Sermon for Sunday, June 15, 2025 || Trinity Sunday C || John 16:12-15
Nine years ago on Trinity Sunday, I preached a sermon called “God and Not-God: A Short History.” I’m going to preach a portion of that sermon again this morning before veering off in a different direction. This short history comprehends five truths that God has revealed to us, culminating in the truth of the Holy Trinity. But we need to begin at a more fundamental starting place.
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So our short history begins with a bit of exposition: If you drill right down to the core of existence, there are two fundamental states of being. There is God, and there is Not-God. God has always been. Not-God is more recent, 14 billion years old, give or take. The universe God created is part of Not-God. This fragile earth, our island home, is part of Not-God. The witness to God called the “Church” is part of Not-God. You and I are part of Not-God. God is perfect. God is eternal. And God is love. Not-God is not perfect. Not-God is not eternal. And Not-God can only derive love from God, like the moon shining by the reflected light of the sun.
Over the short course of human history, humanity has erred time and time again by worshiping part of Not-God instead of worshiping God. We worshiped mighty animals or features of the landscape or the weather. We worshiped graven images and golden calves. We worshiped our ancestors or powerful people who required adulation. We worshiped money or power or fame, which are all pieces of the self-worship called narcissism.
A couple came along in the arid region known today as the Middle East. Their names were Abraham and Sarah, and they worshiped in a different way than their neighbors. They worshiped a God who was not bound to a place or an object or a thing. For them, all of God was in every place.* This God showed them a new land and promised to bless them with descendants too numerous to count – as many as the stars in the sky and grains of sand in the desert. They trusted this God of theirs even when having children seemed impossible, and God fulfilled the promise.
One of their descendants was a man named Moses, who awakened to the presence of God while herding sheep in the mountains. A bush was burning but was not consumed. Moses noticed this odd sight and realized he was standing on Holy Ground. Along with a job to do, God gave Moses the gift of God’s most holy name. But this name was a puzzle. “I AM WHO I AM.” What kind of name was that? It wasn’t just a name. It was a revelation of God’s very nature as the ground of all being, as the genesis of all creation.
Now we knew all of God was in every place. And we knew God was the fundamental being, through which all things exist. But God wasn’t done with Moses yet. Later on, while Moses’ people were backsliding into the worship of Not-God in the form of a golden idol, Moses was up on a mountain gathering a list of the best ways to live. We call them the Ten Commandments. The first is the most important. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me” (Deuteronomy 5:6-7). Moses’ people enshrined this commandment in their call to worship: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord is One. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:4-5).
Now three pieces of the revelation of God were in place: All of God was everywhere, God was the ground of all being, and there was only One God. We know how the story goes next. We’ve lived the story in our own lives. Not-God continued to seduce us away from relationship with God. This seduction happened in the lives of the people of Israel when they yearned to be like the neighboring nations. This seduction happens in our lives when our own particular idols tempt us to prioritize them too highly, to the detriment of all our relationships, including the one with God.
God realized that we perceive Not-God to be so much more immediate than God is. So to save us from our idolatry, God came to us directly in the form of God’s Son, Jesus Christ. Now we could see and touch the revelation of God. We could hear Jesus welcome the outcast, watch him heal the sick, follow him on the way to a life of love and service. The worst parts of Not-God – death, domination, envy, fear – conspired to kill the revelation of God. They thought they succeeded, but no. Their power died when the Son rose on the third day. And in his resurrection, Jesus makes good on a new promise – to be with us forever.
God first fulfilled this new promise in sending the Holy Spirit, “who guides us into all truth” (John 16:13). By the power of the Holy Spirit, we continue to encounter the God of Abraham and Moses. We experience God as a perfect relationship and so we use relational names: the Parent and the Child and the Love between them. The perfect flow of love among this relationship means that, while there are three persons sharing God’s self-love, there is at the same time a Unity of being. Three in One, One in Three. This is a great mystery that we cannot grasp, but we can embrace in our own imperfect loving relationships
Throughout the short course of human history, our God has revealed so much truth to us who are fallible parts of Not-God. We believe all of God is everywhere. We believe that God is the very ground of all being. We believe God is One. We believe that God’s Oneness is a perfect loving relationship that we call the Holy Trinity, a relationship in which God calls all of Not-God to take part.
Not-God is filled with imperfect relationships because they can’t be anything else. But through God’s revelation, we can partner with God in making such relationships less imperfect. We can acknowledge the great sins of the world: sins that separate us from other humans; sins that pit us against people who look different or come from different places or love in different ways; sins that pit us against our environment in a never ending desire for consumption; sins that preference the accumulation of wealth over the well-being of all people; sins that demonize vulnerable people in order to consolidate power; sins that manifest as complicity and apathy and indifference to suffering. All of this sin is part of Not-God. And when we fall into the trap of worshiping Not-God in any of its myriad disguises, we allow such sin to reign unchecked.
And yet…
Not-God is where we live and move, but it is not where we have our being. Our being comes from the foundation of all being, the One whose presence is all in all. And so we pray for God to catch us up in the eternal flow of God’s perfect love, that we will have the strength and endurance to confront all the sinful parts of Not-God. For only in God can perfect love transform and elevate our imperfect love. Only in God do we find a perfect relationship to be the ground and the guide and the goal of all our relationships. Only in God, most holy, glorious, and undivided Trinity.
Just in case you’re wondering, the banner image is Trinity Rodman, a member of the US women’s national soccer team.
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