Trinity Sunday
Genesis 1:1-2:4a, 2 Corinthians 13:11-13, Matthew 28:16-20, Psalm 8
St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church, Austin
May 31, 2026
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. + Amen.
So, it is Trinity Sunday. There is a tradition of seminarians preaching on Trinity Sunday, as a kind of a rite of passage, or maybe a gentle hazing ritual. However, a seminarian may end up preaching on Trinity Sunday, it’s a good week to preach: trying to put huge, foundational theological thought into twelve minutes is the best kind of challenge. On Trinity Sunday, we are trying to explain the foundation of the Christian faith: the belief in one God in three Persons, co-equal, co-eternal, and fully divine.
It’s hard to explain the Trinity, because it is something we simply can’t fully comprehend it in order to really put it into words. Evelyn Underhill, an English Anglican writer with a leaning toward mysticism wrote, “If God were small enough to be understood He would not be big enough to be worshipped.”
Language cannot adequately contain God, and we reach for analogies and metaphors when trying to explain what this God who is One-in-Three is with our limited words. How do three Persons make one God, anyway? You might have heard a few before, such as the Trinity being like water, which exists in three forms: liquid, ice, and steam. The problem with these comparisons is that it’s really easy to stumble into heretical territory—the water analogy, for instance, is an example of a heresy called Modalism. Since water can only exist in one form in one place at the same time (it can’t be ice while also being liquid, or steam while also being ice, etc.) it can give the idea that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three roles God takes at different times, rather than three Persons of God existing in one Being, acting as all Persons at all times.
It gets tricky fast. That’s the problem with trying to explain the Mysteries of divine nature with our human-sized understanding. But we do our best, because the Trinity is the heart of our belief, and it is at the heart of the Creeds, and we profess the Trinity every Sunday.
Yet the Trinity isn’t something explained in the bible. It is a doctrine hammered out by the church over the first few centuries after Christ’s ascension, built from human experiences of God and threads in scripture.
The readings this week take us from “In the beginning,” the very first words in Genesis to the “end of the age,” the last words of the Gospel of Matthew. The ancient Israelites were strictly monotheistic—it was one of the key differences between those who worshiped YHWH and other religions in the ancient Near East.
Christians reading the bible over the past two thousand years have found passages in the old testament that can be read through a trinitarian lens, seeing hints of the future life of Jesus in the Hebrew scriptures. In this reading from Genesis, Christian theologians see God the Father creating the heavens and the earth, Jesus as the Word through which creation happens, and the Spirit blowing over the face of the water, bringing order to chaos.
The Hebrew word for “wind” in verse two is ruach, which also means spirit or breath, and we speak often of the Holy Spirit blowing where it wishes, whenever it wishes. We heard this last week at Pentecost, when the Spirit arrived with a sound like a violent, rushing wind that filled the house where the disciples were gathered.
Through this lens, the Trinity is present from the very first words of the bible, ever present, ever holy, ever at work in the world.
A little farther into the reading, in verses 26 and 27, God says “let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness,” and thus “in the image of God he created them.” What did God mean when God said “let us create them?”
There are different interpretations of the plurality in this passage. One is that God was speaking to a divine council, present while God was doing the work of creation. A reading of these verses through a Christian lens sees the Trinity in these verses, and that we were created in a Trinitarian likeness.
What both of these passages in Genesis share is the visibility of the love God has for this creation and all of the creatures within it, and the special love God has for us, those who he made in his own image, after his own likeness.
This immense love God has for us shows us something about the nature of God—that God contains and is this incomprehensible love that so carefully made the world, and made us, and joyfully called it all very good. Love flows between the three Persons of the Trinity in a relationship that is often described as a dance; a loving relationship that we are modeled after.
Psalm 8 follows the Genesis passage, and it shows—beautifully and evocatively—the gift and the responsibility of being created in Gods image. This psalm is sometimes called “the stargazers psalm,” because the mood of it feels like someone standing outside on a dark night, staring up at the magnificence of the stars in the sky, suddenly feeling how small they are in the scheme of creation.
“What is man that you should be mindful of him?” the psalmist asks, why is humanity so valuable to God? Because we are; we alone among God’s creatures have been given stewardship over the creation that God made and declared very good. This psalm begins and ends with the same phrase; “O Lord our governor, how exalted is your Name in all the world!”
What other response can we have to the magnificence of creation, and the size and importance of the role we have been given within it?
Paul in 2 Corinthians and the writer of the gospel of Matthew both include language that is very familiar to those of us who grew up in the doctrine of the Trinity. Paul ends his letter to the troubled church in Corinth by exhorting the people to live in peace with God and with one another, and blesses them, hoping that “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit” is with the people of Corinth.
The communion of the Holy Spirit Paul is talking about here is that of the life of the Church; the Spirit’s presence with the gathered people of Christ in the name of God, the communion that gives us the strength to become Christ’s hands and feet in the world.
Finally, the author of Matthew ends his gospel with Jesus’s instruction to his disciples to go out and baptize “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” and to follow the commandments he has given us to do. Nowhere else in the New Testament does this specific wording appear, and it is likely that this language reflects the language used in baptismal liturgy in the first century, as this gospel is generally dated to the 80 or 90 CE. What I like best about this reading on Trinity Sunday is the very last sentence – “remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
God is with us, to the end of the age. The Father is with us, the Son is with us, and the Spirit is with us. Always has been, and always will be. This God of love, who made us in the divine image and redeemed us through Christ just because he loves us, is still walking with us. We can’t scare God off, or make God so angry he abandons us, or do a single thing to make God love us less.
God loves us, because God IS.
But what does it mean for us, to be made in the image of our triune God? What does it mean to reflect back to God the love that flows within and from the Trinity? God exists in loving relationship, and we are invited by our very makeup to do the same. The exhortations to love one another abound in scripture, and this capacity to love is given to us in our creation. The Holy Spirit swoops down onto us and into us at the Pentecost, wrapping us into the life of the Trinity. God dwells in us, and we in God.
It’s mind-blowing.
The world is a lot right now. Just a lot. It’s easy to feel lost, scared, angry, alienated, and so busy that we barely have time to stop and be.
I want to ask you to take two things from this today with you this week: That all of God is with you, within you, all of the time. That God truly is closer to you than your next breath. I would also like you to take the wonder that is God’s loving relationship within God and between God and all of us.
Feel the way God reaches for each of us, inviting us to reach back, yearning for us to reach back.
This is our source. This is our one foundation. It can’t be taken from you, it is always yours, by birthright. Let it comfort you, strengthen you, and hold you fast—and let it give you strength to love as we are loved, and let us love you. It’s rough out there, and yet we are the hands and feet of Christ.
One step in front of the other, always bathed in God’s love.
Amen.