A sermon preached at All Saints Chuurch, San Francisco on Trinity Sunday, June 15, 2025
They say that drama in the western world got its start in church, that back in the middle ages the clergy (as usual) were trying to get people’s attention and so on Easter Day they had three women come down the aisle and pretend to be looking for a tomb. That’s how it all began. Then merchants’ groups and trade associations took it over and began producing what they called “mystery plays” – little dramas based on the Bible. And these were acted out around town and in church on the various holy days. There were mystery plays about the shepherds and about Herod
and about Noah’s ark.
And one thing led to another and so then there was Shakespeare and then there was Woody Allen. But it all began with the mystery plays, and they called them mystery plays not because they were whodunits or puzzles to be solved. They called them mystery plays because they dealt with the mystery of life – the parts of life you can’t explain in words or logic – things like an empty tomb.
Sometimes it’s easier to understand things if you see a play about it than if you go to a lecture or read a book. There are things you can’t explain as well with the logic of words on a page as you can with a picture or drama that says more than mere words can say about the wholeness of a reality beyond human words and logic.
Today is Trinity Sunday and if there is anything mysterious about Christianity, this is it.
What do we mean by Trinity?
We mean that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
OK. What do we mean by that?
Well, we mean that God is Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier.
OK. What difference does that make?
Well, it means that God is at work above us and beside us and within us.
OK, I can get some meaning from that, but what if you drew me a picture? Wouldn’t that help? Well, there are diagrams that show the Trinity as a Triangle Iike the cover of the Bulletin today. Does that help? Well, maybe, a little bit,
but God is not a triangle or a set of circles or a diagram on the Bulletin cover.
The problem is that language, human language, is a tool of limited value. It can do marvelous things. It can produce the Bible and the Gettysburg Address and the plays of Shakespeare. It makes it possible for me to communicate with my family and the clerk at the checkout counter. It makes civilization possible. It makes it possible for a Senator and a Cabinet Secretary to talk to each other – if both will listen.
But a tool is only a tool and can only do certain things. And for all the sophistication of human language it seems not to be able to bridge the barriers between Israel and Hamas or Republicans and Democrats or Donald Trump and Elon Musk or Donald Trump and Governor Newsom or Donald Trump yesterday and Donald Trump today.
It was Thursday this week that we learned that while the President wants all illegal aliens out – all illegal aliens doesn’t include some illegal aliens. It doesn’t include the folks that harvest the crops in the Central Valley because someone pointed out to the President that we need those workers -legal or not – if we want vegetables on our dinner plates.
Even where both sides use the same language, it seems impossible sometimes really to hear, really to understand what the other is saying. It doesn’t bridge the gap between Sunni and Shiite, between North Korea and South Korea, between Israel and Hamas, or Israel and Iran, or bring about understanding between husbands and wives and between parents and children.
Language is just a tool. It gives us a way to talk about many things, but it has a hard time communicating the deep things, the things that matter. And it deceives us. It has a way of making us think we know something when we really don’t. Einstein can tell us “space is curved” and that sounds pretty definitive, like 2+2=4; “space IS curved.” Yes, but what does it mean? What is space? And the more scientists learn about space and time, the more we know how little we know. Light is composed of particles, but also of waves and we don’t quite know why it sometimes helps to think of it one way and sometimes the other. There are mysteries about science as well as religion, things we can’t finds words for.
There are times when we can understand more by watching a play than by listening to a sermon. A play puts things in three dimensions, brings it to life, lets us see it in the round, the way life really is. Because it is life we are trying to communicate, and words can help, they can help a lot, but the minute you start to think that you know something just because you can put it into words, just at that moment you may have missed the boat. And worse, because you think you got it and you didn’t.
The Trinity is a diagram, it’s a formula, it’s an attempt not so much to communicate a mystery beyond language as to point toward it, not so much to explain as to remind us that all explanations fall short, that finally God remains a mystery. It’s a way of recognizing who God is: the ultimate mystery, a being beyond all language, one to whom the best response is not words but actions: to genuflect, to repent, to open our hands, to rejoice, to offer one’s self to serve.
