Three Persons: One God - Rector's Rambling for May 30, 2021

   Today we proclaim and rejoice in a great mystery: the Holy Trinity.

My first sermon as a newly ordained clergyman was on Trinity Sunday in 1994, something my rector relished.  “Everyone will want to hear from the new curate on his first Sunday at Good Shepherd.  Just don’t screw it up by preaching a heresy about the Holy Trinity.”  Talk about intimidating!  I somehow managed to get through the morning without being pulled from the pulpit and burned at the stake.

Now we fast forward 27 years later and I am still preaching on the Holy Trinity VERY CAREFULLY.  And in fact, as I have gotten older I have in this way gotten wiser, because I know that I will never be able to explain how God is in Trinity.  And I don’t have to be able to comprehend it fully.

To be Christian is to believe that Jesus Christ is Lord and that he is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity.  We are monotheists, and we proclaim the truth that God is a unity of three persons.  So often, the beginning of a full-blown heretical sect is rooted in poor doctrine about God in Trinity, and eventual denial of this truth altogether.  The Pilgrims/Puritans who came to North America to escape the Anglican religion found large portions of themselves within a few generations jettisoning right doctrine and becoming what is now the Unitarian/Universalist Church, devoid of the faith that Jesus Christ is Lord.  Other groups like the 19th Century Millerite Movements morphed, after their failed predicted dates of the end times, into completely mis-informed sects like the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

We may not understand God in Trinity, but we believe on the sure Word found in Scripture, and we worship Him in the Unity of Persons as the Church has done for 2000 years!

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost – One God throughout all ages.  Amen.