This sermon was originally preached at St. David’s by the Sea for Trinity Sunday (A) on June 4, 2023. The lectionary texts were: Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Canticle 13; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20.
Ted Lasso came to an end this week.
Don’t worry, if you’re still catching up, I won’t spoil the show for you!
After three brilliant seasons, the hit TV show quit while ahead and signed off on Wednesday. While many pundits, arm-chair quarterbacks, and professional “bad opinion givers” have blasted the show’s third season for a plot which was either lacking creativity, purpose, or soul, I found the final episodes of the season to be an overwhelmingly brilliant picture of grace and forgiveness.
Part of the fun of the show is that you cannot have Ted Lasso without football. And you cannot have proper European football without singing. Every episode of Ted Lasso includes scenes of football matches…and the fans are always singing. You may recall such Ted Lasso favorites as “Jamie Tartt” to the tune of “Baby Shark” or “Roy Kent” because he’s everywhere.
One of the thrills of European football is the atmosphere of chanting and singing as thousands upon thousands of supporters belt out their favorite tunes in honor of their team, manager, or favorite player. Most team chants are taken from pub songs, pop songs, or hymn tunes and reworked with lyrics that fit the occasion. Thousands of devoted fans will sing the same songs, with the same passion and zeal, every single week, as they support something bigger than themselves…and all without sheet music!
If only there was a group who met every Sunday for the same activities…hmm…
Anyway, here are some of the most well-known team songs:
Manchester City has Blue Moon
West Ham United has I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles
Nottingham Forrest has We’ve Got the Whole World in Our Hands
And my beloved Manchester United has Glory, Glory Man United
But quite disturbingly, the most well known team song belongs to Liverpool Football Club: You’ll Never Walk Alone. I say disturbing because Liverpool are Manchester United’s sworn enemies, so it pains me to showcase Liverpool in a positive light.
Written by Rogers and Hammerstein for their musical, Carousel, and then made popular by Gerry and the Pacemakers in 1963, the chorus says:
Walk on through the wind
Walk on through the rain
For your dreams be tossed and blown
Walk on, walk on
With hope in your heart
And you’ll never walk alone
Imagine how comforting those words may be when you’re going through something tough or when you feel utterly lonely and isolated. Imagine how comforting the song would be if you were a Liverpool fan during their 30 year period without winning the championship! 😉
I watched video after video of various renditions of YNWA this week. I saw André Rieu and his orchestra performing in front of 10,000 people in Maastricht (mah-strict), Netherlands as audience members wept. I saw a stadium in Australia full of 95,000 Liverpool fans singing at the top of their lungs, with all of their hearts, grown men wholly devoted to their club. Such demonstrations of passion are hard to come by. And I’ll tell you: they took me to church. We were created to worship! More on that later…
Gerry and the Pacemakers remind us that with hope in our hearts, we’ll never walk alone. But hope in what? I mean, I hope that one day I’ll be discovered as someone who can sing perfectly on pitch…or who can whistle…or who can run a 4-minute mile. Sadly, I can do none of those things and hoping otherwise is actually hoping against reality. But we, sisters and brothers, are a people of hope and our hope is founded and grounded in one place: the triune God.
This morning, the first Sunday after Pentecost, is known in the Church Year as Trinity Sunday. More colloquially, many clergy have taken to calling it “Seminarian Sunday” because today hundreds of seminarians around the country are cutting their teeth on preaching the Trinity. We call this ministerial hazing.
Either way, the focus of Trinity Sunday is abundantly clear: the Trinity.
The triune Godhead.
The three-in-one and one-in-three.
The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Well-meaning seminarians and priests have preached many a bad sermon in which they try to prove the Trinity. They use painful analogies to make their point, comparing the Trinity to a three-leaf clover, the three parts of an egg (yolk, white, shell), the three states of water (liquid, solid, and gas) or the roles played by an individual as father, husband, and brother or mother, wife, and sister.
The good news is that this is not one of those sermons! The Trinity has been, is, and will remain a mystery to us until we see God clearly as all in all rather than through a glass dimly lit, as Paul said.
