St. John’s Lutheran Church
4 June 2023 + The Holy Trinity
Matthew 28.16-20
Rev. Josh Evans
People can become famous for many things. Some write best-selling novels. Others paint masterpiece artwork. And still others compose magnificent pieces of music.
Me? I went viral for a TikTok video. Well, at least church-world viral.
Two years ago, as I sat in my apartment on a Friday afternoon, staring a blank computer screen and procrastinating my sermon for Trinity Sunday, I turned to TikTok – as I often do in such moments – and stumbled across one clip of a scene from one of the best TV shows to have ever existed, Schitt’s Creek.
If you’ve seen the show, it’s the scene where David is trying – painstakingly so – to describe his business proposal for the new general store to Patrick. If you haven’t seen the show – you should fix that – but that’s about as much as you need to know for the purposes of this sermon illustration.
It occurred to me, watching that scene again two years ago, while procrastinating my Trinity Sunday sermon, that David’s fumbling, unsuccessful, albeit very well-meaning, attempts to describe his plans for his new store are not altogether unlike the task set before us preachers today: to “explain” the Trinity.
In my own take on the scene, David’s words take on new life with my captions:
“It’s like one God, but it’s also like three Gods … But it’s NOT three Gods. More like three ‘persons,’ but not like human persons … Well, except for one of them…kind of …”
Ultimately, as the scene nears its end, the captions, too, arrive at their conclusion: At its core, the Trinity is mystery. It is indescribable and beyond human comprehension.
If you’ve come to church this morning in the hopes of better understanding the doctrine, I’m sorry to disappoint you. Because, truthfully, I don’t even fully understand.
Instead, what I think we can take away from this day is that there is a multiplicity of ways to describe the indescribable God:
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Mother, Child, and Holy Companion.
Comforter, Redeemer, and Giver of Life.
Or, to borrow from St. Augustine: Lover, Beloved, Love.
The Trinity – while not explicitly biblical – is one way of describing who God is and how God relates to us.
And there are so many other ways, too.
In the back of All Creation Sings, the new hymnal supplement you may have already noticed under your seats, which we will dedicate this morning, there are three pages towards the back full of scriptural images for God:
God is a blazing bush, a strong fortress, alpha and omega, a mother bear, wisdom, and word – to name just a few.
“Bring many names,” the writer of hymn #1094 implores us, in our worship and praise of God.
At their core, all these scriptural images, and even this day of the Holy Trinity, invite us to explore a question people of faith have been asking for as long as our very existence:
What is God like?
Pastor Josh Evans 