Trinity Sunday Year C

The Rev. Melanie Dickson Lemburg
Trinity Sunday Year C
May 30, 2010

In her book Leaving Church, Barbara Brown Taylor tells several anecdotes to her Atlanta friends to explain her decision to leave a large Episcopal church in the city to take up the call as rector of a small church in a small town in northern Georgia. She writes, “When my friends in Atlanta asked me how things were going in north Georgia, I told them that I was living in a Flannery O’Connor story. I would spend one afternoon visiting a septuagenarian who lived in an octagonal house that her late husband had built for her, eating kiwis that she grew on her clothesline and listening to her reminiscences of Isadora Duncan. The next day I would take communion to a man who was back in the hospital for the third operation on his knee, which was crushed when his pickup truck rolled backward and pinned him against his trailer. After church on Trinity Sunday, I came out to my car to find a miniature Three Musketeers candy bar on the hood. Underneath it was a note from the deeply eccentric woman who lived across the street from the church. ‘One for all and all for one,’ the note read. ‘Happy Trinity Sunday.’[i]
So, Happy Trinity Sunday. Our readings for today speak of all the hosts of heaven singing Holy, holy to a great God seated upon a throne. They resound with might and eminence and mystery. Jesus speaks of the Spirit of Truth which will come to guide the disciples and us into all truth, and he reemphasizes his relationship with the Father and with the Spirit. But they also dance on the edge of poetry and lyric as they speak of that relationship:
When he established the heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race."
I’d be willing to bet that in the course of your life, you’ve heard at least one theologically sound sermon on the doctrine of the Trinity, that consists of phrases like: “ that the one God exists in 3 persons and one substance—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God is one, yet self-differentiated; the God who reveals Himself to humankind is one God equally in 3 distinct modes of existence, yet remains one through all eternity.”[ii] Or “that the Latin word personae which we translate as person (as in the 3 persons of the Trinity) is the same word used to talk about the masks that actors used to portray different characters in the theater.” Or perhaps even: St. Augustine compared the Son and the Holy Spirit to processes of human self-knowledge and self-love. He wrote that the Son came from an act of thinking on the part of the Father and the Spirit was a result of the mutual love of the Father and the Son.
But instead today, I want to talk about the implications of the Trinity in our daily life. What significance does it have for us? This has been a busy season in the life of the church. We had two funerals last week, and we are getting geared up for lots of work and some fun in our upcoming Iron Chef competition. In the midst of our busyness, in the midst of life, today we stop and remember the important truth that our God is a relational God, a God who created us specifically to be in relationship with God and whose three different aspects exist in a kind of playful, joyful dance that really makes God more accessible to us. We remember that all of God delights in us, too, and invites us to participate in this joyful, playful, delightful dance with God.
So instead of talking theology or doctrine today, let’s talk poetry. I once read a poem that captured the notion of Trinity for me in a new and different way, and in my rediscovery of it, it has captured my imagination about how my life with my family, my prayer life, and all aspects of how I am in this world in relationship to God and others could be different. It is called Playtime by Michael Hare Duke.

Playtime
It takes a kind of courage
To find time for play…

Thank God for the dreams
in which we mount our fiery imaginations
and ride off into the misty mountains.
Night takes to task the busy day;
but why am I ashamed to claim the right to conscious play
within the waking world?

When I can sit and let my mind catch fire
I understand how God sang for fun
calling out of nothing all creation.
Wagtails bounce and flip their feathers
salmon leap,
the world turns, the planets wheel,
tiny or vast
orchestrated into a joyful tune,
the models of all making.

Dreams, imagination and God’s laughter in creation
invite me out of my industrious solemnity,
to take the task of playing seriously
until my marred manhood
is recreated in the child I have denied.[iii]

Where have you encountered God’s laughter in creation in your life this week? (I have encountered it in the laughter of my children, in quiet times with my husband, in petting my old,sweet, needy, co-dependant Golden Retriever.) Where have you tasted God’s delight in your life? That is the Trinity at work in your life and in the world: indefinable, unbridled laughter and joy that cannot be contained and that delights in you and creates, redeems, and sustains all relationships. That is what we remember, celebrate, and savor this day.

So. Happy Trinity Sunday. Let’s have a little fun today and do something you may have never done before. Eat chocolate in church. I have mini Three Musketeers for everyone that I will pass out now, and I encourage you to eat yours while you pass the peace. May it feed you to look for God’s laughter in creation in your life in the coming week as you witness the delight of the Trinity at work in the world. All for one and one for all!
[i] Taylor, Barbara Brown. Leaving Church. Harper: San Francisco, 2006, o. 67.
[ii] Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. ed. F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone. Oxford: 1997, p 1641.
[iii] Playtime by Michael Hare Duke. Resources for Preaching and Worship Year C. Ed. Hanna Ward and Jennifer Wild. Westminster: Louisville, 2003, p 174.