Drawing Triangles

A sermon for the First Sunday after Pentecost: Trinity Sunday
May 31, 2026, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Hot Springs, AR

Readings: Genesis 1:1-2:4a; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20; Psalm 8

Today is Trinity Sunday, the first Sunday after Pentecost. The Easter lilies are now a distant memory. Christ has died, been raised by the Father, and ascended into heaven to sit at the right hand. And as Jesus promised, the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, has indeed come among us, to guide and sustain us. We have entered the longest season of the Church year, the season after Pentecost, during which we will focus on the teachings of Jesus. And to kick things off, we have the Trinity, the cornerstone of the Christian faith, depicted in our window above the high altar, the mystery of one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 

The Trinity is older than time. The Trinity is eternal, from everlasting, greater than and outside of time itself. In our reading from Genesis this morning, we see the Holy Trinity at work. God the Father is at work in creation, guiding creation from nothingness to fullness, from a formless and dark void to light, to evenings and days, to seas and dry lands, to green vegetation and flowers and animals of all kinds, and finally to us, a people created in God’s very creative and life-giving and loving image. And we read that all of this is brought forth from the Word as creation is spoken into being. The opening to John’s Gospel reads, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And it is this very Word, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God–this Word will become incarnate from the Virgin Mary, to share our human nature, to live and die as one of us, and to reconcile us to God our Father. And we also see the Holy Spirit at work: A wind from God is sweeping over the face of the waters. This wind is the ruach, the breath, the spirit of God that was hovering, brooding over this creation-to-be. This is the wind we heard about last week, the Comforter Jesus had promised when he ascended to the Father: “When the day of Pentecost had come, the disciples were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.” This is the unpredictable fire of God that birthed the Church and catches us up in wonder still. 

But not only at creation. We also see the Trinity at the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River. Jesus, the Son of God, the Word of God, comes to the Jordan to be baptized. And as he is, the heavens are torn open, God the Father speaks, “This is my Son,” and the Holy Spirit descends on him like a dove. They’re all there. It is no wonder, then, that Jesus tells us today to baptize in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. 

And it is this God in Trinity that Paul speaks of today as he blesses the people of Corinth: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.” This is the only instance where Paul blesses his readers with such an overt and clear trinitarian blessing, invoking all three persons of the Trinity. 

But nowhere in the Bible do we see the word Trinity. The formal doctrine of the Trinity would come later, as faithful people wrestled with the testimony of Scripture, and as God revealed the mystery to them. And the word “revealed” is of the utmost importance. The Trinity is not something clever that the Church came up with on its own. No, it is God’s self-revelation to us about who God is, One Being in Three Persons whom we have come to know and love and worship: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The One God testified to in the Scriptures, and the Three Persons also testified to in the Scriptures. 

It was time for children’s chapel at St. Thomas’, Springdale, and I had a good group of kids on Trinity Sunday, maybe around seven or eight years old. There was one girl who did not want to be there, or so it seemed. She sat there in some far-off la-la land, braiding her hair, fidgeting with her socks, untying and retying her shoes, messing with an ant that had got in somehow. But then again, we were talking about the Trinity. Maybe she just wasn’t interested? She wouldn’t be the first child (or adult) to find the subject confusing, or boring, or dull–a most unholy trinity. After we had all talked for a while, I passed out some markers and paper, and we tried to draw a symbol for the Trinity. We all drew triangles, a lot like the triangle in the window above our high altar. But the little girl went rogue. She jotted something down, then turned the paper over and began to draw horses. Well, okay. You can’t win ‘em all. After a period of time we shared our drawings. I hesitated when I got to the little girl, not wanting to embarrass her. But she immediately stood up and brought her drawing over to me. She had drawn a big circle with four small, parallel lines in it. “Will you tell me about your drawing?” I asked. “Sure,” she replied. “The big circle is God, and inside it is the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and me.”

The Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and me. I don’t think Athanasius or Augustine or Aquinas would have endorsed her drawing. But in ten seconds of minimal effort she had got to the heart of a deep mystery. For in our baptisms, the infinite God invites us into God’s own Trinitarian life. 

Week after week, we confess that we believe in one God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But we cannot stop there. Having confessed it, we must live it, for it is in the triune God that we live and move and have our being. When we are baptized, we are adopted as children of God the Father and as brothers and sisters of Christ Jesus. We are invited to live in, to participate in the Life of the Trinity. 

And the Life of the Trinity is Love: It is perfect Love that binds the persons of the Trinity together in One Substance, and that catches us up into the mystery. This perfect Love is boundless, endless, depthless, infinite Love of such vastness that it is constantly being poured out completely, yet it is never depleted by a single ounce. It is an unconstrained Love that breaks every barrier, that is merciful and forgives without limit, that will never leave us even as we pass from life into death. It is this Love that we receive, and it is only from this Love that we can love others. We love because God first loved us. And Jesus says the world will know we are his disciples by how we love–whether or not we love like God: showing mercy, always forgiving, seeking and serving Christ in all persons, striving for justice and peace, respecting the dignity of every human being. For when we truly love God, when we truly live in God, we show forth in our lives what we profess by our faith.   

If you ask me, and maybe if you asked that little girl, that’s a lot more exciting than drawing triangles.