Why we celebrate Trinity Sunday

At Parish Communion and Holy Baptism

Romans 5:1-5

Trinity Sunday, 15.6.25

“We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ … God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” [1]

It is Trinity Sunday, the day when we celebrate a defining truth of the Christian Faith - that God is One and God is Three; One God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Talk of the Trinity, however, may make us pause. 

God is One and God is Three might sound like an odd algebra formula, hardly the sort of thing that is important for day to day Christian Faith.

Perhaps the Trinity is one of those issues to be left to the theologians and their weighty books, irrelevant to us ordinary Christians.

Or, and you do not have to go very far online to encounter this idea, maybe the Trinity is a complex theory that theologians and philosophers invented centuries after the New Testament was written. The word ‘Trinity’, after all, does not appear anywhere in the Bible. 

Is it the case, then, that the Trinity is not essential to the Christian Faith?

One of the reasons we celebrate Trinity Sunday every year in the Church is to ensure that we do not fall into such ways of thinking. 

The belief in the Trinity, that God is One and God is Three, the One God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is absolutely central to the Christian Faith. It is not irrelevant to ordinary, everyday Christian Faith. It is not an optional add-on. And it certainly is not a later invention, unknown to the Scriptures.

Yes, the word ‘Trinity’ does not appear in the Bible - but the Scriptures are not a dictionary or a textbook. They are the story of God’s revelation to humanity. And as we read and hear this story, we see how woven into its very fabric is the understanding that God is One and God is Three, that the One God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Our first reading from Paul’s Letter to the Romans is an example of this. Paul was probably writing this letter a mere two decades after the death and resurrection of Jesus. In our short reading of five verse, we see Paul referring to God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. We have God’s peace in Jesus Christ. We share in God’s love through the Holy Spirit. 

For Paul, it is the true God whom we encounter in Jesus Christ; it is the true God whom we know through the indwelling Holy Spirit. [2]

Here is the Trinity woven into the very fabric of Paul’s proclamation of the Christian Faith. And this is what we see again and again throughout the Scriptures of the New Testament. The New Testament is saturated with this revelation of God as the Holy Trinity, the One God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Which is why it is a foundational belief of the Christian Faith: the Trinity is the God revealed in the Scriptures. This distinguishes Christianity from other monotheistic faiths, Judaism and Islam. It also distinguishes Christianity from those who may have a vague belief in a divine being as creator. The Christian Faith is centred on something much richer and deeper than such a vague idea. For Christianity, the word ‘God’ means Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; the word ‘God’ means the Trinity.

This belief unites all orthodox Christian traditions: Methodist, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, Anglican, and the great Churches of the East. The ground of our unity as Christians is our confession of the One God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 

It is also how Christians have always prayed and worshipped: our prayer and worship is fundamentally shaped by belief in the Holy Trinity. 

The earliest known Christian hymn was found by archeologists on a piece of manuscript discovered in Egypt, dated to around 250AD. Egyptian Christians were singing this hymn nearly 1,800 years ago. At its heart are these words: "While we hymn Father and Son and Holy Spirit, let all the powers answer amen, amen". [3]

It is the same faith which shapes our worship as we gather here today in this parish church for the two Sacraments, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. 

These two little children are about to be baptised. As water is poured over them, we will hear the words “I baptise you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” - words, by the way, that are given to the Church, for use at Baptism, by the Risen Jesus at the end of Matthew’s Gospel. So much for the Trinity not being in the Scriptures!

Baptised in the name of the Trinity, these little children, like all of us who have been baptised, will be marked by and assured of the faithful, covenant love of the One God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

When it comes to the Sacrament of Holy Communion, we will hear the Rector, standing at the Lord’s Table, say the great prayer of thanksgiving over the bread and wine. It begins ‘Blessed are you Father’; it continues, ‘giving your only begotten Son to become Man’; and then, ‘grant by the power of the life-giving Spirit’; ending ‘through the same Jesus Christ our Lord … in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all honour and glory are your, Almighty Father’. [4]

How we pray and worship as Christians is rooted in our belief in the Trinity, that God is One and God is Three; it is what unites us as Christians; it is what makes our faith distinctive; and - as we have seen in our reading from Paul’s Letter to the Romans - this is the God revealed in the Scriptures.

This is why we celebrate Trinity Sunday: because at the heart of the Christian Faith is this belief that God is One and God is Three; the faith that, in the words of Saint Paul, the God with whom we have peace through our Lord Jesus Christ and who pours His love into our hearts through the Spirit, is the One God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And so, in words heard in Christian worship across the centuries and across the globe, Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, is now, and shall be for ever. Amen.

__________

[1] The epistle reading appointed for Year C in the BCP 2004 three year lectionary.

[2] I understand Romans 5:1-5 to be an example of what David Yeago superbly articulated in his 1994 Pro Ecclesia article, 'The New Testament and the Nicene Dogma' (I regard it as the single most useful and significant piece of contemporary theology I read in theological college): "The New Testament does not contain a formally articulated 'doctrine of God' of the same kind as the later Nicene dogma. What it does contain is a pattern of implicit and explicit judgements concerning the God of Israel and his relationship to the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth. The dogma was the church’s attempt to take account articulately of this more basic state of affairs: in both the preaching and the worship of the church, according to the witness of the New Testament, God is inescapably apprehended and identified as the triune God".

[3] The Oxyrhynchus hymn, the earliest known manuscript of a Christian Greek hymn containing both lyrics and Greek vocal musical notation.

[4] The first form of the Great Thanksgiving in Holy Communion Two, BCP 2004.