Month: June 2025

Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on June 15, 2025, Trinity Sunday. Based on John 16:12-15.

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There’s a YouTube video that I love called, “St. Patrick’s Bad Analogies.” In it, St. Patrick attempts to explain the Trinity to a couple of “simple Irish folk,” who turn out to not be so simple after all. The first analogy he uses is water: it can be a liquid, ice, or steam. The simple Irish folk chastise him for promoting modalism, a heretical doctrine that claimed the Trinity were three modes of God rather than three distinct persons.

He says, OK, well, it’s like the sun: it’s a star, that produces heat, and that produces light. Wait a minute, Patrick: that’s Arianism. Arius was a heretic who claimed that the Father was the ground of all being, and that the Son and the Holy Spirit issued from the Father.

Now he gets to his most famous analogy: a shamrock. Like three leaves of a shamrock, the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit together comprise God. But wait: that’s partialism! Each person of the Godhead is God, not just part of God. They are all fully divine, and yet together they are One.

So finally St. Patrick falls back to the creed of Athanasius:

we worship one God in trinity and the trinity in unity,

   neither blending their persons

    nor dividing their essence.

        For the person of the Father is a distinct person,

        the person of the Son is another,

        and that of the Holy Spirit still another.

        But the divinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is one,

        their glory equal, their majesty coeternal.

Athanasius’s creed goes on and on, but it’s more of the same. Did you understand what I just said? I sure didn’t.

They say that Trinity Sunday is the day when the most heresy is committed in pulpits around the world. The root of the problem is that ultimately, when we are discussing God, words fail. Human understanding fails. As St. Augustine once said, “If you understand, it is not God.” Our finite human brains cannot comprehend the infinite glory of our triune God. So we do our best to explain things and end up falling short of reality.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m colorblind. What that means is that my eyes do not perceive color the same way most people’s eyes do. So let me ask you: What does green look like? How would you describe it to me? You could say, well, it’s what grass looks like, but that’s not really helpful. That’s telling me what objects display a certain color, but not what the color actually is.

Theology can be roughly divided into cataphatic and apophatic. Cataphatic theology is where I mostly find my home, as do most mainline Protestants. Cataphatic theology is positive theology: it’s based on affirmations of who God is. We have creeds, right? A whole book full of them, the Book of Confessions, that try to explain God. For 1700 years, Christians have been dividing themselves over their understandings of God and the words they use. The Eastern and Western churches split for many reasons, but a big one was a clause that the Roman church added to the Nicene Creed, “the Holy Spirit, …who proceeds from the Father and the Son.” The Eastern churches said that no, the Holy Spirit proceeds only from the Father. In this and many other ways, we Christians have splintered what should be one Church over words.

Yet in the end, words fail. Then enters apophatic theology, which literally means “unsaying.” It’s sometimes called “negative theology” because it consists of saying what God is not. Here’s an example. “God is love.” Yes, God is loving, and 1 John is an extended meditation on how God is love. But think of all the ways we use that word. I love my family. I love this church. I love pizza. I love hunting. I love working on electronics. Are these all ways that God loves, or that God is love? Yes, but God is so much more!

And then think of all the ways that we show love. You can probably think of many times in your life when you weren’t sure what the most loving choice was, particularly if you are a parent or if you were in a relationship with an addict. Where is the line between loving someone and enabling bad behavior? Where is the line between appropriate discipline and cruelty? It’s hard to know. There are many people who think yelling at people and calling them sinners is in fact loving, because they want to keep them from going to Hell. Are all of these ways that God is love?

So in the end, if what we have and what we do is love, God cannot possibly be love because God is so much MORE than what we could possibly mean by that word. Thus, we say no, God is not love, at least not as we humans understand it. That word, “love,” points us towards God, but God transcends it in every possible way.

What we are left with are analogies and metaphors and stories that help us understand God in some way, but ultimately, we always fall short. The fundamental Trinitarian formula is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Today, on Father’s Day, I’m happy to make an analogy between fathers everywhere and our Eternal Father. The analogy fails in two basic ways. One, God did not literally “father” humanity, but rather fashioned us in God’s image. Two, if God is our Father, He is a perfect Father, one so far exceeding human fathers in every way that we cannot ultimately understand God through that term. A related problem is that we don’t all have good father figures with which to compare God.

