Trinity Sunday - June 15, 2025 Sermon preached by the Rev. Michael Wallens

St. Pauls - Trinity Sunday - June 15, 2025

Hold on to your hats. It’s Trinity Sunday, that day when we dare to enter deep waters and reflect upon the God who has come to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the God whose unity is in God’s complexity, whose complexity is in unity. Oops. I’ve already sailed into some deep, paradoxical talk. But that’s the way our talk about God had to be once God showed up among us as Jesus Christ, fully God, fully Human.

In our Gospel reading this week, Jesus tells his disciples, 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.

I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.  Can we pause for a moment and hear the tenderness in those words?  The kindness?  The depth of patience, perception, and forbearance Jesus offered to his disciples?  He didn’t burden their frightened, skittish, saturated souls with more than they could handle.  Instead, he promised them the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth, the Spirit of ongoing revelation.  That Spirit would slowly guide the disciples — and by extension, all of us — into a fuller knowledge and comprehension of everything Jesus left unsaid.

As I contemplate the three-in-one this week, I’m finding Jesus’s promise a safe and gentle place from which to begin.  Meaning, I don’t have to understand everything right now. I don’t have to find the perfect analogy or metaphor to explain the three-fold fullness of God.  The Trinity is not fodder for bumper sticker summaries or clever internet memes; it is a great and holy mystery, and my first job is to stand in humility before it.  To explore the nature of God's selfhood is to come to the end of what human language can illuminate.  It is to become speechless.  It is fall to our knees and say, I cannot hold the singularity, the otherness, the strangeness of this God.  I cannot domesticate him.  I cannot tame him.  All we can do is seek the truth with our whole hearts, and trust that Jesus’s promise holds.  All we can do is await the Spirit who will come and reveal God's truth to us in God's time.

I think that is what Meister Eckhart was trying to do when he said: Let us pray to God that we may be free of God.

Meister Eckhart, was a German monk, theologian, and mystic who lived in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. He prayed that God would rid him of God. Maybe that should be our prayer on this day, Trinity Sunday. Maybe that’s our best bet on this day when we celebrate the mystery of the three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Sprit, and the one God. Maybe on Trinity Sunday we need to be free of the Trinity.

So for the next few minutes, instead of talking about persons, essence, unity and multiplicity, co-eternality, ousia, hypostasis, perichoresis, or all the other stuff that goes along with trinitarian theology. I want us to be free of God. 

I am not suggesting that there is no God or that there is nothing to God, and neither is Eckhart. The God Eckhart wants to be free of is the God we try to understand, fit, and contain in our concepts, images, doctrines, and explanations. (Caputo, The Folly of God, 12-13) At best those are pointers, signposts, and guides along the way that are supposed to help us experience God beyond the God of our own constructing. At worst they become dead ends, limitations, and confusing irrelevancies.

Getting rid of that God does not spell the simple end of God…, but the beginning, the genuine entry or breakthrough into the depths of God (Ibid., 13). It allows God to be more than we can explain or understand. It gives God a place in the world and in our lives instead of out there somewhere. It opens us to something beyond the horizon of our expectations, beyond what we can imagine, foresee, or consider possible. It offers the possibility of the impossible. 

Here’s why I say that. Try to capture, comprehend, explain, or understand the most profound, meaningful, and life-changing experiences and events of your life….. They are beyond words, description, and understanding. We can’t explain or make sense of them. They come to us. We respond to them. And we are changed by them. They are more than we can contain, carry, or hold. They are unbearable. Maybe that’s what Jesus is getting at when he says, I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. Maybe there is something unbearable about God. 

When have you experienced the unbearable in your life? What happened? How did it come about? In what ways are you experiencing the unbearable today?

Some of us have experienced the unbearable in the death of a loved one, a diagnosis, a divorce, guilt and regret, or some other circumstance in which our heart was broken and our life was shattered. Words cannot begin to describe what we feel, explain what is happening, or offer consolation. It’s more than we can bear and we don’t know how or if we’ll get through it. When has that happened to you? 

For others of us the unbearable is experienced in the birth of a child or grandchild, a dream that is finally realized after years of waiting and working for it, a life of beauty and meaning beyond our imagination, joy that makes us weep, forgiveness that offers a fresh start, a marriage or friendship that just keeps getting better, a love we never thought possible. Words cannot begin to describe what we feel, explain what is happening, or offer enough gratitude. The unbearable is in those circumstances that leave us feeling like it’s just too much, too big, too beautiful. It’s more than we can bear and we never want it to end. When has that happened to you?

For most of us, I suspect, it’s both. We’ve experienced both aspects of the unbearable. The unbearable, in either aspect, in whatever way it comes, unhinges us, pushes us to the edge of our life, and leaves us standing at the opening into all the truth. This is not an opening into learning all the truth. It is an opening into doing all the truth. The unbearable calls, invites, solicits, and asks us to do all the truth: to do the truth of forgiveness, hospitality, and justice; to do the truth of peace, mercy, and compassion; to do the truth of faith, hope, and love. 

Every time we respond to the call of the unbearable, every time we step into that opening, every time we do all the truth, we give existence to God. We make God present in our lives and in the world. 

The unbearable isn’t hard to spot. It’s happening in those times we say things like, No, this can’t be,This is impossible, I can’t believe this is happening, It’s too much, I’m overwhelmed, I can’t take anymore, This is too good to believe, Not in my wildest dreams, I never imagined or expected this, I don’t deserve this, I have no words, How can this be? 

Have you ever said or thought those things? We probably all have. They are moments when the unbearable is breaking into our lives, shattering the horizon of our expectations, and guiding us into all the truth. 

What is unbearable for you today? What is the truth that is calling and waiting to be done by you? And how will you give existence to God in your life and the world?

A Prayer-Poem by Steven Garness-Holmes called: Space for the Trinity

Soul, do you feel a tinge of awe?

Praise the Holy One, who is.

Do you feel the balm of an unseen companion?

Thank the Son, who is present.

Do you feel the courage, the rising of love?

Honor the Holy Spirit, who breathes in you.

Soul, do you sense the mystery that can’t be sensed,

the giving that is a gift,

the Beyond that is within you?

Bow down and leap up,

for the Holy Trinity

has found space to rest and dance in you.

AMEN+