The Rev. Dr. Brandon Perrine
Trinity A
Genesis 1:1-2:4
May 31, 2026
When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” And it was so. And God said, “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. Then God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so. And God said, “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. And God said, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.” So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm and every winged bird of every kind. And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.” And it was so. Then God said, “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness.” So God created humans in God’s image, in the image of God they were created. God saw everything that had been made, and indeed, it was very good. On the sixth day God finished the work that had been done, and rested on the seventh day.
~o~
Today is Trinity Sunday—the only Sunday of the church year dedicated not to a person or an event, but to a doctrine. Churches like ours don’t tend to make a big deal out of Trinity Sunday. It’s sometimes jokingly called “heresy Sunday,” because nearly every attempt to explain the Trinity eventually runs into difficulty somewhere. Even St. Patrick’s famous shamrock illustration doesn’t quite hold up under theological pressure. He suggested that each of the three leaves, like the three persons of the Trinity, is part of the whole. But that makes it sound like each person of the Trinity is only one third of God rather than fully God. It’s a heresy known as Partialism. Sorry, Patrick.
This whole Trinity thing has been a sticking point for centuries. So much so, in fact, that the Athanasian Creed emerged in the fifth and sixth centuries to counter all the so-called heretical beliefs about the Trinity popular at the time. The creed states: “that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Essence. For there is one Person of the Father; another of the Son; and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one.” The creed states further that failing to keep this faith “whole and undefiled,” one “shall perish everlastingly.” Yikes!
In my personal experience, most Christians consider it enough to “believe” in the Trinity without really being able to articulate or understand fully what it means. Lest you think that because we’re a noncreedal church within a noncreedal denomination, Congregationalists have side-stepped conflict over the doctrine, I’d like to point out that in 1825, our own denomination split over the issue with hundreds of churches—including the pilgrim church in Plymouth and Harvard University—leaving Congregationalism to form the American Unitarian Association. Particularly in a church like ours where we hold space for a variety of different beliefs, it seems safer to avoid the subject completely, doesn’t it? Then again, nothing ventured, nothing gained! And perhaps the difficulty of talking about it really is the point.
Religion has always attempted to give language to the realm of things which are beyond the current scope of human understanding and explanation. Religion undertakes the bold work of stretching the mind beyond what it knows for certain and enters the uncertain realm of ultimate things. As such, all language will finally fall short. All metaphors will be inadequate. All formulae will be lacking. But that is the work of theology—of god-talk—of religion. And I think it’s worthwhile.
To see how this works, we can look at how our ancestors tried to map out the mystery of the world’s very existence. Take, for example, the creation story from the first chapter of the book of Genesis. It begins with a creative force—God—and a chaotic pre-creation. The creative force orders the chaos, separating light from dark, day from night, atmosphere above from water below, and land from water. The creative force causes plant life to emerge on land and animal life to emerge in the oceans, in the skies, and then on the dry land. And the creative force brings about human life from the earth itself—from the dust, the carbon. All completed—finished—in six days with time to rest on the seventh.
We know, of course, that the universe began expanding nearly 14 billion years ago, with an event known as the Big Bang. We have the language of astrophysics to trace the formation of earth around 4.5 billion years ago, and the evolution of life beginning nearly 3.5 billion years ago. Yet, the ancient biblical creation story shares some remarkable parallels with what we’ve learned through modern science—including the emergence of dry land, the evolution of life from the seas, the late appearance of the human species, and the common core of carbon shared by all earthly life. Honestly, not bad for a story that was first told around a campfire before the invention of the Scientific Method! But that’s precisely the point of religion—to stretch the mind and attempt to give language to things which are beyond the current scope of human understanding and explanation.
Similarly, the language of the Holy Trinity is our ancestral attempt to give shape to how we experience that very same Divine presence. We begin with that enduring creative force—existent since the beginning of time. Then, the early disciples experienced that same Divine love anew, embodied in the revolutionary life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. And finally, after the crucifixion, the community discovered that this love could not be contained by a tomb; it returned as an ongoing, animating presence—a Holy Spirit—breathing life into the followers long after Jesus was physically gone. The doctrine of the Trinity stretches the mind with a new paradigm for divinity and for humanity. It is an ongoing attempt to give language to things which are beyond the scope of raw understanding, but deeply felt in our everyday lives.
While beyond their understanding and explanation, both the creation story and the doctrine of the Holy Trinity attempt to give language to things which are within the scope of human experience. The ancients that first conceived of a seven-day creation knew that the world started at some point, experienced life in its infinite complexity, and recognized that there was something unique about themselves—about human beings—in the grand scheme of things.
So they told a story.
The early followers of Jesus experienced a sense of transcendent truth, holy wisdom, and godlike love in the person of Jesus—things undiminished by his death, even increased by it.
So they told a story.
You and I will experience things so deep and so profound that we, too, will interpret them through the lens of faith and tell our own stories. The words we choose will not be identical to the ancient creeds, nor will they be the exact same stories told by future generations of humans. But they are ours. And like the creation story and the doctrine of the Trinity, they carry a living truth for us today—because that’s what religion does. That’s what it offers: a chance to explore the realm of things which are beyond the current scope of human understanding and explanation, but never beyond the realm of human experience. It gives us the language to talk about it, share it, and build community with one another.
May we have the grace to accept the stories we receive from the past as profound truths for those who told them, and a foundation for who we are. And may we courageously continue our own search for meaning, telling our own stories of love, grace, and justice in our own time.
Amen.
