Trinity Sunday: Shouldn’t We Have Heard This Before Seminary?
Romans 5:1-5
Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we[a] have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we[b] boast in the hope of the glory of God. 3 Not only so, but we[c] also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; 4 perseverance, character; and character, hope. 5 And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.
GATHERING FOR SUNDAY
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Greetings all,
This Sunday is Trinity Sunday. I remember my first church’s robust assertion of a Triune God. I presumed that trinitarian theology was obvious and always had been. Flash forward about 20 years, I’m in seminary as a friend has just sat through a theology lesson about the Trinity. He asked me, “shouldn’t I have heard this before now?” -this actually happened more often than you’d think.
Christian theology, and Jewish theology before it, is sometimes presented as an obvious set of prepositions that were widely accepted from the beginning. But that’s not really true. Meanwhile, we often describe our lives with God as both a personal and corporate journey.
If our faith life is a journey, it shouldn’t surprise us that the theology we treasure has been much the same way- often taking centuries to settle through dialogue (or fighting), prayer, reflection, and scriptural study. And yet, a number of my young seminary friends encountered a mini-crisis of faith then they learned the history of our own tradition. They missed the journey to give us our current robust faith because it was always presented in its final form rather than as our faith’s process of growth.
So, this Sunday is Trinity Sunday. Let’s be a people that celebrate our history. We’ll look through the Hebrew people’s national journey towards monotheism (the belief that there is or worship of only one God). We’ll look at the experiences of the very first Christians that revealed to them that they needed to seek a new understanding of that monotheism because God was far more than they’d originally understood. More than that, we’ll remind ourselves that our worship and faith is what it is because God is Trinity.
Peace,
Zach