Back in 2006, PC(USA) commissioned and endorsed a study on the Trinity, titled “God’s Love Overflowing,” that explored many other ways to understand the mystery of our triune God. So let’s try another trinitarian formula that was in their report: God the compassionate mother, God the beloved child, and God the life-giving womb. Here, the first Person of the Trinity is still a parent, but now we can speak of her feminine attributes. If you have trouble with an authoritarian Father image, perhaps a compassionate, caring, comforting Mother image is better. God the Mother takes responsibility for healing our wounds, teaching us to be loving, and guiding us into healthy relationships. The second Person of the Trinity is a beloved child, our divine sibling who demonstrates how to love God the Parent and how to love one another. We are all beloved children of God, and we can all model our lives on Christ, regardless of gender. The third Person of the Trinity is the source of our lives, the womb from which the Church was born just last week on Pentecost—or, well, 2000 years ago, but you know what I mean.

So if God the Mother, the Child, and the Womb help you to understand our triune God as the source of love and life, that’s great! But in the end, this metaphor fails to capture all of the attributes of God.

Let’s try another one: God the Rainbow of Promise, God the Ark of Salvation, and God the Dove of Peace. In this trinitarian re-telling of Noah’s story, we get another perspective on the ways the three Persons of the Trinity interact with humanity. The First Person sets a rainbow in the sky as a reminder of the promise that humanity is beloved and will never be destroyed. By extension, we can comprehend all of the promises of God given throughout the Bible as expressions of the fundamental promise that God treasures us. God acts in the world as the Second Person of the Trinity, the ark that carries us to salvation. Christ didn’t just proclaim salvation, Christ is the vessel of our salvation, the embodiment of the promise that the First Person makes to us. We know of our salvation because of the Third Person, the dove who brings peace to us all.

I think this is a beautiful way to understand the story of Noah, as an experience of the triune God. But it too fails. Christ was not just a boat made of wood. Christ was actually a human being, Jesus of Nazareth. The Holy Spirit is not just peace, but also power and love and unity. So yes, God is rainbow, ark, and dove, but not really.

In the end, none of our analogies or metaphors really capture the essence of the Trinity, but all of them point in the general direction of who God is and how God interacts with humanity. One common theme through it all is LOVE. The Trinity is three Persons united with so much love that it overflows. There is so much love that the three Persons are fully united into one God. And then God’s love flows out and fills the universe, uniting us all into God, too.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus’s farewell discourse gets very mystical: the Father is in the Son as the Son is in the Father and the Son is in us as we are in Him and he will send an Advocate who tells us all things about the Father and the Son. Wow. I think this was an early attempt, in the limited language that the disciples could comprehend, to approach the divine Truth of the Trinity. I probably haven’t said it any better, but maybe some additional analogies can help us, as Paul wrote in Ephesians, to have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that we may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Because in the end, we cannot comprehend the Trinity, we cannot fully comprehend just how much love God has for us, and we cannot comprehend the infinite riches of God’s grace with our finite minds. What we can do, though, is to “unsay” what we think we know about God, all of the limits we try to place on God, and experience God’s overflowing love.

The best way I have ever found to truly experience that love is through other people. I can point to two somewhat mystical God experiences. One was in a worship service with probably a hundred people, and one was sitting on my couch with a friend. Beyond that, the times I have witnessed the kingdom of God were when I was surrounded by people who were experiencing true community, authentically expressing themselves, and affirming and supporting one another. That is the gift of the Trinity, overflowing love that binds us to one another and allows us to embrace our identity as beloved children of God, Christ’s siblings.

So tell me, what does green look like? Words fail. Just as our words about God fail. Our faith should rest not on human wisdom, but on the power of God. Our metaphors, our analogies, and our stories can point us towards God, though, and help us to live together as members of God’s family, loving one another through the overflowing love of the Godhead. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on June 1, 2025. Based on John 17:20-26.

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I’d like to start by situating this passage in the story of Jesus’s life and ministry as related in the Gospel of John. The first half of John’s Gospel is the Book of Signs, in which Jesus performs seven major miracles. This passage comes during the shift to the Book of Glory, which culminates in Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection.

