Trinity Sunday 2025

The Trinity is a relationship between God the Father, God the Son (Jesus), and God the Holy Spirit - not a puzzle to solve, but a truth to lean into.

The Trinity reflects God's majesty and intimacy - God is both far above us and deeply present with us.

The Trinity is not an abstract idea, but a lived reality that shapes how we are to live our lives in relationship with God and one another.

Trying to describe or define the Trinity is like trying to capture profound human experiences in words - it ultimately falls short, but the act of reaching for it brings us closer to God.

Believing in the Trinity means trusting that God is always reaching toward us, walking with us in suffering, and guiding us through the Holy Spirit.

Scripture is read by Davison Tekseni.

Sermon by Rev. Beth Demme
For more information, visit www.graymumc.org

Transcript

Davison Tekseni (00:05):

Today's gospel reading is from John 16. From verses 12 to 15, it reads, I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them. Now when the spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth. For you'll not speak on his own but will speak whatever he is, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He'll glorify me because he'll take what is mine and declare to you. All that the father has is mine. For this reason, I said that you'll take what is mine and declare it to you, the word of God for the people of God.

Rev. Beth Demme (00:45):

Thanks be to God. May God add a blessing to the reading, hearing, and understanding of these scriptures. Amen. You may be seated. So you've probably heard a version of this story. There was a little girl in Sunday school and she was drawing quietly, coloring quietly, and her teacher leaned over and said, oh, what are you drawing? And the little girl said, I'm drawing God. And the teacher said, well, okay, but nobody knows what God looks like. And the little girl said, oh, they will when I'm done. There's something deeply human about that impulse to picture God, to understand God, to define God. And yet over and over again, scripture and tradition remind us that God is not easily boxed in, not easily contained in a drawing, not easily contained with our words. God is mystery. What we celebrate today is that God is relationship. God is in fact more than we could, any of us could bear alone.

(02:02):

We come to this together. So today is Trinity Sunday and we dare to speak of God as three in one. Not a puzzle to solve, but a truth who we can lean into. We hear this in all of our scripture readings today. Psalm eight lifts up wonder. Romans five grounds us in suffering and hope. And in John 16, Jesus reminds us we are not alone, and each of these texts is pointing us to the Trinity in its own way. Psalm eight begins with wonder, oh Lord, our sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth? The psalmist marvels at the vastness of creation, moon and stars, the work of God's fingers and then contrast that vastness with our smallness, right? What are human beings that you are mindful of them? We talked about it in Bible study on Thursday and we're like ants on the face of the earth, right?

(03:05):

Why is God so mindful of us when we are so tiny and insignificant? The Psalm captures that concern, that condition, that idea that is so core to the human condition, our desire to be known and to know the one who created us. We want to know. We need to know that we matter and we need to know that there's a pattern behind all of this incredible beauty. The creation isn't random, but reflects something of our creator. And so we name God the best we can. We say Lord, sovereign, creator, all names that point beyond themselves to something to someone who is greater. The trinity is the church's ancient answer to the mystery of God's majesty and intimacy. God is not just far above us. Eternal, powerful, holy God is also near moving among us in ways that we can name when we say creator, redeemer, sustainer.

(04:15):

And we also heard Romans five, and that brings us right down to earth. If Psalm eight sent us soaring in the skies, Romans five brings us right down to earth because the apostle Paul is writing to a struggling church, to real people who are enduring suffering. And so he says something striking. He says, we boast in our sufferings knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. And hope does not disappoint us. That's not a flowery formula. It's lived experience. Paul is putting to words what he has experienced in his journey with God, and it's one of those universal experiences. It's not unique to him. It's something we can all relate to.

(05:04):

The reality is it's just not all that easy to believe. We read Paul's words, right, boast in our suffering. Suffering produces endurance. Endurance produces character. Character produces hope. And hope does not disappoint us. But sometimes, sometimes hope disappoints us or it feels like it does. And sometimes we don't feel strong or character field. Sometimes we don't feel like enduring much less boasting about it. Sometimes we are just tired. Guess what? God is with us. Even then. That's actually exactly where the doctrine of the trinity becomes a comfort because it's not an idea to grasp. It's not something that if we get the words exactly right, we're going to unlock a new level, right? No, the Trinity is a relationship that we can lean on. That's why Paul goes on to say God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

(06:10):

The Trinity is not abstracted is deeply relational. The Trinity is God in motion, God in relationship, God with us and in us and for us in the gospel reading today, Jesus tells his disciples, I still have many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them. Now, I can relate to that, right? Jesus says, when the spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth. We live in that unfinished place where Jesus knows there's still more that we need to know that we cannot bear right now, but that with the help of the Spirit, we can lean into God and we can grow in our understanding. Jesus didn't tell his disciples everything doesn't tell us everything. They couldn't bear it. We certainly can't bear it, but Jesus doesn't leave us alone. He promised to the Holy Spirit, an advocate, a comforter, a guide.

