Blessed Trinity
The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill preaches a sermon on Matthew 28:16–20, “Blessed Trinity”. The Marsh Chapel Choir performs “Tibi laus a 4” by Orlando di Lasso and “Father All-holy” by Charles Wood.
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Sermon Text
Blessed Trinity
Lectionary Texts (Genesis 1, 2 Corinthians 13, Matthew 28)
May 31, 2026
Marsh Chapel
Robert Allan Hill
Eternal Father strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave
Who bidd’st the mighy ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep
O hear us when we cry to Thee
For those in peril on the sea
For this Sunday our lessons evoke a Triune God, God in three persons, blessed Trinity. Some find God readily and quickly in Nature. Genesis speaks to you. Some find God readily and quickly in order. Corinthians speaks to you. Some find God readily and quickly in worship. Matthew speaks to you.
Father, Son, Spirit. These are choice, endlessly lovely passages, any one of which, and any verse from any one of which should deserve our full preaching attention and acclamation. Let us honor and remember them.
The Christian doctrine of Trinity is of course a deeply mysterious matter, out of reach of most of us most of the time. How can God be, both one and three? Faith we must guess involves more than math. Not less than math, but more than math. If nothing else, about the Trinity, we remember this: God is relational, on this teaching. At the heart of the divine there is relationship, of First to Second to Third to Second to First. This is what the early church found in Jesus: the God to whom Jesus prayed, the God who guided and inspired Jesus, and the God in Jesus. This is what the early church found in the Scripture, including ours today. This is what the early church found in Life: the rush of creativity, the joy of love, the breath of spirit. In our Gospel today, the Scripture goes even further, in a way giving privilege, at least here, to Spirit that guides into truth. Once the creation has emerged; once redemption has been offered; then it is a matter of spirit, Spirit, wind, breath, gusting Spirit of God.
We preach and pray at the crossroads of faith and culture. This is true for every congregation, pulpit and place, but especially and keenly so right now, in America, and at Marsh Chapel. In a new, perhaps conflicted way, across the country, we may be listening this summer for words of grace, out of our holy scripture, out of our traditions, out of our sacred history, and wondering, hoping, perhaps doubting but still hoping, that these as preached may help us make some sense of what is becoming of us, as a people and as a country, in our time. And what is becoming of us, as a people and a country, in our culture? And what has become of us, in the last ten years, as a people and as a country?
You are good people of faith. On Sunday, as Christian people, you come together in church to worship God, to find a way through the next six days or six months or six years, to live a faithful life in an unfaithful culture. You desire a faith amenable to culture, and a culture amenable to faith. For what good is a baptized cleansing if we are simply thrown back into the mire? Personal and social holiness are married to one another. Loving faith expects loving culture.
For all the attention we—rightly—give to politics and economics, it is really the cultural realities that have most impact on individual lives, over time. When an 8 year old bursts through the back door, crying, saying that her school friend will be deported, hers is a culturally inflicted wound; when an 87 year old woman, in a nursing home, rues the collapse of her life long party, and surveys its demise and damages with the word ‘dismaying’, hers is a cultural assessment; when a leader, given to insulting all about him (as my Dad said, ‘its one thing to be tough, but its another to be mean’), we suffer a cultural decline; when only 24% of 17-24 year olds are eligible to seek admission into armed forces (the other 76% ineligible due to obesity, lack of a high school diploma, drug use, criminal record, failure of physical exam or other), here we trace cultural influence; when forms of worship, meant for enchantment, give way over multiple generations to a pseudo-worship aimed at entertainment, we face a cultural deficit; in short, when a culture, like ours, has a mirror held up to it, and the image is more appalling than appealing, then some among us may begin to return to, revert to, a reconsideration of our more ancient repositories of wisdom: scripture, history, thought, and scrutinized experience. Today, Genesis and Corinthians and Matthew. In an age of broad cultural malaise, some may gird the loins and toughen up and come to church and faith, to seek more steadily the reassurance, peace, insight, and resolve to be found in moments of truth, goodness, beauty—and ordered worship. Those in the pulpits across this country have our work cut out for us this year, as we have keenly for the last ten years. And we are not getting a passing grade yet. Here is one measure. The courts get a B. The press gets a C. The congress gets a D. But civil society—very much including the churches and our pulpits—is lower still. For all the work done, we have plenty more to do, weekday and Sunday, and Sunday by Sunday. How shall we invoke and evoke faith fit for culture and culture fit for faith? How will we address incivility in a civil way? How do we oppose demagoguery with a respect for democracy? How do we contrast buffoonery with beauty? How does one supplant cultural disorder with liturgical order? How do we combat fear with faith? We have our work cut out for us. And yes, we have plenty of work to do.
