31/05/2026
SERMON: The Rev. John Kater All Saints Cathedral Trinity Sunday 31 May 2026
I think this is the only Sunday of the Church year when we celebrate a problem! Of course the problem is figuring out what God is like – or who God is. And the problem specifically is how we can recite week after week and year after year that we trust in one God, but then go on to talk in ways that sound a lot as if there were not one but 3…you know, Father, Son and Holy Spirit…as if God were a committee!
In fact, sometimes it seems as if trying to solve the problem only gives us more problems. What our ancestors were trying to express when they called God “Father” was their perception that God was the ultimate source of all that is… the Life-giver, the World-dreamer, the timeless Energy behind and before the Big Bang…the God who spoke and called this vast universe we live in into being, and called it ‘very good’. When I was working in Panama, I once visited a very old church that had a portrait of the Trinity. It showed three men who looked just like each other except that one of them had hair that was turning gray so we would know that was the Father. That painting really made it look as if the Trinity was a committee! You might well think that “Mother” is another image for the source of life. But the fact is, all our images turn out to be just that – images but not the reality. No one is ever going to be able to paint a picture of the God who wills the universe into being.
But when we’ve finally given up trying to find an image for that reality we call God, we run into another problem: What do we do about Jesus? How does he fit into what we believe about God? On one hand, he was just as we are. He was born, he grew up, he learned things he hadn’t known before, he got hungry and thirsty, he got tired, he suffered pain, and he died just like we do – and yet he was different than we are. For one thing, he did things we can’t do. For another, he was close to God in ways we can’t follow. And he was raised from the dead. It took his friends and the people who followed them a while to figure out how to think about Jesus in a way that made sense. It was John’s gospel that put it into words: God’s Word became flesh and came to live among us. John understood that while we can never fully understand God, the God who spoke and called the universe into being loves it so much that God really cares what happens to it – to us. God is not a silent Mystery; God wants us to know as much about who God is as we can comprehend. That’s why God has been speaking to this human race of ours as long as we’ve been around…inviting us to live the way that we’re meant to live, reminding us that we are meant to love one another, as God loves us. The Bible is really the record of God’s efforts to get through to us – and it turns out that’s a hard job! We human beings seem to miss the point more often than we get it right. So God doesn’t just keep speaking to us…God’s Word – what God wants to say to us – actually is born as a human being named Jesus, and finally does what God had been hoping all along somebody could do – somebody would do, which was to live a perfectly human life. A life defined by love, a love so deep and wide that he was willing to offer it on the cross, just so we would know how far God would go to bring us home when we were so lost. The love of God that called you and me into being, and that calls us by our name…living a human life in a man named Jesus so that we would finally get it: the God who dreamed up the universe loves us, more than we can imagine.
And of course once Jesus had died and been raised from the dead, I suppose that after his friends met him again they thought he would always be around when they needed him…but the Easter appearances didn’t last forever. Ad just last week we celebrated the great festival of Pentecost, when God’s Spirit – God’s powerful presence -- made itself known to his friends, and they found themselves changed. Frightened fishermen became powerful and fearless preachers. People who had never traveled anywhere except to Jerusalem found themselves going all over the Roman Empire to tell people the Good News they had learned from Jesus. People like Paul who thought that Jesus and the movement he started were the enemy were converted and became its greatest advocates…because God was pouring out that Spirit on God’s People as they had never experienced it before.
And gradually, as time went by, the people who had learned to follow Jesus came to understand that yes, this is who our God is. Our God is the source of all creation -- the parts we can see, the parts so far away we didn’t even know they were there, the parts so tiny only the most powerful microscopes could find them – the billions of galaxies that are flying through space, each with their billions of stars…the tiniest cells that tell a baby to start growing fingernails…all of them signs of a God whose creativity knows no bounds, who dreams a universe that no human being, not even the most advanced AI, could ever imagine. Truly almighty…maker of heaven and earth…of all that is, seen and unseen…
But our God is not just the creator of an astonishing universe…our God is a God who wants us to be friends…with each other and with God. Because God didn’t just get the universe started…God cares about it, God cares about the way it all is meant to fit together. But of course it doesn’t. Right now, as we celebrate who God is, on the other side of the world people are grieving, wondering how they will ever put their lives back together because bombs have fallen on their homes and their schools and their children…the human price of greed and love of power.
And God cares so much that God keeps telling us, over and over, that it doesn’t have to be that way. God who dreamed the universe into being still dreams about a human family that understands that is what it is – one family. And that is why God keeps reminding us: through the words we hear through the Bible, through the words Jesus left us, through the words God still speaks to us.
And God still sends the Spirit to give us all the gifts God wants us to have: when we are baptized, we not only become part of the Body of Christ, we receive God’s own Spirit and the gifts God gives us so that we can carry on God’s work of making God’s dream come true. Every one of us who has been baptized has been given God’s Spirit to make the world better…more peaceful…more loving…more like what God still dreams it can be. God invites us to be dreamers – to dare to believe that things don’t have to be the way they are…that peace, and love, and compassion, and kindness, and generosity can still change things – in our homes, in our office or workplace, in our schools, in our neighborhoods.
And one last thing: Matthew tell us that when the Risen Christ was saying his last goodbye to his friends after Easter, he charged them to carry on what he had done: teach what he had taught…tell everybody! And bring them into the Body of Christ to carry on his work through baptism – in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. You see, that’s not just who God is. That’s whose name we carry. That’s the God who created us. That’s the God who loves us. That’s the God who invites us to share the dream. That’s the God who can change us into the people we’re meant to be. No wonder we’re celebrating! Amen
