Trinity Sunday 2009

A sermon delivered to All Saints Anglican Church on Trinity Sunday, June 7, 2009, at the convent Chapel of St. Mary's Medical Center, Huntington, WV.

Almighty Creator, who hast made all things,
The World cannot express all thy glories,
Even though the grass and the trees should sing.

The Father has wrought so great a multitude of wonders
That they cannot be equaled.
No letters can contain them, no letters can express them.

He who made the wonder of the world
Will save us, has saved us.
It is not too great a toil to praise the Trinity

Purely, humbly, in skillful verse
I should delight to give praise to the Trinity

In the Name of the Father and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.


The little poem I just quoted comes from Wales and probably originated some time in the ninth century. I found it in a book called ‘A Celtic Psaltery’, compiled by David Adam, who is the vicar of the Holy Island in Northumbria and who has written or compiled 15 books about Celtic spirituality.



In preparing for this day of marking Trinity Sunday, my thoughts immediately gravitated to the Celts because as a culture, they seem to have had an intuitive understanding of ‘threeness’, even before the Gospel reached their shores.

Author Timothy Joyce notes that an awareness of ‘threeness’ was explicit in the pagan worship of the goddess Bridget, ‘who appeared in three forms: the goddesses of fire, of poetry, and of fertility, all three named Bridget!” Later, when the Celts became Christians, “this Trinitarian consciousness permeated Celtic spirituality An awareness of the threefold God shaped prayer after prayer, and a triad way of expressing prayer became common as well.” Joyce goes on to illustrate how “One such ritual prayer was a practice immediately following the birth of a child. The baby was carried in a circle around the room three times in the direction of the sun. Then it was handed over a fire three times in purification, and finally three drops of water were placed on its head. Thus was the child marked with the Trinity prior to its formal baptism.” (Celtic Christianity, A sacred tradition, a vision of hope, pgs. 19, 20).

Now I don’t know about you, but my understanding of the Trinity is considerably less ‘organic’ than this – although come to think of it, my wife comes from a family of three girls, Cindy and I had three girls – and my oldest daughter has three children – so maybe there is an organic connection to the Trinity in our family after all… and perhaps that family metaphor is apt.

“The God whom the Celtic peoples know is above all the Godhead who is Trinity, the God whose very essence is that of a threefold unity of person, three persons bound in a unity of love… [this] speaks …of harmony, unity, interrelationship, [and] interdependence…’ says Esther de Waal in her book, The Celtic Way of Prayer (‘CWP’pg. 38).

Our Western intellectual tradition leads us to view the Trinity in a rational, ‘scientific’ mode, as a sort of problem to be solved rather than as a mystery to be celebrated. Our minds tend to trip on this mystery, and instead of increasing our faith in God, this doctrine may actually become a stumbling block to us.

What Celtic spirituality offers us is an understanding of the Trinity that is natural, immediately accessible, and which can be understood in metaphors from common life, as in these lines from the Poem Book of Gael, complied by Eleanor Gull(quoted in de Waal, pgs. 39, 40)
“Three folds of the cloth, yet only one napkin is there,
Three Joints in the finger, but still only one finger fair.
Three leaves of the shamrock, yet no more than one shamrock to wear,
Frost, snow-flakes and ice, all in water their origin share
Three Persons in God; to one God alone we make prayer.”

This homey understanding of the Trinity resorts naturally to song and poetry in order to express deep mysteries that cannot really be understood or parsed intellectually, but which can actually be lived out intimately.

Esther de Waal says it well for us: “I want to be able to take my Trinitarian understanding into my daily life, into my praying and living, and words such as this help me to do that.” (CWP, pg. 45).

She’s talking about things like starting your day by splashing your face with water three times in honor of the Trinity – or crossing yourself “in the name of the Father, the son and the Holy Spirit” before you turn on your computer or begin a new work. She’s talking about contemplating the Trinity and then having words available to us such as the traditional prayer that an Irish woman might have used to bank the household fire at night:
The sacred Three
To save,
To shield,
To surround
The hearth,
The house,
The household
This eve,
This night,
Oh! This eve,
This night,
And every night,
Each single night.
Amen. (CWP pg. 48).