A few chapters earlier, Jesus and his disciples gather for a Passover meal. At the start, Jesus washes his disciples’ feet as a prophetic action to demonstrate what love means and how love acts. Judas departs to betray him, and then Jesus begins his farewell discourse. Today’s passage is the last part of his high priestly prayer that concludes the discourse before they all depart for the garden of Gethsemane. This is one of the major examples of Jesus showing us how to pray. He earnestly asks God the Father to unify all of God’s people. This passage is very mystical—Jesus prays that the Father would be in the Son as the Son is in the Father as both are in the disciples and the disciples are in them. Wow! How do we make sense of that? This can only be true if we are all bound together by the Holy Spirit, the Advocate that Jesus promises at the beginning of his farewell discourse.

The Gospels are stories of Jesus’s life, but they are more than that. They are stories told to specific communities who were trying to figure out how to follow Jesus. The first Christians were Jews who believed that Jesus had come to reform Judaism. Eventually, though, they realized that Jesus’s message of hope, peace, and love was meant for more than just Jews. Peter had a vision that opened his mind and his heart to Gentiles, and subsequently Paul was commissioned specifically to take the Gospel message to Gentiles around the Roman Empire.

One of the hallmarks of the early church was its diversity. Traditionally, religious communities were ethnically segregated. Each community had its patron god or gods and its own worship practices. In a sense, the Jews were no different—they just thought that their God was supreme over all other gods, or that the other people’s gods were not real. So no matter where they lived, they cleaved to the one true God. For this reason, Jews and Christians were sometimes accused of being atheists because they didn’t worship the local idols, the local gods. If something bad happened to a city, it must have been because the Jews hadn’t properly sacrificed to the patron gods. That led to persecution throughout the Greco-Roman world.

Anyway, pre-Christian religions were segregated by ethnicity and, to some extent, by class. Christianity was different. They welcomed people of any ethnicity, any gender, any social class. Take the Ethiopian eunuch for example. Being Ethiopian, he was not fully welcome in the Temple in Jerusalem. Being a eunuch and likely a slave, he was definitely not welcome in the Temple and would not have been welcome in many social and religious settings. Yet when he encountered Philip on the road as he was heading home from Jerusalem, Philip baptized him and welcomed him into the Christian family.

Throughout the Roman Empire, Christian churches sprouted and grew. In almost every case, they were “house churches,” which is to say, they were groups of people who would meet at one person’s house to worship and share a meal together—the meal we will share at the Lord’s Table in a few minutes. Inviting someone into your house is far different from inviting someone to a public place like a church. I mean, if you are out in public and start chatting with a stranger about religion, you would surely feel more comfortable inviting them to worship with you than to come to your house for a cup of coffee. Yet the house churches were very welcoming to people of all different backgrounds. Generally, groups gathered in the homes of the well-to-do so that there would be enough room for everyone, yet even slaves were welcome and treated as equals. Although later church hierarchy would exclude women from leadership, these house churches were frequently led by women, which makes sense when you consider the typical role of women in managing household affairs and offering hospitality.

Not only were the house churches welcoming of a wide range of people, the Christians actively loved their community, those outside their church. One of the primary contributions of the Christian church is the invention of the hospital. Before the fourth century, physicians treated patients in their homes and would stick to their own people. Then Christians began opening hospitals that welcomed anyone, Christian or not, from any class or ethnicity. The open-heartedness of early Christianity goes a long way towards explaining how it grew from a minor sect of a minor religion into the dominant religion in the Greco-Roman world.

Still today, Christians seek to love those who are outside their immediate circle. A few weeks ago, I related a short story about Carol Mayorga, an immigrant who is being detained. Let me expand on that just a bit. Carol, whose legal name is Ming Li Hui, went to St. Louis for what she thought was a routine visa renewal. Instead, she was arrested by ICE and transferred to Phelps County Jail. A group in Rolla called Abide in Love has been tracking the ICE detainees in our jail. My friend Lucy had specifically been in touch with Carol. Presbyterian pastor Kirsten King from Carol’s hometown of Kennett, MO, reached out to our church, so I had a video call with Carol. Since then, Carol has been transferred to Greene County Jail, where she remains. Through it all, Lucy has kept in touch with her and her lawyer. Lucy reached out to NPR, who visited Kennett and wrote a great article about the situation. Subsequently, the New York Times also wrote an article about her. Lucy has regular video calls with Carol to share God’s love and human connection.

