Sermon preached by the Reverend Nicholas Lang, Rector

St. Paul’s on the Green, Norwalk, Connecticut

Trinity Sunday, June 3, 2007

May the peace of God be with us, the grace of Christ embrace us, and the Holy Spirit live within us forever. Amen.

A senior citizen drove his brand new Corvette convertible out of the dealership. Taking off down the road, he floored it to 80 mph, enjoying the wind blowing through what little hair he had left. “Amazing,” he thought as he flew down I-95, pushing the pedal even closer to the floor.

Then he looked in his rearview mirror and saw the police car behind him, blue lights flashing and siren blaring. He floored it to 100 mph, then 110, then 120. Suddenly he thought, “What am I doing? I’m too old for this,” and pulled over to await the Trooper’s arrival. Pulling in behind him, the Trooper walked up to the Corvette, looked at his watch and said, “Sir, my shift ends in 30 minutes. Today is Friday and I’m off till Tuesday. If you can give me a reason for speeding that I’ve never heard before, I’ll let you go.”

The old man paused, then said, “Years ago, my wife ran off with a State Trooper. I thought you were bringing her back.” “You have a good day, Sir,” replied the Trooper.

Some things are just not very easy to believe. We celebrate one of those things today – the Holy Trinity. The greatest theologians the Church has produced have struggled for centuries to explain the mystery of the Trinity – a doctrine of the faith that teaches that there are three persons in one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Their work is expressed in the creeds of the church, one of which we recite every week.

Martin Luther once said, “To try to deny the Trinity endangers one’s salvation; to try to comprehend the Trinity endangers one’s sanity!” Dorothy Sayers, British author and theologian, once used these words that parody the Athanasian Creed in the script of a play: “The Father is incomprehensible. The Son is incomprehensible. The Holy Spirit is incomprehensible. The whole thing is incomprehensible!”

The Trinity is an ultimately unexplainable Doctrine of the Christian Church and it took almost 400 years for the church to get its head straight about that doctrine, so we should not worry too much when we rise to our feet on Sunday and recite the words of the Nicene Creed with more than a little confusion, puzzlement, and even disbelief.

I have come to understand that it is not so much how well we can digest or affirm the church’s teaching of one God in three divine persons, but rather what we believe about God that matters. In fact, I think that what we believe about God shapes who we are and, when we are able to stretch our brain and expand our mind about God, it can and will transform our lives.

One of my favorite prophetic voices these days is Sister Joan Chittister, a Benedictine Nun who is not afraid to take on the Pope or the President or anyone else she thinks needs to listen. In her book, In Search of Belief, she relates an experience of asking people in discussion groups, “What do you believe?”

One man said he really didn’t believe in anything anymore and then went on to talk all about the business he started and the Krugerrands he had bought. She smiled as she though “he clearly believes in the god of money.”

“What do you believe?” she asked a young man, fresh from a college degree, not long married. “I’m taking a Bible course,” he said, “I believe that Americans are God’s special people and that the man is supposed to be the head of the family.” She watched as he gave his wife orders as they talked. His belief, she mused, was obviously in himself and the god of entitlement.

A woman who had left the church told her that “I believe that God made women to have the same abilities and opportunities as men have, and I’m not going to be part of anything that says otherwise.” These situations made her point: Everybody believes in something. There is no such thing as an age of unbelievers. Joan concludes then that “whatever we believe at the deepest center of our being determines what we ourselves become, even when we say we believe in something else.”

Rather than unpack this incomprehensible doctrine of the Trinity, I wonder if it is not a day for us to reflect on Sister Joan’s probing question: “What do you believe?” What do you believe about life and about the world and about God and about love and about mystery? And how has what you believe shaped the person you are?

But, if there is one thing we might take away with us about the Trinity, can it be that God created us to be in relationship with one another, to live always in relation to a community, to a family, perhaps a family of choice and to work for the well being of others in our community.

The doctrine of the Trinity then becomes a core belief about God’s life with us and our life with each other: God in us, we in God, all of us in each other. It reveals our call to advocate for those who are in trouble, in danger, at risk, and in need. Philip Turner, former dean of Yale Divinity School says that what the church needs to be is a moral and political community which is something more than a lonely crowd in pursuit of private ends.

Many religions are all about rules and restrictions. I think you and I have come here because we need more than rules. I think we are looking for something to help us find meaning in life when the rules no longer make sense, old ways no longer work and we feel isolated and in desperate need of being connected to and with something that might just possibly give us a glimpse of the face of God.

In the words of Joan Chittister: “The truth of life is that life is not a given. We are its co-creators. The globe is in our hands. We must be impelled by the vision that inspired it, committed to the glory that created it, and confident in the beauty that sustains it. To say ‘I believe’ is to say that my heart is in what I know but do not know, what I feel but cannot see, what I want and do not have, however much I have. To say ‘I believe’ is to say yes to the mystery of life.”

In that mystery we discover the truth that whatever we believe at the deepest center of our being determines what we ourselves become.