To celebrate Trinity Sunday is to recognize who we are and who God is. I think it’s interesting that Trinity Sunday has deep roots in the Anglican tradition. And maybe that’s why Anglicans, Episcopalians, are less likely than people in other churches to look for simple answers to hard questions, to expect that there are answers to all questions, to make religion a matter of rules and laws.
Most churches don’t celebrate Trinity Sunday. Protestant churches generally don’t worry about festivals except Christmas and Easter. Roman Catholics don’t have Trinity Sunday, and I think that’s unfortunate because if you celebrate Trinity Sunday every year you are brought face to face every year with the unknowable, with the God beyond knowing, beyond any reduction to black and white simplicities.
You probably don’t remember the Prayer Book before 1979. Willard and I do, but you probably don’t remember the so-called 1928 Prayer Book in which half the Sundays in the year were numbered not after Pentecost the way they are now but after Trinity Sunday. I think only Anglicans ever did that and we tend to down play it these days – after all how many preachers want to preach about the Trinity? But this day has had an enormous influence on the Anglican way of understanding God – or actually of not understanding – of remembering that our minds can only take us a little way, a very little way into the ultimate mystery of being. And that’s why we worship. Worship as we understand it is not about listening to sermons, it’s about offering our selves, our whole selves, mind and body.
Theology for us grows out of worship; it’s humble; it knows theological knowledge isn’t everything. There’s more, we know there’s more, but words alone can’t take us there. And maybe that’s why the English tradition grew up of mystery plays. Maybe they understood instinctively that some things could be acted out that couldn’t be said. Maybe there are things we can learn from a puppet show that could never be said in a sermon. Maybe there are things we can only say by coming to the altar with open hands.
One of the great contemporary American playwrights, Neil Simon, once said, “It’s like someone gave me a microscope and I looked through it at a slide and saw something of how life goes on. And I know with each play that if I can only find a more powerful microscope, I can see deeper and find out more. I believe that if I keep on working, I am going to unearth some kind of secret that will make it unnecessary for me to write again. But all I find is clues. And the more of them I find, the more fascinating and frightening life becomes. If I stop writing plays, I’ve got nothing left to do. It’s the only way I have of finding out what life is all about.”
There are mystery plays and there are musicals. It’s in a musical play – my Fair Lady – not by Neil Simon but based on a play by George Bernard Shaw – that I hear the ultimate wisdom. Maybe you remember the song with the words:
Don’t talk of stars Burning above; If you’re in love, hold me.
Tell me no dreams Filled with desire. If you’re on fire, Show me!
Here we are together in the middle of the night!
Don’t talk of spring! Just hold me tight!
“Don’t talk of love, hold me.” God might say that to us – especially on Trinity Sunday as we come forward to Communion: Here we are together in the middle of the church – don’t talk of love, hold me. Hold me.
So you want to understand the Trinity?
The Trinity is this:
it’s the sun setting over the blue line of the ocean to the west
and the rainbow arched over the city towers to the east;
it’s the cherry blossoms in full bloom on a spring day
and it’s the fog drifting in past the Golden Gate bridge;
it’s Francis of Assisi preaching to the birds,
and it’s Thomas Aquinas setting down logical propositions;
it’s a mourning family gathered around an open grave,
and it’s a newborn child placed in its mother’s arms;
it’s a scientist peering into a microscope to learn more about the retroviruses,
and it’s another scientist looking through a telescope at a distant galaxy;
it’s a hummingbird visiting the trumpet vine,
and soldiers nailing a young man’s hands to a wooden cross;
it’s women standing in puzzlement before an empty tomb.
It’s politicians willing to be patient, to seek understanding:
seeking peace in all things, seeking unity, not division.
It’s love. It’s love.
It’s God’s inexplicable love for the human race.
It’s God’s love shaping worlds,
God’s love speaking to us in Jesus Christ,
God’s love within us drawing us together –
drawing us to love, by love, through love.
The Trinity is just that simple and just that complex. But it’s that God, that triune God, who centers and renews our broken lives whom we come here to worship.