Trinity Sunday
Sermon given on Sunday June 4, 2023
Hello and thank you for the warm welcome. Rev. Jennifer and I have been friends since our days in seminary so I am grateful for this opportunity to preach and even more grateful that technology makes it possible for me to do so even while I am in Ohio.
Ok, let me start by describing my sermon writing process. First, someone invites me to preach, I do a quick glance at the lectionary readings and think, “Sure that works.” I figure that future Naiomi will work out the details. Then a few days or weeks later, depending on when I am preaching, I sit down to do my research and start preparing my manuscript. It’s at this time, 9 times out of 10 I ask myself, “What was I thinking when I picked these specific passages?”
Now this was especially true for this week’s reading. When I finally sat down to put together my sermon I thought, “Wait I’m preaching on Trinity Sunday? When I agreed to this date I must have forgotten that the unit on the Trinity made me cry in seminary.”
So then I thought, “Ok I just won’t talk about the Trinity. That will be fine. Let me just focus on the gospel reading. Oh, it’s the Great Commission passage, you know the one that has been used by centuries of Christians to justify colonizing other countries and exploiting the local populations.” I'll be honest, at that point I started to panic just a little bit.
So cue the worrying and praying portion of my sermon preparation. To be honest, this happens almost every time I write a sermon, though this time was a bit more intense. During this stage of sermon prep, I often read the Scripture passages dozens of times, and look through my commentaries again, all while praying for inspiration to strike.
And inspiration can come from the most unlikely sources: past sources of inspiration include Taylor Swift, the Walking Dead, and my friend’s then 3-year-old daughter. This time inspiration came from an aptly titled article, “It’s Jesus, stupid.” My first reaction reading that article was, “You are calling me what?” My second reaction was: “Well duh.”
As Christians, our whole faith is built on following and believing in Jesus Christ. Christianity as an institution has spent thousands of years debating who Jesus is and what the criteria are to be a Christian. And as individuals, most of us will spend our lives grappling with what it means to be a follower of Jesus. But sometimes, we complicate things to the point where we forget that Jesus is at the heart of our faith.
Now let me be clear- faith can be complicated because we live in a complicated world. And the Bible is a complicated book. If it weren’t our pastors wouldn’t need to spend thousands of dollars and years of their lives in seminary. And I absolutely believe in the need to think critically about our faith. I am the first to advocate for robust theological and Biblical education for congregations. And I’m also not saying that the other persons of the Trinity do not matter. Of course, they do. But our understanding of God and the Holy Spirit flows from our knowledge about Jesus. And when we lose sight of that, we lose sight of the core of our faith.
For instance, I think what frustrated me about attempts to explain the Trinity in seminary was that the discussion quickly became abstract with little relevance to everyday life. It felt as if we were trying to create a mathematical formula that never quite added up. Don’t get me wrong I found the class discussions and debates interesting up to a certain point but I struggled with the question: what did these class debates mean for the marginalized, for the poor, for the suffering? We were talking about the Trinity but as an abstract entity that seemingly had little relevance for the here and now.
In a similar way, when it comes to the Great Commission, or Jesus' call to make disciples, so much harm has occurred because those who called themselves followers of Jesus, often lose sight of Jesus while attempting to fulfill it. I think of the leaders who not too long ago viewed their conquering of vast lands as being ordained by God.
I mean, I’m sure it didn’t hurt that they envisioned these lands to be filled with all sorts of economic goods including people to enslave, hidden treasures, and so-called “uninhabited lands.” Because these leaders lost sight of Jesus or perhaps never even truly thought of him to begin with, the Great Commission throughout modern Christian history has often had less to do with bringing people the liberating message of Jesus and more to do with bringing them under the captivity of the empire.
So how do we keep sight of Jesus so we aren’t caught up in theological debates that seem to go nowhere or so that we don’t act in ways that bring harm to others in our attempts to bring the Good News? I’ll give you three suggestions: you can embrace them or if you don’t like them, you can tell Rev. Jennifer and she will give me a good talking too:
Remember the incarnation- I love the church calendar and how it is divided into separate seasons. It brings a predictability that I cherish and it also serves as an important reminder for key themes throughout the year. But remembering the incarnation is not just for Advent. The heart of the Trinity and I’d argue the heart of the gospel in general, is the story of a God who became human and not just any human. But a Jewish Palestinian, born to an unwed teenage mother living in occupied territory under the Roman empire. The incarnation speaks of a God, who yes, cares for all, but especially the marginalized and those at the bottom heap of society. The God who created the moon and stars doesn’t come down to earth as an emperor, or a powerful military leader or even a wealthy merchant, but as a person living on the margins. God became human to challenge the kingdoms of the world which are based on violence and oppression. God through Jesus offers us the kingdom of God, a kingdom where hierarchy is turned upside down and where the poor and the looked down upon are held in honor.
Make sure Jesus shapes our understanding of God and the Holy Spirit: I mentioned this earlier and now I am going to elaborate. As a child, I grew up in a religious tradition where God the Father (or the God the Creator) was portrayed as violent, wrathful and angry, Jesus was our buddy, and the Holy Spirit was sort of our life coach guiding us and letting us know what we needed to do. But what if we understood God the Creator and the Holy Spirit through Jesus? Would God the Creator still just be a wrathful and angry being, who needs Jesus to act as a buffer? And what would that say about the Holy Spirit, who in many traditions is sort of the forgotten sidekick?
WWJD- I am going to age myself a bit but in elementary and middle school, the popular bracelets at the time were those rubber bracelets with the letters WWJD, which stood for What Would Jesus Do. In practice those bracelets had less to do with actually following Jesus and were more about collecting as many as possible. They also gave the aura of holiness without really impacting our actions. So I am not advocating for us to go back to wearing those bracelets. I’d rather we didn’t. However, it is important to remember that Jesus isn’t just a figure that we occasionally pray to or sing to on Sundays. But Jesus calls us to follow him and part of that is to try and imitate him the best we can. Of course we aren’t perfect and we will make mistakes, but luckily the call to follow Jesus doesn’t entail perfection. But we mimic Jesus when we care for the vulnerable, when we push back against a society that says that some lives are worth more than others, when we love our enemies, and when we advocate for liberation and justice.
On this Trinity Sunday, we don’t need to shy away from difficult discussions or even debates about the Trinity or about the Great Commission. These conversations are important. They help us articulate what we believe or what we think we believe and they provide spaces for us to challenge each other in hopefully healthy and productive ways. But in the process of having these important conversations let’s not lose sight of Jesus.
Too often in Christian history, the Good News of Jesus has been depicted in ways that are actually anything but Good News for the majority of people. I talked about a historical example earlier when I mentioned colonialism, but there are present-day examples as well. We see this today when people use their Christian faith to justify mocking people who think or believe differently, or when they claim their faith gives them permission to use violence to impose their ideas of what is good and godly on others. We see this when some Christians claim that their faith says that Black and brown people are inferior to white people. Or that members of the LGBTQ+ community need to be executed. (yes a pastor in Texas about a year ago, was recorded saying those words in a sermon). In these cases, those called to bring the Good News lost sight of Jesus. Let us not make the same mistake. Amen.
Image of a cross on a mountain with a pink and blue sky backdrop. Text: our understanding of God and the Holy Spirit flows from our knowledge about Jesus. And when we lose sight of that, we lose sight of the core of our faith.