Trinity Sunday (Romans 8:12-17)

There’s a wisdom of why Trinity Sunday follows after Pentecost. Without experiencing the presence of the Holy Spirit within ourselves, it’s utterly impossible to experience the triune mystery of God. Note that this mystery is to experience first, not understand intellectually. The latter part of making sense of this divine mystery comes out of our personal and communal experience of God the Holy Trinity. Then what is this experience? ​


Today’s lesson from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans shows us where to begin to enter this experience. The keyword here is “a spirit of adoption” through Christ. This is to say that we look at ourselves as we set our eyes on Jesus of Nazareth. As much he is human, we are too human. This very humanness that both Jesus and we share in common is the very beginning to enter the mystery of the Holy Trinity. Where God the Son stands, we stand with the Son. This standing together is Christ. This state of standing together, which in other words is being in union with each other, simultaneously takes place as we notice the breath of God the Holy Spirit in our own breathing. As our focus is single-pointed to the very communal act of the Spirit and us, we are also one with the Spirit. In this imminent experience with the Spirit deeply breathed in us, we experience the transcendence of God the Father, meaning we go beyond ourselves. We’re out of ourselves, transcending ourselves which almost is felt like being gracefully consumed and unconditionally loved in the womb of God. 

I personally find naming the Holy Trinity as God the Transcendent, God the Wisdom, and God the Immanent more helpful than the traditional term, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit simply because the former captures our experience more accurately. (Sometimes traditional expressions are to be freshly compared with our experiences expressed in contemporary language.) This contemplative and mystical experience of God as the transcendent, the wisdom, and the immanent is what our baptismal experience is supposed to be like every day. 

Having briefly illustrated this experience of the Trinity, we might want to ask a practical question. Does this “holy” experience help me? If so, how? What does it do to me? Of course, we’re not talking about a guaranteed ticket to heaven. If we cannot experience the kingdom of God here and now, we probably won’t experience it even after we die. This question of how practical and beneficial this holy experience is to us is the reason why we believe what we believe. We all have some reasons to believe in this Christian faith. St. Paul points us to “life according to the flesh” which is governed by “a spirit of slavery.” His spiritual diagnosis of people in the world is that they’re living their lives according to the flesh. This life according to the flesh doesn’t merely mean that people are becoming more secular or less religious but the life enslaved by superficial, empty, and unsubstantial matters. 

When there is no serious question about life itself but only avoidance about finitude and mortality of everything that exists, we become far removed from the ultimate reality in which God reveals in us. This spirit of slavery keeps our focus away from our own mortality and falsely lures us to believe we can live forever. We are self-absorbed and self-attached that there’s no room to see others around us. The spirit of adoption, however, puts things in order that we’re not gods but children of God. How we realize ourselves as God’s children is through the contemplative experience with God the Trinity. So, yes the experience of the Trinity helps us by liberating us from the unreality and taking us back to the ultimate reality where we die and live in Christ between birth and death. It keeps us living in the present moment. 

Then again, this is not the end of it. When we’re living in the presence of the Trinity, we become radically selfless so that we become compassionate, kind, and loving. There is no reason to defend ourselves from others because in God we literally have nothing (or no self) to lose. Love is what’s left in us. This joining in God’s love in the eyes of the world is nothing but suffering. Thus, St. Paul says, “In fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.” At this point, how can anyone argue whether our belief in God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is simply an intellectual matter? It is real. It leads us to the cross. May this faith in the Triune God take us to the feet of Jesus of Nazareth. Amen.