Trinity Sunday B: Love. Yeah, Just Love
Dear Partner in Preaching,
I want to propose a radical idea: on this Holy Trinity Sunday, don’t preach on the Trinity. Don’t even mention…it, him, her, they (proper pronoun, please?)
Why? Because it’s a doctrine. Because it’s a confusing doctrine. Because doctrine itself is meant to be a way of understanding and describing our experience of the living God, but perhaps as much as or even more than any other doctrine, the doctrine of the Trinity has ended up not describing an experience, but substituting for one. For many of our folks – and who knows, maybe for us – it is little more than a formula – “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” (Or is it “of the Son and of the Spirit” – I always get that confused.) While for far more it’s just a name – Holy Trinity United Methodist Church, Trinity College, etc.
So if we’re not going to preach on the Trinity on Trinity Sunday, what are we going to preach on? How ‘bout love. Really. I know, know, not terribly original. But if not original, at least totally faithful to the passages appointed for this day.
Take John 3:1-17, for instance. Lots to pick from there, but hard to miss the emphasis of John 3:16, the world’s most famous Bible verse: “For God so loved the world….” And when you consider that just about every other place John uses the word love – Greek: kosmos – he’s talking about an entity at complete enmity with God (“if the world hates you, remember that it hated me first” 15:18 ff.), that’s a whole heck of a lot of love.
And don’t forget the verse that comes next, John 3:17, what I think of as the world’s most overlooked Bible verse: “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” God is not vengeful, not demanding of judgment or appeasement, not angry, but loving. Just plain loving. And the cross is not a mechanism to appease God or satisfy God’s justice or thirst for blood, but rather is the sign of just how far God will go to show us that God already loves us. There is nothing God will not do for us in love, the cross testifies, while the resurrection promises that God’s love is more powerful than all things, even death.
And it doesn’t end there. The few verses from Romans 8 pack an unbelievable punch: through the Spirit and out of love, God has adopted us God’s own beloved children who now are heirs of all good things. But not just heirs because of Christ, but even co-heirs with Christ. That’s right, God loves us so much that when God looks at us God sees us as no different than Jesus. God doesn’t see the mistakes or regrets or missteps or disappointments. God only sees goodness. Why? Because God loves us. Loves us so much God forgives all things and sees only the best in us.
So preach about love. I won’t say “preach about love for a change,” of course, because I have a pretty high confidence that most of your sermons, just like most of mine, are grounded in the love of God. But I will say “preach about love again,” because the reason we keep preaching love is simply that, quite frankly, it’s so damn hard to believe. We know ourselves. We carry our faults, disappointments, and insecurities like a snail carries its shell. And so it is just plain hard to believe that God, who knows all of this as well as we do, still loves us. But it’s true. So remind us of God’s love. The hard-to-believe, always-important-to-hear, live-changing, indeed life-saving love.
Oh, and if you really can’t help preaching on the Trinity, probably my favorite shorthand explanation of the Trinity is based on – you guessed it – love. The Father is one who loves, the Son the beloved, and the Spirit the love shared between them. No, it doesn’t explain the Trinity, but it does help us imagine and remember that the whole point of the Trinity is that God’s love is too big, too immense, even, to be described as the love of a single person, but is more like the loved shared among a community, a love shared so deeply that it can’t be contained but spills out from the Trinity into the whole world and into our lives.
I realize I didn’t pick up on the Isaiah passage, Dear Partner, but that one I’d read just for yourself. For you, like Isaiah of old, have been chosen by God to declare the good news that God loves all of us more than we can imagine. Sometimes the weight of that call burns like tongs of fire, and sometimes it can seem incredibly daunting, but know that you were chosen, Dear Partner, chosen by the loving God to share the earth-changing news that God loves all. Thank you for your faithful response.
Yours in Christ,
David
I’m sure you hear this a lot, David. But thank you for that last paragraph. Thank you A LOT. Doubts, burnout and frustration are pretty common to pastors, I know. And your kind words and affirmation are such a dose of the Spirit’s whisperings to us all. That your simple words hit me (and others, I’m sure) with such force is a surprising (and somewhat sad) revelation of how rarely we hear that.
So thank you. And the feeling is mutual.
As for me and my house, I shall not preach on a doctrine either. I distinctly remember the St. Paul quote (on the base of the Luther statue at that oldest of Lutheran Seminaries in North America): “Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel.”
So I shall preach the “good news” (aka, “gospel”) about the God who shows himself to us in three ways: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. And I will take as my text Luther’s explanation to the Creed in the Small Catechism.
And the ‘punch line’ is John 3:17 (to my way of thinking, far better “good news” than John 3:16).
First off the block from New Zealand with thanks for your plea to preach love rather than try to explain the Trinity! Somehow my reflection came together unforced after several false starts earlier in the week. I loved rediscovering John 3.17 ‘the most overlooked verse’ – imagine if we all took that on board.
While I can never claim to understand the Trinity I can say that I’m not afraid of this doctrine any more.