Holy, holy, holy. Lord God Almighty.

Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee.

Holy, holy, holy, merciful and mighty!

God in three persons, blessed Trinity!

It’s Trinity Sunday, the day of the Church Year devoted not to a story about Jesus, nor something erudite written by St. Paul in one of his long epistles, nor a magnificent story of the early Apostles, nor one of the tales of faith from the Hebrew Scriptures … but to a concept, a thought, a doctrine, a teaching.

This is the Sunday from which preachers yearn to be free, it is a great Sunday to be away and let someone else struggle homiletically with the notion. 

Those of us clergy who are linked together on facebook ™ began to mimic the Prophet Isaiah who having a night-dream of God in heaven surrounded by the mighty and terrifying seraphim cried out, “Woe is me!  I am lost …” 

In response to a message I sent to one of my colleagues about this Sunday, she replied, “Not preaching this Sunday (thank the triune God).”  Before today’s Service began, I asked Pastor K. in the congregation here if he would like to preaching on the Holy Trinity this morning in my place … to which he responded, “Don’t you have a film?”  I then went to Pastor C. who wandered into the Nave among the early arrivals and asked him … to which he smiled and said, “No thank you.”  And right now I see sitting in the congregation visiting Rev. M., and so “Would you like to …”  Immediately she begins to shake her head No!

My mind began to race with endless possibilities of how to avoid the annual Sermon on the Trinity … perhaps we could transfer that wonderful tradition of Bright Sunday which takes place on the Sunday after Easter … religious joke-telling to uplift our spirits on “Low Sunday” one week after the church has been packed with worshippers.

I thought of telling the well-worn Holy Trinity Joke to you.

Well, why not?

The Holy Trinity decides to go on a vacation. The Son proposes to go to San Francisco, but the Father finds that place too liberal minded. So the Father proposes to go to Jerusalem. “I can’t go on vacation there!” says the Son, “That’s where I got killed! I can’t believe you just said that!”

A fight breaks out, and the Holy Spirit walks out. “If you can’t come up with something when I come back, we’re not going anywhere!”

An hour later the Holy Spirit walks back into the room, and the Father and the Son excitedly say they want to go to Rome. “Rome?” says the Holy Spirit, “Great idea! I’ve never been there before!”

I even considered doing a kind of sermon-lecture about the history of what I call The Holy Trinity War that took place in the Councils of the Church at Nicaea and Constantinople in the 4^th and 5^th Centuries, and produced for us that wonderful “song of faith” we call the Nicene Creed … parts of which we repeat so faithfully with eyes raised to heaven and shoulders shrugged, so foreign to us are its words and concepts.

I thought also (since I always read a lot of this stuff in Greek) about doing a wonderful exegesis for you of the Greek Word upostasiz which was the word hotly debated at Nicaea and Constantinople … it is found in the debate about the hypostatic union of the two natures of Christ … just how is it that Jesus could have both human and divine natures (upostasiz ) … but I decided against it … we might just talk about it tomorrow noon in our Greek Class, however.

I pondered the possibility of doing a slide show presentation about the artistic representations of the Holy Trinity throughout history … some of those images are at least vaguely reproduced in your bulletin this morning.  But such a presentation would take more than the time allotted for a sermon.

In other words, I was (am) doing what most of us do when dealing with the Holy Trinity … we avoid it.  That is to say, we avoid trying to explain it.  We begin our services “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” … we use it in just about every blessing we offer, even prayer shawls … It has become for us the name of God, it is how we understand God, how we express the vision we have of God … I should add quickly, as Christians.

And we say, “Well, yes it is true that the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is not found anywhere in the Bible … but the notions of God as these expressions, these three ways of being God … for us as followers of Jesus are found in Holy Scripture.  And this is our shorthand for talking about those expressions.

OK.  Nothing wrong with that.  It’s actually quite a good answer, I think.  Someone asks, “Who is God?” and we answer by telling the things that God has done, promises to do, and we feel is doing even now in the present.  Or we can say, “God is Father, Son, Holy Spirit” or as people of faith have attempted to do in recent years in an effort to “de-patriacharlize” God, things like:

“Rock, Redeemer, and Friend”

“Mother, Child, and Womb”

“Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer” …

But however we do it, it expresses the inability of our language to capture the nature of God … how God is … more than who God is.  At best, we are back with the Prophet Isaiah, “Woe is me!  I am lost” and the best thing to do is to join in with the song of the Seraphim as loudly as we can, “Kadosh, kadosh, kadosh” … “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory.”

Actually, that’s not bad at all.  Because in Isaiah’s vision we see God.  In Paul’s vision … remember his “Abba, Father” … we see God.  In Jesus’ vision … remember his nighttime meeting with Nicodemus … we see God.

It is truly God, the Vision that captures us, that moves us, that sustains us, that fills us … because we know that God, being God is beyond the ink we put on paper, the characters we type upon the computer screen, the words we speak in a sermon, and the hymns we lift to heaven.

We have but a vision, and it is enough, and when that vision needs to be spoken, we begin to pray, as I ask you to do now.  Let us pray:

Holy God, the earth is full of the glory of your love. May we your children, born of the Spirit, so bear witness to your Son Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, that all the world may believe and have eternal life through the One who saves, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, now and for ever.

And let us all say: Amen.