05/06/2026
Last Sunday was Trinity Sunday. This Trinity Sunday sermon, from the fictitious church of St Faithful's, Havnot, could have been preached from any pulpit across the land and has a lot to teach us. You can also read our Chaplain Roy's equally stimulating thoughts on the long season of Trinity on our website blog.
DOUBTERS ON THE MOUNTAIN
Canon Tom Kennar wasn't preaching today, because he was completing his Big Birthday holiday. But if he had been, on this Trinity Sunday, here's what he would have said (or so he tells us) from a previous year. We hope you find it helpful (since our OWN Vicar has STILL not learned to write out his sermons in full, instead of preaching from a messy collection of post-it notes scattered around the pulpit).
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Readings: Isaiah 40.12-17, 27-end
Psalm 8
2 Corinthians 13.11-end
Matthew 28.16-20
There are Sundays in the Church’s year that arrive with a donkey, or a baby, or fire, or bread and wine. And then there is Trinity Sunday, which arrives carrying a doctrine, a baffling diagram, and a warning label: “Handle with care. May cause heresy if explained too confidently.”
Because the Trinity is not easy. One God, three persons. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer. Not three gods. Not one God wearing three hats. Not a divine committee (with minutes and apologies for absence). And yet Christian faith insists that when we speak of God, we do not speak of a solitary monarch sitting alone in the heavens, but of living relationship, of communion, of love moving endlessly within God’s own life and overflowing into creation.
That is why our readings today matter. They do not give us a neat formula. They give us space. And they invite awe.
Isaiah stands before the vastness of creation and asks: Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand? Who has marked off the heavens with a span? It is poetry of scale, designed to make us feel small — not worthless, but properly small. Small in the way one feels under a wide night sky, realising that life is far more mysterious than anything we can manage.
Psalm 8 does the same thing with astonishment: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars… what are human beings that you are mindful of them?” Not “How can I understand God?” but “Why should God care about us at all?” Why should the maker of galaxies notice our tiny muddles, our anxieties, our parish rotas, our lost spectacles, our uncharitable thoughts about the person who chooses the hymn we cannot stand?
And yet, says the psalm, God does notice. God gives dignity to humanity. God crowns us with glory and honour. Not because we are impressive in ourselves — history has provided evidence to the contrary — but because God’s love is generous. Creation is the overflow of divine delight.
That, for me, is a helpful way into the Trinity. The Trinity is not a puzzle to be solved. It is a way of saying that at the heart of all things there is not domination, isolation, or control, but relationship. God is not lonely power. God is communion. God is love in motion.
And that matters deeply, because we become like the God we worship.
If our God is imagined mainly as a ruler issuing commands from a distance, then religion easily becomes hierarchy, fear, obedience, and the policing of boundaries. It becomes the anxious business of deciding who is in and who is out. It becomes faith with a clipboard.
But if God is communion — if God’s own life is mutuality, giving and receiving, difference held in unity — then Christian life must look like that too. It must become reconciliation, generosity, listening, justice, tenderness, welcome. This is why Paul’s words to the Corinthians are so important. “Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace.” And then that beautiful blessing: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”
Notice the shape of it. Grace. Love. Communion. Not suspicion, control, and panic. Not “the anxiety of the institution, the wrath of the committee, and the minutes of the previous meeting be with you all.” Grace, love, communion. That is what the Church is supposed to breathe.
Of course, the Church does not always breathe it. Sometimes we wheeze. Sometimes we cough. Sometimes we sound less like the life of the Trinity and more like a badly tuned accordion being sat on by a verger. But the calling remains. We are invited to become a sign of God’s own relational life.
Then comes the Gospel. The risen Jesus meets the disciples on a mountain. Matthew tells us something wonderfully honest: “When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted.”
That little phrase may be one of the most comforting in the whole Bible. Some doubted. Not before Easter. Not before the resurrection. Not before the great commission. There they are, face to face with the risen Christ, and still some doubted.
And Jesus does not say, “Come back when your doctrine is tidy.” He sends them anyway. “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations… baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit… and remember, I am with you always.”
The mission of God is entrusted not to the spiritually flawless, but to worshipping doubters. To people who kneel and hesitate at the same time. To people with faith and questions tangled together like cables in the church audio-system cupboard.
That should give Christians courage. We do not need to pretend certainty we do not have. We do not need to reduce mystery to slogans. We do not need to defend God as if God were fragile. We can stand before the immensity of Isaiah, the wonder of Psalm 8, the tenderness of Paul’s blessing, and the unfinished faith of the disciples, and say: this is enough. We are loved. We are called. We are accompanied.
Trinity Sunday, then, is not an exam in divine algebra; an attempt to understand how A can also be B and yet both be the same as, yet different from C. It is an invitation into a way of being. To honour the mystery beyond us, the Christ beside us, and the Spirit within and among us. To live as though relationship is holy. To resist every voice that turns faith into fear, or a mechanism for domination. To refuse the loneliness of power. To practise communion in a divided world.
God is not a thing to be explained, but a life to be shared. The Creator who holds the oceans in the hollow of a hand is the same God who notices us. The Christ who sends doubters is the same Christ who stays with them. The Spirit who binds the Church together is the same Spirit who keeps nudging us beyond ourselves and beyond our little borders of belonging.
So, on Trinity Sunday, we do not need to understand God completely. In fact, it would be worrying if we did. A God small enough to fit neatly inside my head would probably not be large enough to save me, or you, or the world.
But we can trust the shape of God’s life: grace, love, communion.
And we can begin again, today, in that name.
Amen.