(07:11):

So understanding God isn't about coming up with a set of answers that we memorize. It's not about a fixed point that we reach on our spiritual journey. Understanding God is something that we grow into through relationship and by the power of the Holy Spirit. And that's good news for a church like ours because nobody in here is pretending to have all the answers, certainly not the person standing in your pulpit. We do not have all the answers, but we are committed to listening for the spirit together. Together. I mean, let's face it, there are some things in life that we can experience but not really explain. Think about the first time you knew you knew you knew that you were in love. How would you ever describe that? How could words ever do that feeling justice? Or if you are a parent or an aunt or an uncle, think about the first time that you got to hold your child or your niece or your nephew.

(08:19):

How can you describe a moment as profoundly wonderful as that? How can you put that into words? Or maybe you've had the terrible experience of saying goodbye to someone who you loved for decades, whether that's a spouse or a parent or a friend. That is an indescribable moment, isn't it? Well, that's how the trinity works too. Not easy to define, but deeply felt, deeply known, deeply experienced like other things in life that shape us forever. Today is Trinity Sunday, the only Sunday in the church year that isn't named for an event or for a story, but for a doctrine? How exciting is that? A doctrine that might sound daunting, but the Trinity's not a doctrine in the sense of something that we can or must master. The Trinity's, not a math problem, not a puzzle. Trinity is the name we give to the living loving, dynamic relationship that is God, father, son and Holy Spirit.

(09:31):

It's a glimpse, a glimpse into the inner life of the one true God who doesn't just choose to be in relationship, but who is relationship. I mean, it's okay to admit the Trinity is hard to grasp so hard that it's tempting to avoid talking about the Trinity at all, or just reducing it to a metaphor that will not only fall short, but probably get you ruled a heretic. We'll talk about that in a minute, but maybe that's the point, right? The Trinity teaches us that God is more than we can imagine or define, and yet the Trinity also teaches us that God is not solitary. God is relationship. God is community. God is love In a world like ours, a world where people are deeply isolated, where we have a pandemic of loneliness, where we see things ruled by division and ego, the Trinity is radical news.

(10:38):

The very nature of God is to be in relationship and to invite us into that relationship that is good news. So the ene creed, you know it as the long one. I know that's what you all call it. It's the long one. And that's an ancient summary of what Christians believe about the Trinity. And even if church history isn't your thing, I want you to stay with me because this story has real people, high stakes debate, and even a little drama. So I'm going to take you back to the year 300. Christianity went from being the faith of outcasts to being the faith of the powerful emperor. Constantine himself, a Christian invited 300 bishops, leaders in the church to come to a meeting in a place called Nyia. It's in today what we would know as Turkey, see as Christianity was growing in those first 300 years after the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension.

(11:42):

There were a lot of different ideas about what Christians believed and things that we take for granted today. Well, they just weren't settled doctrine yet. Christians were still figuring a lot of the basic doctrine out, and they were figuring out how to be a church that crossed tremendous borders from Jerusalem south down into northern Africa, from Jerusalem north across what we know as Turkey all the way to Italy and beyond, through many countries through many types of rulers. There were Christians in all of these places. And how do you decide what it means to be a Christian when your daily lives are so different? So people would support one bishop's idea. A bishop would say, this is what it means to be a Christian. And they'd go, okay, well, you're local to us, so we'll follow you. That sounds good. But then they were opposed to any bishop who held a different view.

(12:41):

So divisiveness might feel like a 21st century problem, but it certainly is not unique to our time. So in the midst of division and choosing sides, emperor Constantine did something kind of brilliant. Instead of picking winners and losers in these regional debates, he said, this is my paraphrase. I don't know exactly what he said, but he said something like, all y'all need to come on and get together in a room. You need to hammer this out. You need to figure it out. Instead of making an imperial decree and deciding what it was that the church would teach, and for a constant team said, you church leaders, figure it out. I mean, they were all saying that they were driven. All the church leaders were driven by a higher authority than Constantine, right? They were soldiers for God. But Constantine said, I have the God-given authority to run this empire, and I have the power to tell you to come together and bring this to a fitting conclusion.

