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