Sermon for Sunday, May 31, 2026 || Trinity Sunday A || 2 Corinthians 13:11-13

At the end of his second letter to the church in Corinth, St. Paul writes these memorable words of blessing: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.” As we celebrate the Holy Trinity today, I’d like to focus on the three words that Paul associates with this fundamental truth of Creation: grace, love, and communion.

But first, why does Paul talk about the Lord Jesus Christ, God, and the Holy Spirit? Why not just God? Or just Jesus? Or just the Spirit? Why do Christians use so many different words to talk about the Source-of-All That Is? Here’s my take: God has revealed God’s self to be a perfect relationship from which the near limitless relational aspects of Creation find their connecting foundation. Everything in Creation can be described in relationship to something else or multiple somethings else. This foundational relational aspect of Creation springs from the perfect relationship of God with God, a relationship that we describe with the familial words of Father and Son, along with the Spirit as the reciprocal flow between them. God embraces us in the truth of this perfect relational Oneness. This embrace allows us to sustain relationships of our own, though we do so imperfectly because we are not God. The relational life of the Holy Trinity is the foundational Truth of Creation AND the daily Truth that animates our lives. The Trinity is not a stuffy, antiquated doctrine of the church. The Trinity is our way of talking about the miracles of life and love and Creation, all bound up in the mystery of our eternally living, loving, and creating God.

Phew. Okay. That was a dense couple of minutes, so let me sum it up with this: The Holy Trinity brings us imperfect beings into the ever-swirling dance of God’s perfect relationship with God. And we live into this perfect relationship of God by receiving God’s love and grace and then sharing them with one another and with all of Creation.

Which brings us back to Paul’s three words: grace, love, and communion. Let’s take them in turn as we imagine our hearts and minds into that ever-swirling dance of the Holy Trinity. First up: Grace. This is the beautiful Greek word, charis. It’s such a beautiful word that I wanted to use it for our daughter’s name, but both names ending in “S” didn’t quite have the right sound. Charis most often gets translated as ‘grace’ but it can also mean beauty and generosity and acceptance and kindness. I told you this is a great word! In the spirit of a God that is Three and also One, let’s not pick. Let’s use them all:

“The grace and beauty and generosity and acceptance and kindness of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” 

Using all these different nuances of the Greek word charis, we see the kind of life that Jesus invites us to live. Grace showers upon us and all Creation, granting us the grace to accept grace in the first place. (There’s a special five dollar theological word for that, which is “prevenient grace.”) Think of grace like a soaking spring rain. You’re out in it, hunkered down under your umbrella, grumbling because you’re still getting wet. And that’s when it hits you. You’re getting wet anyway, so you might as well embrace it! You close your umbrella, lift your face to the sky, and let the rain wash over you. Accepting the grace of God liberates us to celebrate beauty and live generously and accept freely and practice kindness all the time, no matter what.

As we live a life of grace, we realize that such a life can be summed up in the word ‘love.’ This is another wonderful Greek word: agape. This is the special love characterized by devotion, love based in fidelity, truthfulness, and promise-keeping. Often, the phrase “unconditional love” is used to translate agape. And while this phrase is fine in its own right, I find it unsatisfying because the word “unconditional” modifies love with a negation: “not conditional love.” So, I like to think of agape love as eternal lovel, expansive love, all-embracing love. If grace is a soaking rain, then love is the ocean.

And so our verse from Paul’s letter grows bigger: “The grace and beauty and generosity and acceptance and kindness of the Lord Jesus Christ, the eternal, expansive, all-embracing love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”

The ocean of God’s agape love permeates all of Creation. Like umbrella-less grace, God invites us to jump into this ocean with both feet; not to wade in up to our ankles only, but to dive deep into its enlivening waters. The more we swim in the ocean of God’s love, the more this love coats us. Our hair drips with God’s love. Our skin glistens with God’s love. Our fingertips get pruny with God’s love. The ocean of love stretches before us and surges within us and fills us to overflowing.

And that’s when we begin living the third part of the life of the Holy Trinity. We begin our communion through the Holy Spirit. Hold the presses: today, you get three Greek words for the price of one. “Communion” is one translation of the Greek word koinonia. We could also translate this word as fellowship, partnership, participation, or my favorite, simply “sharing.” We imagine the Holy Spirit as the flow of love between Father and Son because this flow is the perfect sharing of love. If grace is rain and love is the ocean, then (to stretch this metaphor to the breaking point) sharing is the water cycle. Water evaporates from the ocean, condenses into clouds, then perspires as rain, only for the cycle –the flow – to begin again.

When I was a kid, I heard my dad tell a parable about heaven and hell. In hell, there’s a vast banquet laid out on a table, full of all the best food and drink imaginable. But the people sitting at the table have no elbows. They cannot get the food into their mouths, and they remain perpetually hungry. In heaven, the same vast banquet is laid out, and the people here also have no elbows. But everyone is fed because they are feeding each other. That’s the koinonia, the sharing that happens when we embracethe the beautiful practice of living for community.

As we live into the ever-swirling dance of the Holy Trinity, grace lets us accept grace; love lets us love; and sharing lets us welcome one another and all of Creation again and again into the life of God. And so we revisit and expand our verse from St. Paul one more time as we dive deeper into God’s grace, love, and sharing.

I offer you this blessing today, and I invite you to offer it to all you meet today and every day for the rest of your lives:

“The grace and beauty and generosity and acceptance and kindness of the Lord Jesus Christ, the eternal, expansive, all-embracing love of God, and the sharing of the ever-flowing Holy Spirit be with you all.” Amen.

---

Photo by Ant Rozetsky on Unsplash.