(13:43):

He called them together to counsel. It's what we united Methodist call conferencing. It's why we have a charge conference every fall. We have an annual conference every year. We have a general conference. Every four years we conference, we counsel, we discuss. It was a good piece of political savvy by Constantine, and it ended up establishing a principle that remains true in Christianity. Today. We counsel or conference together to resolve disputes. We still do that today. And one of these disputes that was causing them to come together in Nyia was it involved a priest named Arius. He lived in Alexandria, which was part of Africa, down just by the Nile Delta there. That's where Alexandria was. And Arius, he had different ideas, and by three 18, his radical ideas were taking hold. See, Arius believed and taught that Jesus was separate from God the Father, that Jesus was inferior to God the Father.

(14:55):

Aria said, Christ is part of the created order. Christ is the first thing that God created, but Christ is created. There was a time, maybe it was brief, aria said, but there was a time when Christ didn't exist, but his bishop, the bishop of Alexandria, whose name was Alexander, we use the same words over and over again. So Bishop Alexander of Alexandria said, that's not quite right, aria. Jesus always has been. And Aria continued to teach this wrong idea. So his bishop called a meeting of local leaders there in Alexandria and had Aria condemned, had his views condemned and had him personally condemned, to which Aria said, I've been called worse things by better people than you. And he appealed to a bishop in another place, a more powerful bishop than Alexander. And then there was another group of bishops that said, we don't really know what y'all are talking about.

(15:56):

We've already figured this out. God is three persons of one substance. Duh, it's the Trinity, right? Well, eventually this debate and a few others got so intense that Emperor Constantine said, it's enough. It's time for y'all to come together and bring this to a fitting conclusion. That meeting was called the Council of Nice because it met in nice. And the details of this meeting are totally awesome, especially if you go to a lot of church meetings like I do, right? Things were kind of stalling out talks were kind of stalling out about what it was that Christians believed. Did we believe that Jesus was co-eternal, always existing with God, or was Jesus the first of God's creation? Things were kind of stalling out. And then a friend of Arius stood up and explained it so clearly, explained aria's, views so clearly that everyone in the room understood it was wrong.

(16:59):

Everyone understood that it was a heresy. And the bishop started yelling, you lie, blasphemy, heresy. He got shouted down. They took the pages of his written speech and they snatched it from him, and they tore it up and they tore it up. See, they did like that. They tore it up and they threw it on the ground, and then they stumped on all of Aria's ideas. They were really animated about how angry they were. And then they decided that they would write a statement that they would write, a creed that clearly rejected these wrong views that areas held. So the bishops wrote what we know as the ene creed, a statement that would unite the church not around power or preference or one individual's views, but around a shared trust in God. The ING creed begins with two simple but powerful words. We believe if you want to look at it, it's on page eight 80 of your hymnal.

(18:04):

We believe that each of the stanzas starts that way. We believe not I believe, but we believe. We believe in one God, the Father, the almighty maker of heaven and earth of all that is seen and unseen. The ing creed is not a list of facts, it's a declaration of trust. It's a way to say, we are not alone in this world. God is with us. Divinity is expressed as a relationship, and we too are made for relationship. Faith's not a solo project. It's not something that we can do alone. It's something we live into, something we experience together. So we say we believe, and when we say we believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, we're not just reciting old words. We're grounding ourselves in a truth, in the truth that still shapes us, still shapes how we live here and now.

(19:15):

Today we are in our own way, each trying to draw God to describe the indescribable. Just like the little girl with her crayons, we're saying, oh yeah, oh, they'll know what God looks like when we are finished. And the creed gives us our first broad strokes, foundational strokes. God who imagined galaxies, maker of heaven and earth, God who gave us breath, God who gave breath to dust and created us God who speaks light into darkness, who shapes land and see and calls it good God, the artist of Creation whose fingerprints are everywhere. That is the one true God. That is our God. The next stanza says, we believe we believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God. Begotten not made. Take that arius right of one being with the Father. Through him, all things were made. And then it goes on to incorporate language that is familiar to us from the much older Apostles creed. The Apostles creed would've come to us in the first century, and the ing creed would've come to us in the fourth century.