Carol is from Hong Kong originally and is Catholic. Why did a Presbyterian pastor contact us? Why is my Episcopalian friend staying in touch with her? Because we are all one humanity. Christ told us to love one another. He didn’t say that we should only love those who love us, or only those who share our values or our community or anything else. He said that we should love our neighbor AND our enemy.

For a couple of months, I was participating in a book study that Patrick Wilson led at his church, CrossRoads. Through that, I learned about two types of churches: a bounded set and a centered set. In a bounded set, there is a clear boundary between who is “in” and who is “out.” For example, in many churches, there are pretty firm rules about who is and is not allowed to take communion. In many churches, there are pretty firm rules about who is allowed to serve in a leadership role. In many churches, there are pretty firm rules about who is considered worthy of membership and who is not. I would say that in the Presbyterian church, the boundary is a little bit porous, but there definitely is a boundary. We allow anyone to take communion, and there are no classifications of people who are disallowed from membership or leadership, but you do have to subscribe to certain beliefs to become a member and then be chosen to be a leader.

In a centered set, there is a clear center, and then there are people who are closer to or further from the center, and either moving towards or away from the center. That’s the kind of church Jesus is describing. The center is LOVE. The center is the mutual love of God the Father and God the Son, who are in one another and whose love flows out and fills the cosmos. Near the center are people like Jesus’s disciples: those who truly know Christ and have given their whole selves to serving God’s kingdom. That’s what God desires for all of us. But most of us aren’t there yet. The most we can hope is that we are moving towards Christ and His love as the source of our being.

Jesus describes an existence of complete unity as another aspect of the kingdom of God. Someday, we will achieve complete unity. In the meantime, as we move deeper into Christ’s love, we move towards fuller inclusion and fuller belonging. Inclusion is an open door: All are welcome. No longer do we have ushers who act like bouncers to keep out certain people. Everyone can come in, sit down, and join us in worship. Belonging takes that to a higher level, though. On a website called Inclusion Geeks, I found this description:

Understanding the difference between inclusion and belonging is crucial because focusing solely on inclusion can create a hollow feeling. Imagine inviting someone to a party but then leaving them standing awkwardly in the corner. They’re technically included, but they don’t truly belong. Focusing only on inclusion might bring diverse individuals into the organization, but without belonging, they may feel isolated, unheard, and ultimately disengaged.

Inclusion is opening the door. Belonging requires building genuine relationships, empowerment, trust, and psychological comfort. Belonging rests on celebrating differences, not minimizing them. We are all beloved children of God, made in God’s image. Yet we all express a different facet of God’s infinite being. Only by celebrating the many faces of humanity can we truly experience God’s presence in and among us.

And that celebration must be active. It isn’t enough to sit quietly in your pew and think positive thoughts about people who are different from you. Instead, we must actively engage with people who are outside our family circle, our friend circle, and our church circle. We must seek out new experiences, new people, different ways of being, and different perspectives.

Our church is a microcosm of the Christian church in America. We are all at a crossroads. For the past 500 years, we have split repeatedly over differences in theology, different ways of understanding God’s calling, different views on who is welcome and who is fit to lead. The process has accelerated in the past fifty years, with the predictable result that succeeding generations are rejecting all of it. If we can’t get our act together and center ourselves on the Truth, God’s Truth, which is LOVE, then why should anyone outside the church care what we have to say? If church is a place where people encounter conflict, or shame, or trauma, why would anyone join? If what we say we believe doesn’t match the truth of our actions, why should anyone trust us?

The only way forward and the only hope for the Christian Church is to live what Jesus commanded his disciples and pray as he prayed: that we may all be one, that we may dwell in God the Father and God the Son and that they may dwell in us. Then empowered by the Holy Spirit, we can exhibit the kingdom of God to the world, the love that unites all of humanity as God’s people.

Jesus described a grand vision for the kingdom of God: complete unity. This unity is based not on sameness, but on the foundation of God’s love in Christ. As we widen the circle of who we call neighbor, who we call friend, who we call sibling in Christ, we move deeper into the infinite love that Christ offers us all. Amen.

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