Today is Trinity Sunday, the Sunday that we celebrate the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit – The Godhead, according to Christian doctrine. On this day, throughout the church, pastors, deacons, or lay preachers, will get up and do their very best to explain the concept of the Trinity in a way that makes logical sense.
So, let’s jump right in.
Imagine, if you will, a glass of water sitting in front of you. Doesn’t smell like anything, and it sloshes around nicely in the glass, and seems good to drink. But at the moment, you decide that you don’t really want a glass of water, and what you want instead is some tea, so you heat up the water on the stove. After a while, you notice that steam is coming out of the kettle, and you know the water is hot enough. And you make your tea, take a sip, and you burn your mouth. “It’s too hot!” you realize, and so you go to the refrigerator and you pull out some ice cubes and just as you are about to put the ice cubes into your exceedingly hot tea, you have a sudden aha! moment.
“This is like the Trinity,” you think. “God can be in the form of the Father, like the liquid, in the form of the son, like the ice cubes, and in the form of the Holy Spirit, like the steam.” And then you sit down in your easy chair, and contemplate the wonders of God, and how you have just made sense of the Trinity. A wonderful feeling. And as you are sitting there, you think to yourself, “You know what? God made humanity in God’s own image. That means I resemble God.” And as you ponder that concept, you realize that you can be a Father, a husband, and even an employer – or, a Mother, a wife, and business owner – depending on how you look at things, or who is describing you. Your spouse will describe you as a spouse, your children as a parent, and your employees or customers as an employer or business owner. Simple, right?
So you tell this concept to some people, using these analogies of water and humanity. And while you’re doing that, an old woman who lifts up her cane at you and screams, “Heretic!” And the next thing you see is a blinding blur of movement, and you say to yourself, “How on earth can she move so fast?” Right before you black out.
So… after you get out of the hospital, you go back home. And you decide to look up why this little old lady smacked you upside the head.
And you discover that these analogies, the one of the water, and the one of the various roles we play in our lives is in fact that – a heresy. It is called Modalism. It denies that there are three persons of the Trinity, and instead says that there is only one divine being that happens to present itself in three distinct ways. When you look at water, it remains the chemical structure of one hydrogen atom and two oxygen atoms, and so its “essence” never changes – the only thing that changes is the “mode” or form that is visible at the moment. Same thing with the analogy of humans. The individual person never changes, and the only thing that changes is the description of the person, based on who is doing the describing. It’s not a depiction of One God in Three Persons, just a depiction of One God, in various forms.
Feeling enlightened now, you start to make yourself a breakfast sandwich with some sausage and egg. And then, again, you have a sudden flash of insight, another “aha!” moment, and you realize, just as you are cracking the egg, that God is like this egg. “Yes,” you say out loud, “God the Father is like the shell, and God the Son is like the egg yolk, and God the Holy Spirit is like the egg white. Together they make up the One egg” And then you realize that you can do it with all sorts of other things, like an apple, which has skin, flesh, and seeds. Or an orange, which has a rind, the meaty bits, and seeds. Or plants, you could even make these analogies with various plants, like a clover, because each of the three leaves of the clover is like one part of God.
“This is amazing,” you think to yourself, “I’m going to go and tell people all about this now.” And then you pause, “But I’ll stay away from where I was last time, because that old woman with a cane. She terrifies me.” And so you head out, and begin telling people about the Trinity, and how God is like an egg, a three leaf clover, or even an apple.
And then… There’s the old woman, leaning on a cane twice the size she had last time. “How did she get here,” you wonder. And she lifts up her cane and pretends to come at you. But before you can blink, you’ve made a beeline for your car, and you’re gone before you can hear the word “Heretic” come out of her mouth.
After you get home, narrowly escaping the wrath of the old woman with a cane, you discover that this heresy is called “Partialism.” This egg analogy, this three leaf clover analogy, or the fruit analogies reduce each of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to only being a “Part” of God. That is, an egg yolk is a part of an egg, but without the shell or the egg white, it is not a complete egg – it is only one-third of an egg. But God is One God, and made up of three persons – not God the legs, God the torso, and God the head being just the parts of One complete God. They are all three distinct persons, yet one in nature. They are all God, not just mere parts of one god. And you say to yourself, “Yeah, I guess that makes sense.” And then you add, “This Trinity stuff is hard.”
And as you are sitting on your patio, basking in the warm sunlight, you have another Aha! moment, and think, “Hey, wait a moment, the Sun. It creates both light and heat. Can I use that analogy?” And then, you think, “Hmmm… Maybe I better see if there’s stuff in the Bible first, so I don’t have to deal with that old lady again.”
