To Be Convicted

That the Father may approve, the Son aid, and the Holy Spirit inspire. Amen.

Today we gather together for one of the principal feasts of our Church, Trinity Sunday.

And we celebrate here, of course, not just because this feast recognizes the

Blessed Trinity, but because it is the feast for which this very parish is named, Trinity Church.

So just as we ponder the mystery of faith, we too now pay homage for all of

those who have come before us and paved the way,

who have built the church that

now holds us today through faith and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

And the Holy Spirit, of course, remains fresh in our minds Having just been

visited by that Spirit Its bounties poured upon our flesh in the celebration of Pentecost,

With the descent of the Holy Spirit, the Godhead was made complete And we are

now called to reflect on the nature of that very Godhead, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

This is an admittedly challenging task.

There is no simple way to explain the nature of the Trinity.

Being wise enough to rely upon the aid of those who have come before me,

I have sought wisdom from texts ancient and well-worn.

A Picture of God, Three in One Here is one apple.

There is only one true God.

The apple has three parts, the peel, the flesh, the core.

The one true God has three persons, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit.

It's nice, but... Then there's St.

Patrick St. Patrick used the imagery of the shamrock I'm obviously Irish,

so that appeals to me Three leaves that simultaneously make a single plant Again,

it's nice, but it doesn't fully capture the point,

Or maybe the worst metaphor that I've ever heard That I came across in my studies

this week Three in one body wash.

We had a lot of fun with that one this week as a staff. And so,

finding nothing sufficient, I instead sought wisdom in the safest of harbors cracking open St.

Augustine's teaching Christianity to see what he might have to say about the Holy Trinity.

Of his attempts to describe the Trinity, he wrote, Have I said anything at all,

solemnly uttered anything that is worthy of God?

To the contrary, all I feel I have done is wish to say something.

But if I have said anything, it is not what I wished to say.

Inspiring.

Jesus sort of mirrors this sentiment today in our gospel reading from John.

Our passage takes place during a broader farewell discourse,

which is bookmarked between the Last Supper happening in the 13th chapter of

John and Jesus' arrest in John's 18th chapter.

As Jesus says a long goodbye to his disciples, he leaves them,

first with practical instruction.

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.

Just as I have loved you, you should also love one another.

He speaks also to his own nature in relation to God the Father in John 14,

remarking, If you know me, you will know my Father also.

From now on you do know him, and you have seen him.

This farewell discourse also includes the promise of the Holy Spirit to the

disciples which we read from last week during Pentecost.

And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate, to be with you forever.

And yet Jesus kind of pumps the brakes today.

In John 16, placing a limit on our capacity to understand his teachings,

he opens, saying to his disciples, I still have many things to say to you,

but you cannot bear them now.

In the immediate sense, Jesus is telling the disciples that they will be enlightened

with the arrival of the Holy Spirit and will come to better understand the teachings

that they are being given now.

And yet I think Jesus is telling us something more broadly about his teachings and our life.

I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.

The fact of the matter is that the Holy Trinity extends far beyond that which we can now bear.

No metaphor, however important or exquisite,

will adequately express, no diagram fully encapsulate, no treatise give language

to express that force which birthed language itself.

The Holy Trinity is the source of all life And the thing of our greatest enjoyment

And yet it is ultimately inexpressible How frustrating.

Even when it comes to our best attempts Augustine is right All we have done is wish to say something.

Now there are, of course, things that we can affirm about the Trinity We can

affirm what Paul writes in Romans 11 From him and through him and to him are

all things to him be the glory forever,

We can affirm that the Trinity handed down to us in the Nicene Creed Says that

there is one God Almighty,

that which created earth In the heavens, we can affirm that the Son was born

of the Father before time and made incarnate living, dying, and being resurrected

as one of us and in our midst.

We can affirm in the Spirit that gives us life and that places a fire upon our

tongues who is made present in the prophets and in the collective body of believers, the Church.

Through the creeds, we have a basic understanding. of how the persons of the

Trinity interact, that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are each holy

God, and yet all together form the one true God.

But even though we can know some things, we do not know all things.

Much of God is a mystery to us.

This may seem deeply dissatisfying. It may even make us wonder, what's the point?

What is the point of scriptural study of something you cannot fully know,

of long and wordy theological books, of worship to a God that we just can't fully understand?

For Augustine, the point is this.

He says, And yet while nothing really worthy of God can be said about God,

he has accepted the homage of

human voices and has wished us to rejoice in praising him with our words.

Or as Gregory of Nazianzus perhaps says more astutely, Our preaching is not in vain our faith empty.

Conviction of a thing's existence is quite different than knowledge of what it is,

We are called to faith not because we know We are called to faith because we are convicted.

Now, there's a saying that if you're a hammer or what Everything starts to look like a nail,

And given that, it could be said that if you're a preacher Everything starts

to look like, what, a sermon,

And that's true It's hard to walk around in daily life and not sort of conjure

sermons Out of things that might not be sermons at all,

But I was listening to this podcast Where Jon Stewart was supposed to be talking

about the New York Knicks They'd just lost in devastating fashion And he's an

avid, lifelong Knicks fan. He was bummed out.

And the topic kind of starts to shift.

Now, the conversation drifts into the details of his return to television.

It had been 10 years since Jon Stewart had hosted The Daily Show,

and he'd recently returned. And so the host asked him, after a decade away,

were you nervous to return?

What he said gave me just great pause. He said, it's hard to describe the feeling.

The first day I went in to do the show and I'm sitting behind the desk in rehearsal

and the camera guys, they're all the same guys that I'd been with before.

The comfort was there. We did the rehearsal.

But when I put on the suit and I came down and I sat behind the desk in the

suit, I look into the camera, and I saw myself on the monitor,

at the desk, in the suit, with the pen and the script, the whole deal.

But I looked like this now.

I looked like this now, and that was daunting.

He says, it was a very strange kind of melancholy feeling Of the explicit evidence

of the passing of time Can you imagine?

The question, did it make you nervous? I suspect in short the answer was yes

But not for the reason that you might have thought.

Now, what John Stewart says here,

encapsulated in the life of a show that for so many Americans felt like a fabric

of their own lives and their own homes, speaks so succinctly to the reality of our existence.

The inescapable passage of time.

The reality of the cycle of life and death spoken so matter-of-factly In our

own scripture in Ecclesiastes, there is a time to be born and a time to die,

Or perhaps more poetically in the book of Isaiah The grass withers,

the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever.

In the midst of a life so fleeting, subject to chances and changes,

to fortune, both good and bad, the gift of the Trinity is that the passage of

time does not have the final say.

The gift is that we have been given a glimpse of what today's collect calls

the glory of the eternal.

While time does indeed pass, we have been redeemed by a God who all at once

stands entirely outside of time and who is also intimately and deeply involved

in the ticking of the seconds of our own lives.

That's something that I will never fully understand The paradox and the mystery

of it all But I sure am convicted by it,

I sure am convicted Amen.

Thanks for listening to

60 Church Street.

A podcast of Trinity Episcopal Church in Asheville,

North Carolina.

Now, go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

The homily was offered by the Rev. Mike Reardon.

Introduction and closing reflections were shared by the Rev. Amy Peterson.

Musical contributions were performed by Dr. Kevin Seal.

Sermon audio was prepared by Nanette Popa. Production was guided by Karen Marie Frederiksen