Our lessons and collect, this morning, contain one eternal truth and three things that truth means for us. I rarely say this, but this morning may be a good morning to take notes, and I promise I’ll go slowly because, as a preacher, there is a plethora of alliteration.
The truth I want to teach you is the Primacy and Pre-existence of Perichoresis.
The three things it means for us are:
- The Promise of Provision and Protection
- The Presence of Peace and Power
- The Purpose of Praise and Proclamation
Assuming you’ve had time to write those all down or you have committed them to memory, let’s dig in.
The Primacy and Pre-Existence of the Perichoresis.
This is our theological heavy-lifting this morning but the work looks more intimidating than it actually is. In Genesis 1 we are given the first of two creation stories. While the second story gives us a more detailed examination of the creation of the first humans, our passage this morning presents the traditional story of cosmic creation, from the milky way galaxy (and beyond) down to the fire ants that sting us with such ferocity and regularity in Florida.
We find out immediately that God existed before creation. The story starts off with four of the most important words in English: In the beginning, God. Before a word was ever spoken, before “every action was an act of creation,” God was. Period.
God was there because God always has been.
God was, and is, and always will be.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. Amen!
The Father is there, present, waiting, pre-existing. And then we find out that the Spirit is there, present, hovering over the waters, pre-existing. The word which we translate as “hovering” is the verbal picture of a bird rapidly beating its wings. This hovering Spirit is part of creation. And then we read that the Father spoke and the Word, the divine logos, the second person of the Trinity, poured forth and creation commenced. This is how and why John can open his gospel with, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.”
We aren’t even three verses into the opening chapter of the opening book of the Bible and we have already encountered the Trinity! First the Father, then the Spirit, then the divine logos.
Genesis 1 shows us that all three persons of the Trinity are active and present in the creation of all things, visible and invisible. The triune God is the Primary Mover, the only mover, the only actor in creation. Before humanity is ever created, invited, and commissioned to be stewards of creation, God is primary, pre-existing before the pillars of the earth and the foundation of the world were laid. The primacy of the Trinity reigns throughout Scripture and we see references in our passages from both 2 Corinthians and Matthew. Paul writes, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God [the Father], and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you,” while Matthew records Jesus as instructing the disciples to “baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
So that’s the primary and pre-existence piece, but what about this word perichoresis, you say? I’m glad you asked!
Perichoresis is the theological term used to describe the relationship between and within the Holy Trinity. It means mutual indwelling. It means the Father is God. The Son is God. The Holy Spirit is God. But the Father is not the Son and the Son is not the Spirit and the Spirit is not Father. Got that? As St. Augustine put it, “Each are in each, and all in each, and each in all, and all are one.”
This is deeply important theologically and relationally because all three persons of the Trinity are fully God and all actions and activities of the Trinity involve all three. We can’t separate the Trinity out into roles–that’s the heresy of modalism. We shouldn’t refer to God as “Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier” instead of “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” When God says, “Let us create humans in our image,” we are image bearers of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. We are not alone, we have never been alone, and we never will be alone. And we are invited into God’s perichoresis, mutual indwelling.
That’s the heavy lifting. But what does it mean for us? It means three things:
- The Promise of Provision and Protection
- The Presence of Peace and Power
- The Purpose of Praise and Proclamation
- The Promise of Provision and Protection
In Genesis we are shown the picture of the Trinity providing life to all of creation. (As I preached during the Easter Vigil) Provision is part and parcel of who God is. God provides life, God provides a home, God provides food, God provides a relationship. When humanity sinned, God provided forgiveness, atonement, and covering. When humanity continued to sin, God provided a deliverer through Moses, and then deliverance through the Judges, and then deliverance during the time of the Kings and prophets. Ultimately, God provides himself, inJesus, the second person of the Trinity.
When Jesus says in Matthew 28 that “all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” and then he commissions his disciples, we are to understand that Jesus’ authority will protect and guide them. Elsewhere he tells the disciples that when he leaves for the right hand of the Father, the Holy Spirit will be sent to lead and guide them, and then he prays to the Father for protection.