Do you have a relationship with the Trinity like this? …Me neither. It’s just not a part of my cultural equipment to think this way – even though I am trying to apply some of these ideas in my daily life. This is why we need words to help shape our thought process. Words such as the Nicene Creed, which we recite every Sunday – or the Athanasian Creed, which we will use today at the end of this sermon. Words such as this opening verse from a hymn by St. Columba:
The High Creator, the Unbegotten Ancient of Days,
Was without origin of beginning, limitless,
He is and He will be for endless ages of ages,
With whom is the only-begotten Christ, and the
Holy Spirit,
Co-eternal in the everlasting glory of divinity.
We do not confess three gods, but say one God,
Saving our faith in three most glorious Persons.
(Quoted in CWP, pg. 45).

Words such as these concerning the Trinity from St. Patrick:

“[Our God] has a Son co-eternal with himself and similar in all respects to himself; and neither is the Son younger than the Father, nor is the Father older than the Son; And the Holy Spirit breathes in them; Not separate are the Father and the Son and Holy Spirit.”

Who among us thinks this way naturally? Nobody – which is why we need these exalted and poetic words to help shape our thinking and our praying.


And here let me make a short defense for our liturgical style of worship. Our culture has come to denigrate Words and despise repetition. Words have been so devalued that important concepts in Religion, Politics and Morality commonly get swept under the carpet during debates with moronic phrases like “Whatever…”

Folks, Words matter. They matter because they convey meanings that are really important. But they also matter because they are beautiful and because the beauty of words feeds our soul. Our Bible contains books of Poetry and Wisdom. There are quotations from ancient hymns, and Songs, or Canticles, sung at important times by people like Moses, Mary, Simeon and Isaiah.

Compared to these wonderful Canticles, our normal daily vocabulary is pathetically limited when it comes to expressing depth and beauty in prayer.

We also think that ‘spontaneous’ prayer is superior to written prayer because it “comes from heart” and is more immediate. I’m not denying this and I do think spontaneous prayer is important, but we are also creatures who need input from outside ourselves to shape our spirituality and to help us to have vocabulary to express grander concepts than, “Just help us to have a good day today Lord,” or “God please heal us” or “Give us the money we need.”

Our liturgical prayers are carefully crafted to express deep truths in beautiful ways so that we can have something interesting to say to God – and so that our spirits may be nourished by the music of Words. We memorize and pray Songs and poetry from Scripture, as well as Collects and other prayers, because we believe in the Word, the Logos, but also because we believe in words as meaningful and spiritually helpful to us.

Liturgical worship is word based in both of these senses of ‘Word”. And on a day like Trinity Sunday, we need beautiful and precise words to help us grasp mysteries such as the Trinity.

Returning to our subject, I think the real importance of the Trinity in our daily lives is to help us understand the interrelatedness of all things and to help us grasp that God is not a distant and far-off impersonal Concept, but a deeply personal relational being who is with us in our everyday activities and who wants to be part of our daily lives. This is what the Celts seem to have grasped intuitively – that God is indeed Emmanuel – ‘With us”. He is indeed a ‘very present help in time of trouble (Ps. 46), a comfort to our souls, an Illuminator of words and the Word, as well the One who convicts us of our sins and graciously forgives us. He is the Creator God who pours out his gifts upon us abundantly each day and the One to who all praise and honor is due. He is the One we respond to in love –just as our Celtic Prayer of Dedication so beautifully expresses it:

“I am giving Thee offering with my whole thought,
I am giving Thee Love with my whole heart,
I am giving Thee affection with my whole devotion.
And I am giving Thee my soul, O God of all Gods.”

I pray for us that we may all enjoy this deeply personal affection for, and devotion to our God. May we also enjoy the Celtic appreciation for ‘threeness’ and for the poetry and music of our liturgical worship. In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. AMEN.