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...

Matthew 28:16-20 Dear Partner in Preaching, Ever notice that the close of Matthew’s Gospel, a passage we usually refer to as “the Great Commission,” ends with a promise? I think I sometimes get so caught up in the grandeur and import of the Great Commission that I overlook what I now think of as “the Great Promise” – “And I am with you always, to the end of the age.” I suspect this isn’t an accident. That is, I suspect that our only hope of fulfilling the great commission – sharing the good news of God’s grace in Christ with the world through word and deed and welcoming all into fellowship through Baptism – is by...

Dear Partner in Preaching, So what do you think: is it possible to preach a sermon on the Trinity without mentioning the Trinity? I ask because I have this hunch that we’ve gotten a little off track with our thinking about the Trinity. That is, I think the Trinity was the early church’s way of trying to grapple with a monotheistic belief in one God in light of their actual, lived experience of God’s activity powerfully in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and after an encounter with the power of the Holy Spirit. And the Trinity provided an answer…of sorts. An answer often couched in the language of fourth-century metaphysics....

Three-in-One Plus One   Dear Partner in Preaching, Imagine with me for a moment, the delight you would experience in discovering that you had a long lost uncle or aunt who had made you the heir to their estate. Can you see it? You’d wake up one morning and discover that they had left you riches beyond count, that your major financial worries were over, and that you really didn’t have to worry all that much about the future. If that scenario happened, how would you feel? What would you do? Or, more to the point, what would you do differently? And here I don’t mean what would you run out and buy – though I suspect that most of us...

On this, St. Patrick’s Day, I think it’s worth recalling that St. Patrick is known not only for converting Ireland to Christianity, and not only for banishing all the snakes from Ireland, but also for being a major advocate and defender of the Doctrine of the Trinity. Which, when you think about just how difficult a feat that really is, may be the most stunning element of Patrick’s resume. For how do we explain or even understand that God is one God, indivisible, and yet also three persons, distinct in identity? When I was a child, my Mom tried to help me understand the Trinity by comparing it to water. Although H2-O is one...