The Trinity is the promise of provision and protection for those who believe. The promise of provision means that God will always be enough, that he is sufficient and satisfying. The promise of protection means that will never leave you, nor forsake you, because he who watches over you neither slumbers nor sleeps.
2. The Presence of Peace and Power
Our lessons and collect remind us of God’s peaceful and powerful presence. In Eastertide we were reminded of Jesus’ promise and proclamation of peace. After the resurrection, Jesus said, “Peace be with you” and before the crucifixion he promised them, “My peace I leave with you, my own peace I give you.” In 2 Corinthians 13, Paul commends the Corinth Christians to “live in peace” with one another. He then assures them by telling them that “the God of love and peace will be with you.” The God of love and peace has been with you, is with you, and will be with you, as well. Through the incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension we have been made at peace with God, even though we were once enemies of God, as Paul writes. The perichoresis of the Trinity is peace and it extends peace to us.
The presence is not just peaceful, however, it is also powerful. Borrowing from Gordon Fee, God’s presence is powerful because God is powerful.
The same power which created all that is (seen and unseen);
The same power which burned but did not consume the bush;
The same power which parted the Red Sea;
The same power which we call “the mighty hand and outstretched arm of God”;
The same power which raised Jesus from the dead…
It is the power which is poured out for you, present with you, and presented to you as a gift.
Many times in our lives, or in our days, when we feel powerless. We may feel powerless over circumstances or powerless over people or powerless over gravity or powerless over alcohol or powerless over time or powerless over politics or fill in the blank, and while the world tells you to turn inward to find the power in yourself, the Trinity tells you that the power is already present because God is always present. Jesus reassures you that God’s presence of peace and power is, “with you always, to the end of the age.”
This all sounds so good, right? We have been comforted, reassured, and buoyed by the promise, provision, protection, presence, peace, and power of God…but to what end? This brings us to our third and final “meaning” this morning:
3. The Purpose of Praise and Proclamation
The works of the triune God, the mutual indwelling of the triune God are always generative and creative and they always point us to the purpose of praise and proclamation. The first humans were given stewardship of creation, their vocation was to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it, allowing creation to flourish under their care and careful cultivation. This has been called the cultural mandate by many, but at a more foundational level it all has to do with praise. The creatures and creation of the Creator are called forth to bring him praise. We were created as cosmic priests. As Irenaeus famously wrote, “The glory of God is humanity fully alive,” and humanity is fully alive, most fully human, most fully living into its vocation when women, men, and children praise God and direct the praise of creation back to God.
Our canticle this morning reminds us of this God-given purpose with ease and simplicity: we will praise you and highly exalt you, forever. This is what it means to be human! Some of the disciples worshipped Jesus when they met him in Galilee before the ascension. In the famous Temple scene in Isaiah 6, Isaiah is so overcome with the reality of who God is that all he can do is praise him!
Our praise is directed toward God, but we are all created with the purpose of proclamation: proclaiming the good deeds, mighty works, and saving efforts of the Triune God to everyone around us. We can call it gossiping the goodness or evangelism or testimony or sharing our faith, but no matter how we parse it out, the Great Commission is abundantly clear: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” Our praise of God must turn to proclamation of the Gospel because as the church we exist for the sake of others and not just those who are already in our pews.
We acknowledge the glory of the Trinity and we worship the unity because this mystery is the foundation of what it means to be Christians, what it means to be human, what it means to be created in the image of God, and what it means to be God’s people.
The Trinity means that you are never alone. It means that you are never without promise, presence, or purpose. It means that you always have provision and protection, peace and power. It means that your response is always to be praise and proclamation. The Trinity means that we are a hopeful people who have hope in the resurrection because Jesus has been raised from the dead, trampling down death by death, bestowing life to those in tombs.
So, my friends, walk on.
Walk on with the hope of the Trinity in your heart.
Walk on like that and you’ll never walk alone.
Amen.
Porter C. Taylor 