A Sermon for Trinity Sunday

As preached on Sunday June 15th, 2025 at St George's Anglican Church, Place du Canada in Montreal Quebec, Canada.

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-32, Psalm 8, Romans 5:1-5, John 16:12-15

Let us pray: in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today, the church across the world gets to talk about the mystery at the core of our faith, the Trinity.

God is three persons in one substance. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one. and this takes on a particular gravitas this year - as it is the year of the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea.

The council of Nicaea was in 325AD when church leaders from across the Roman Empire, Bishops, gathered to sort out the Trinity and face a growing heresy that was threatening the unity of the Church - Arianism. The goal was to formally and finally sort out the relationship of the Father to the Son to the Holy Spirit.

Now, the truth is, there is a reason that stands the test of time for why when we try and pin down a definition of the Trinity, all of our metaphors and explanations fall short.

And, that reason is simple, it is because nothing is like God.

No thing is like God.

Because God is not a thing.

God is not a thing and we forget that sometimes.¹

Whether this intuitively makes sense to you and you feel it deep in your bones or if thinking about it for even just a second gives you a headache, the Trinity is central to our faith.

Firstly because we believe it to be true that God is one. Three persons, one essence, one.

And secondly - though also firstly - God is not a countable thing amongst Creation but is rather that which created Creation - all of it. Everything and everyone.

Let me show you what I mean when I say that when we try and pin down a definition of the Trinity, all of our metaphors and explanations fall short:

God is like water - water can be solid ice, vapour, or liquid, but it is always water. This commonly used metaphor sounds right, it’s easily digestible and it is true about water but, it's not entirely true about God. In fact, this is a classic example of an ancient heresy called modalism. You see, unlike water, God isn't limited to being one thing at one time and another thing at another time. God is not a thing. There is God - who is not a thing - and Creation which is a thing, full of other things.

Modalism tries to explain God but ends up putting God in a box that is much much too small for God.

What about explaining the Trinity as a family where there is a father, a mother, and a Son. This one doesn’t quite work either because it implies one of the persons of the Trinity was created later than the first two, and well… that's called Arianism after Arius. He was the one whose thoughts sparked the council of Nicaea and convinced Emperor Constantine that it was necessary to formalize an understanding of the Trinity.²

Arius was condemned by the council of Nicea in 325AD. So, it won’t surprise you when I explain that there is a problem here, too, the Trinity cannot be described as a family because Jesus isn't biologically half God. He is entirely God, just as the Father and the Holy Spirit are entirely God. Three persons, one substance. One God.

Okay, let's try one more; what about saying that God is like an egg. Eggs have a yoke, an egg white, and a shell? Okay, two more - what about St Patrick's classic? The three-leafed clover? Where each leaf is a person but they are all apart of one whole? Well, the trouble here - with both of these - is tritheism, or partialism, or modalism even dependent on the words you use to describe the egg or clover or widget spinner. It boils down to this, our God - is just the one God.

Not a God with three distinct parts - well, yes, a God with three parts, but… not like that… we're getting lost again.

And in this case - it’s good to get lost. We have barely scratched the surface this morning but as you go home and look up more ways to talk about the Trinity, I bet you will find, in every case - in each heresy - one thing in common:

And that is this: there is a very compelling reason why all of our metaphors and explanations fall short.

And a compelling reason why we should keep trying, why 1700 years later we are still trying to figure out how to talk about the Trinity - still teasing out ideas and playing with metaphors - and trying to explain this belief in a mystery that is at the core of our faith.

Talking about mysteries is complicated for many reasons, but perhaps the most frustrating of all is that when it comes down to it… you can't. We cannot, in words, with precision, explain what we mean. Instead, we dance around it and with it. The church has been dancing this dance for 2000+ odd years.

We stumble in this dance, imitating the perichoresis of the Trinity itself - the divine dance that is not a dance where the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit relate to each other and are each other all at once.

Perichoresis was actually the first term coined in Christian theology. The first instance of it being used is when Maximus the confessor used it in 662³, though the concept had been explored earlier by Gregory of Naziansus⁴ and John of Damascus⁵. In any case, it took the church about 600 years to find a word to talk about the Trinity.

So if this hurts your brain, I hope you find comfort in the fact that it has broken and confused many, many brilliant people before you.

We needed a new word to talk about the Trinity because the Trinity is unlike everything and anything else.

I mentioned that perichoresis is like a dance. I said that because it is often described that way to explain the beautiful inner life of the Trinity and how the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit have related to each other since before there was an earth, long before humans walked the earth.

But, those of you with keen ears should be shouting in your minds “but, Heather that’s heresy too!”

Of course, you are too polite and well mannered to shout it out loud, but you’re not wrong.

But, hear me out, what I am tentatively suggesting is that perhaps this little problem is solved by suggesting - as many have, that it is the dance itself, that movement between the dancers, that images the Trinity, not the dancers themselves.⁶

Yet, you’re right - entirely correct. If we aren't careful,

we can stumble into that same heresy we did when we talked about eggs and three-leafed clovers. A heresy called tritheism where we have not one God but three. Or we can end up making God impersonal and uncaring since a dance itself cannot love.

God, however, does love, and God is three persons but one substance…

It's tricky.

But that very trickiness is what today is for. Today is Trinity Sunday. It is the day in the church year when we think about the complex unknowability of God. The day when as a church, we consider, and bask in the mystery of God. It is a day when we - as a church have to admit - get to admit -that we cannot talk about God and not get it wrong.

Any metaphor we use leads us smack dab into heresy.

The best we can do is write poetry and talk around it.

The best we can do is keep trying - lovingly and thoughtfully to explain what is unexplainable.

Because nothing is like God.

No thing is like God.

Because God is not a thing.

And we forget that sometimes.

We may have forgotten, but I believe that it is time to remember.

Remember that We are the church that dares to step out and trust in the unknowable God who becomes knowable through Jesus Christ.

So let's remember.

Let's step out and let God reorder things again. Let us step out IN the God who has promised to be with us always, to the end of the age.

Amen.

1. Because I don’t have time in an Anglican-sized sermon to get into Augustine’s On Christian Teaching and the whole business of “res'“ vs. “sign/signa/signum” from On Christian Teaching, a work that spanned nearly his whole tenure as Bishop of Hippo, please don’t read Augustinian neo-platanism into how I am using the word thing here and instead think of what is countable/perceivable vs. that which God is.

2. Interested in reading more about Arianism turn to Athanasius

3. Maximus Confessor. Ambigua ad Ioannem. In Patrologia Graeca, Vol. 91, edited by J.-P. Migne, 1031–1418. Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 1865.

4. Gregory of Nazianzus. Theological Orations: Oration 31. In On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius, translated by Frederick Williams and Lionel Wickham, 122–145. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002.

5. John of Damascus. The Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. Translated by Frederic H. Chase Jr. In The Fathers of the Church, Vol. 37. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1958.

6. If you’re interested look to Pseudo-Dionysius or to later writers/theologians like Jurgen Moltmann or Vladimir Lossky who draw on the language used by Pseudo-Dionysius to think this through.