed. It seems to have been formulated in the Western, Latin speaking part of the Church decades after St. Athanasius died, and far from his home in Egypt. Even so, this statement of faith became an authorized articulation of the Christian teaching about the Trinity… spelling out what Christians mean when we speak of God as Triune.
 
Turn back to in your Book of Common Prayer to page 695.
 
This document is kind of a long read, and I will take it slow. And as today is Trinity Sunday, we’ll just read the first portion dealing with the Trinity together. But now you know where to find it so you can keep on reading it on your own, which I highly encourage you to do.
 
But before we do, just a quick word about the word “Catholic”, which is used here, and in the other Creeds. The word literally means “universal”, as in “the whole Church.” This is not the same thing as the Roman Catholic Church, which is one branch of the one universal Church of Jesus Christ throughout the world, and across the ages.
 
With that said, let’s turn to the Athanasian Creed… specifically, the first 28 stanzas.
 
“WHOSOEVER would be saved needeth before all things to hold fast the Catholic Faith.
2 Which Faith except a man keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he will perish eternally.
3 Now the Catholic Faith is this, that we worship one God in Trinity, and the Trinity in Unity;
4 Neither confusing the Persons, nor dividing the Substance.
5 For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, another of the Holy Ghost;
6 But the Godhead of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost is all one, the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal.
 
7 Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Ghost;
8 The Father uncreated, the Son uncreated, the Holy Ghost uncreated;
9 The Father infinite, the Son infinite, the Holy Ghost infinite;
10 The Father eternal, the Son eternal, the Holy Ghost eternal;
11 And yet there are not three eternals, but one eternal;
12 As also there are not three uncreated, nor three infinites, but one infinite, and one un-created.
 
13 So likewise the Father is almighty, the Son almighty, the Holy Ghost almighty;
14 And yet there are not three almighties, but one almighty.
15 So the Father is God, the Son God, the Holy Ghost God;
16 And yet there are not three Gods, but one God.
17 So the Father is Lord, the Son Lord, the Holy Ghost Lord;
18 And yet there are not three Lords, but one Lord.
 
19 For like as we are compelled by the Christian verity to confess each Person by himself to be both God and Lord;
20 So are we forbidden by the Catholic Religion to speak of three Gods or three Lords.
 
21 The Father is made of none, nor created, nor begotten.
22 The Son is of the Father alone; not made, nor created, but begotten.
23 The Holy Ghost is of the Father and the Son; not made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding.
24 There is therefore one Father, not three Fathers; one Son, not three Sons; one Holy Ghost, not three Holy Ghosts.
25 And in this Trinity there is no before or after, no greater or less;
26 But all three Persons are co-eternal together, and co-equal.
27 So that in all ways, as is aforesaid, both the Trinity is to be worshipped in Unity, and the Unity in Trinity.
28 He therefore that would be saved, let him thus think of the Trinity.”
 
Don’t worry, there won’t be a pop quiz on this later on. But I hope you do get the sense that those who wrote this Creed were seeking to be precise, because precision matters. Not because we humans can figure God out somehow, but because we want to be as careful as possible not to mess up the picture of God that He has shared with us through the Scriptures. We want to be careful to recognize and pass on the true face of our Saviour King.
 
Think of the doctrine of the Trinity, not so much as an explanation of the Living God… but as some clear boundaries around how we are to speak truthfully about the One who is far beyond our ability to comprehend, or master with our understanding.
 
As our Christian ancestors faithfully told the story of the Bible, they found themselves speaking of the Living God in this Trinitarian way. When they went outside of these bounds… for instance, when some claimed that Jesus was not equally God, but merely a creature like you and I… they quickly found themselves telling a very different kind of story than the Gospel, the Good News that they had received, and had been entrusted to share with the world.
 
The Trinity is not some obscure, outdated teaching from the past with no connection to our context today. It is a gift to us… offering guidance and guardrails to help us tell the story of the Good News… the story the whole Bible is telling… the story of the saving love of God… of the Merciful Father in Heaven sending His eternal Son to rescue us and our world… and filling us with the Holy Spirit so we can share in God's own blessed life, now and forever.

That’s a lot for today. So I’ll close now with a very different exploration of the truth of the Trinity in the form of an All-Ages song. It’s not even close to a perfect picture… after all, all of our metaphors break down and miss the mark when faced with the unique mystery of the Living God who reveals Himself to us in the Holy Scriptures. But even so, I hope that this song might stir up our imaginations a bit, and point us in the right direction… that is, towards the God of the Gospel: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This song’s called All Three One.
 
All Three One
 
The Sun we see
   above us shares
Its life from day to day
It holds our whole
   world in its place
Forever and always
 
The Sun’s Light opens
   up our eyes
To help us find our way
To help us see
   and be the truth
In all we do and say
 
The Sun’s Heat warms us
   through and through
Keeps frozen nights at bay
So we can share
   with those around
A welcoming embrace
 
As Sun, and Light,
  and Heat all share
One life, but not the same
So Father, Son,
   and Spirit all
Three share
   God’s holy Name