(20:43):

This part of the creed about Jesus, it's us further in our attempt to describe God. If the first stanza, the first sentence gave us broad strokes, well then this one is starting to fill in the image. Jesus is not just like God. Jesus is God. God from God. Light from light, true God from true God. God didn't stay distant. Jesus came down from heaven. Why for you, for us, and for our salvation, we try to draw God with words like mercy and sacrifice, healing, resurrection, grace, but none of them fully capture the love that led Jesus to enter into our suffering and redeem it from the inside out so that the Apostle Paul could write. We boast in our afflictions, right? Because we know that ultimately that's going to lead us to hope because God's love has been poured into our hearts. We don't boast that we've had to endure.

(22:03):

We boast that God is with us as we endure. That's the love we're trying to describe. In the third stanza, we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and Son is worshiped and glorified and has spoken through the prophets. The Spirit is not a distant force. The Spirit is an intimate presence. And here our drawing of God shifts. Again, not to a face or a form, but to wind, flame and breath. The Spirit is hard to picture. But unmistakable when felt, when my children were little and I was trying to wrap in my own way, trying to understand God and trying to kind of wrap my mind around God. And at that point, the idea of a journey was really exhausting to me. I was exhausted by motherhood, so I kind of just wanted to know things.

(23:07):

Anyway, that's a long story to say. I remember talking to a mentor about how in the world could I ever explain God to my children? How could I explain the Holy Spirit to my children? And she said, well, what if you take a piece of paper and you blow on it, the paper moves. You don't see your breath moving the paper. You don't see the spirit moving in your life, but you feel it because the spirit is as close as your breath. We have all had moments when we sensed something holy, that words couldn't capture a nudge, a peace, a burning in the heart, a whisper of guidance. That's the Holy Spirit, the living, breathing, presence of God with us and within us. And still, we try to draw. We try to describe, we reach for images and metaphors, for stories and songs, for creeds and prayers, not because we can ever capture God in our sketch, but because the act of trying, the act of reaching out, the act of grasping brings us closer to God, closer to the heart of God.

(24:37):

We believe not because we understand everything, but because we have seen love made real. The Trinity is not a theory. The Trinity is our lived reality. A creator who gives life a savior, who redeems our sinfulness, a spirit who restores and renews one God, three persons, always moving, always reaching, always loving. This is not just what we believe. It's how we are to live, not alone, but together. Not by our own strength, but by God's grace. Not to escape the world, but to transform the world. The creed doesn't try to explain the trinity. The creed confesses the trinity. The creed invites us to trust a God who is both beyond understanding and closer than our very next breath. The creed is not an abstract set of ideas. It's a story. It's a declaration. It's a love letter. It tells us who God is and who we are.

(25:58):

God is God the Father, the source of all life calling creation, good, sustaining all that is. God is Jesus Christ who took on flesh and entered into our suffering and conquered death so that we might live. God is the Holy Spirit who dwells with us and within us guiding and empowering and renewing us day by day. This is the God we worship. This is the God we follow. This is the God who even now is calling us into deeper life, deeper love, deeper hope. And so we say we believe. We believe in God, the Father, son and Holy Spirit, one God, three persons a relationship of love that invites us in. Let me ask you, what does it mean? What does it mean to believe in the Trinity? Not just with our minds, but with our lives? It means trusting that God is always reaching toward us even when we feel small, even when we feel insignificant, even when we feel unsure.

(27:15):

It means knowing that Christ walks with us in our suffering and gives us a love that is stronger than death. It means believing that the Holy Spirit still speaks through scripture, through conscience, through community, and is guiding us into more than we can yet understand. There is more to be understood, stood, and God is revealing it to us. It also means believing in the Trinity also means modeling our lives. After God's relational nature to be made in God's image is to be made for connection. We're not meant to bear life alone. If you've ever thought life is just too hard, you are right. It is too hard to do alone. We need each other. That's why God gave us the church. That's why we say we believe not. I believe because as the Spirit leads us, we are being woven into something beautiful and whole.

(28:30):

Together. Together. So we today echo the psalmist in awe, oh Lord, our sovereign, how majestic is your name and all the earth. And we stand with Paul even in suffering because the Spirit is breathing hope into our hearts, and we listen with Jesus trusting that the Spirit will guide us into truths we cannot yet bear because we believe in one God who is creator Christ and Spirit three in one and one in three, holy, mysterious, and near. We believe not because we understand everything, but because we trust the one who holds all things together. We believe not because we have to believe in order to earn God's love, but because we know we are already loved. We believe not alone, but together. And maybe if we keep drawing, if we keep loving and trusting and reaching for God, then one day someone will look at our life together and they'll say, oh, now I see it. That is what God looks like. Amen.