Trinity Sunday (Matthew 28:16-20)

The doctrine of the Trinity is the most challenging topic to preach on. One of the reasons is that no one really gets what it is yet it’s what distinguishes Christians from other monotheistic traditions. It is also the reason that our fellow Muslim and Jewish friends might be puzzled about our faith in one God. They can get the Father part as well as the Holy Spirit part because they can be considered as a way to refer to God. But Jesus the Son of God?! Isn’t he a human being just like us?  Jesus is the most troublesome reason to make sense of this doctrine of the Trinity but is the very starting point for Christians to experience God and learn to embody God’s presence. ​

This reflection on the Trinity has two parts. The first is more important than the second one. You can skip the second part but I would like to encourage you to keep the first one in mind so that you actually deepen your spiritual practice of contemplation. 

1. How the doctrine of the Trinity is approached in general is metaphysical. It’s talked about in the abstract. It’s like one’s hopeless attempt to grab the air with a hand. The only way to grasp is to breathe it in. This is much more concrete and real. Now, when we talk about the Trinity, it is the Christian way of experiencing God. We Christian experience God’s presence first and express it in a trinitarian way. It is how we make sense of God’s presence in us. So, I would like to invite you to experience and embody God’s presence in a trinitarian way. 

We start with Jesus of Nazareth. We look at him and listen to his teaching of God’s kingdom dwelling in us. God is “nowhere” out there and “now here” in us. The risen Christ breathes in us as though God breathed into Adam the breath of life (Genesis 2:7). Our breath is the entry to the Holy Spirit, the Breath of God. Our spiritual practice of contemplation is not only our lifeline but also our way into the presence of God through breath. Jesus shows and teaches us the way to the very source of God’s presence through our breath that originates from the Breath of Unforgetting or the Spirit of Truth. In our contemplative experience, we stand before God the source of all that is, the Ultimate Reality, the Glorious Transcendent. We embody the presence of God in a trinitarian way through contemplation. This embodied experience must come before we express God as the Trinity in words. Every time we sit in silence to contemplate, we encounter the triune God. Whenever you hear the term “Trinity,” it is really “Try, unity!” with God through trinitarian contemplation. 

2. It seems that in Christian history any attempt to make sense of the Trinity, as though it is a mathematical problem, has either failed or been unsatisfactory. If it fails, then one becomes a heretic. If it doesn’t, then the phrase “mystery” is used. There’s indeed an illogical aspect to the doctrine. We all know 1+1+1=3. But the doctrine seems to insist that the answer is 1, which is arithmetically incorrect. Theologians must somehow turn 3 to 1. Well, the only way to make 3 to 1 arithmetically is to subtract two fingers from three fingers. This does nothing to help our understanding of the Trinity. Perhaps there’s another way to make sense of this confusing doctrine. 

The real difficulty may begin with our tendency to make sense of God or a living being as a noun or an entity. Our conception of God the Father as 1, the Son as 1, and the Holy Spirit as 1 presupposes that God is a static being or an object (objectified by us) rather than a dynamic force in action. This way of understanding is applied to perceiving us human beings as well. You are counted as 1 as I am counted as 1. This being as 1 in a numerical sense, however, doesn’t capture anything. Let's ask ourselves whether we can be reduced to 1 just because of our nature of having length, breadth, and depth, in this corporeal body.​​

No, we are more than the number 1. This isn’t an emotionally charged rhetorical response we often hear that we are not just statistics. We just cannot be reduced to 1 because it doesn't accurately capture what we are. Think of yourself as the closest example of a human being. Are you a number? Are you a static being? The answer is no. Each one of us is a dynamic force. We are a verb rather than a noun. We are a function in a mathematical sense rather than a number. In the same manner, God is a verb, not a noun. Always simultaneously acting, living, and breathing. Then, our conception of the Trinity is not about that forcing us to believe 1+1+1=1 when it’s 3 but about F(f)+F(s)+F(hs)=F(t) in that each one is understood as a function of f=Father, and s=Son, and hs=Holy Spirit, and of t=Trinity. 

How does this functional combinability play out in our concrete reality? Again, as I mentioned above, we start with Jesus. We look at how he functions contemplatively in his inner life and acts compassionately in his outer life. We embody how he functions.