So, you pick up your Bible, and you throw it down on the table, and it miraculously opens up to Proverbs 8:22, which says, “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,” and you think this verse is a reference for Jesus. That is, Jesus was created. “That would make more sense, because how can there be three in one, one in three?,” you think. Excited, you randomly flip the Bible open to another passage and come across 1 Corinthians 8:5-6, which says, “for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things exist, and through whom we exist.” And you think, “See: One God, the Father, and all things were created by God.” And then, excited, you flip open another passage, and you see, in Collossians 1:15, that it says, “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of over all creation.” “How about that,” you say, “We even say that in some of our Eucharistic Prayers, so it must be true. Jesus is the first created being, so my Sun analogy totally works. God is the Sun, and Jesus, the Light of the World, is like the light that is created by the Sun, and the Holy Spirit is like the heat. They are created by God” And you’re so excited that you grab all of your stuff and run to the door. But as you lock up, and turn around, there at the bottom of the driveway, standing by the curb, is that little old lady, leaning on her cane, shaking her head.
And, you think, “Maybe I should look some more.” So you go back inside and you flip to the beginning of the Bible, and it says, “In the beginning the earth was formless and void, and the Spirit of God hovered over the water,” and a little later, when God created humans, it says, “Let us make humanity in our image, in our likeness…” And you think to yourself, “Our image. That’s plural. That’s weird.” And then, you flip through your Bible again, and come to Matthew, chapter 3, and you see that at the moment that Jesus was baptized, the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove descended upon Jesus, and a voice from heaven said, “This is my son, whom I Love; with him I am well pleased.” And you think, “Wow, there’s three people here in this story, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and God, the voice from heaven. That’s weird.” But still, you think, maybe I’ll try one more time, and you flip a few more pages, and you come to the Gospel of John, which begins with the words, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And you think, “Hmmm… maybe that’s why the old lady was waiting for me. Jesus is not created, and God seems to be plural, and there’s three of them when Jesus is baptized. Ugh! This Trinity stuff is hard.”
And so, to avoid the wrath of the little old lady and her cane, you start to dig a little, and you find out that the reason Paul said that Jesus was the “firstborn of all creation” was not to say that Jesus was created, but that Jesus had authority and superiority over all created things. And then you find out that in the early 300s, the church was going through a crisis. People were preaching different things about Jesus, some of them saying that Jesus wasn’t really human, and only appeared to be human, pretending to be human so that we could learn from him; that Jesus was born human, and adopted by God and made into a divine being; or the opposite, that Jesus was completely divine, and not really human, so that we couldn’t really use Jesus as our example, because after all, he was a God, not a man. But the one that really stuck around, and caused a lot of problems was something preached by a man named Arius, who said that Jesus and the Holy Spirit were created by God, and that therefore there was only one real God – God the Father. Everything else was created, including Jesus. And because there were some things in the scripture, that when taken out of context seemed plausible, many people believed this heresy, called Arianism. And so, the church gathered all its bishops and clergy in a city called Nicea in the year 325, and together, using scripture, hashed out the nature of God, of Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.
In the end, this Council produced a Creed, called the Nicene Creed, which laid out that Jesus is “eternally begotten from the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.” That is, Jesus is eternal, and Jesus is God, and they are the same. And the Holy Spirit also, “with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified.”
If after hearing all of this, you thought to yourself, “Ugh, this Trinity Stuff is hard,” I would totally agree with you.
The issue is that we want to make logical sense of the idea stated in another creed, that “the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. And yet they are not three Gods, but one God.”1 We want it to make sense, because we don’t understand how this can possibly be. But in the end, we must remember that some things we will never understand: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,” God says. Sometimes we just need to accept things as a mystery, and take it on faith, and recognize that right now we only know in part, but when we arrive in heaven, we shall know and understand fully.
For those of you that took the Instructed Eucharist class, you might remember me telling you that the Nicene Creed is in the liturgy not just because it is part of our faith, but that it comes right after the Sermon so that you can compare what you have heard in the sermon to this statement of our faith.
Why is this important? Because all of these heresies that you heard about today are still preached, in various forms, throughout the world.
The challenge we face today, as with every other day, is that we are to guard our hearts and minds from those things that would turn us away from the Truth we profess to believe, just because they sound plausible and seem to make logical sense.
And then, hopefully, we can avoid getting smacked upside the head by that little old lady with her cane.
- Athanasian Creed
[This sermon was delivered at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Wickenburg, AZ on June 15, Trinity Sunday, 2025.]