Thank goodness we are not alone! Blessed Trinity blesses us, especially as Trinity leans to Spirit.
Hear good news. There is a self-correcting Spirit of Truth loose in the Universe, leading us.
Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians is one of the great high peaks of the New Testament. It is about a whole new life, a new creation. In fact, it is one of the highest peaks in the whole range, a Mount Everest of the Bible.
After Paul had been converted to Christ, he spent 17 years in unremarkable, quiet ministry. We know nothing of these two decades spent in Arabia. All the letters we have of Paul come from a later decade. Paul was converted to Christ, as he says earlier, “by apocalypse”. Christ revealed himself to Paul. Thus, for Paul, the authority in Christ, is not finally in the Scripture, nor in traditions, nor in reason, nor in experience. Christ captured Paul through none of these, but rather through revelation, the apocalypse of God.
There is a singular, awesome freedom in the way Paul understands Christ, including in the Corinthian letters. We have yet, I believe, in the church that bears His name, to acknowledge in full that freedom.
After these 17 years, Paul went up to Jerusalem to meet with the pillars of the church. Can you picture the moment? All in one room: Paul, Peter, Andrew, James, John, Titus, Barnabas. And in that room there was argument, real and hard difference. Paul preached the cross of Christ to unreligious people, and they heard. What would the Jerusalem elders say? Jesus was a Jew and had been circumcised. So also were all the first Christians, including Paul himself. But God had done something astounding. It was the Gentiles, not the Jews, who fervently believed the Good News. Should these unreligious children of God be brought back into the Covenant of Circumcision? No, they all agreed, no. God had done something new. So, Peter went to the circumcised, and Paul went to the uncircumcised. Peter went to the Jews, and Paul to the Gentiles. They agreed to disagree, agreeably. And the meeting ended and it was settled. As Paul writes, today, they ‘put things in order’. They put things in order.
In this passage, Paul points to a clue, as well, to one of our great arguments today. Here, your identity is not to be inferred not only from creation….but from new creation!
So, my teacher, J L Martyn: “Paul uses an argument explicitly based on creation, drawing certain conclusions from the “things God has made” in “the creation of the cosmos”. In effect, Paul says in this passage that God’s identity and the true identity of human beings can both be inferred not just from creation, but from new creation.
“What a different argument lies before us (in Paul). Here the basis is explicitly not (only) creation, but rather the new creation in which the building blocks of the old creation are declared to be non-existent. It is Christ and the community of those incorporated into him who lie beyond religious distinctions…Baptism is a participation both in Christ’s death and in his life; for genuine, eschatological life commences when one is taken into the community of the new creation, in which unity in God’s Christ has replaced religious-ethnic differentiation. In a word, religious and ethnic differentiations and that which underlies them—the Law— are identified in effect as the “old things” that have now “passed away”, giving place to the new creation (2 Cor 5:17).” (Martyn, in passim, Anchor Bible Commentary: Galatians).
In other words, we are called to honor and love each other, in a way that mirrors both creation and new creation.
God is calling into existence a new community of faith working through love. There is your identity. Not just what is natural but what is heavenly about us forms our primary identity. That is, the Bible itself, opens the way for an understanding of identity that is not just nature or creation, but new creation. This is the community of faith working through love. Here, there is a place where God may be doing something new, revealing something new. God is doing something new, which includes all in the community of faith working through love.
Will you come to worship, and work in a community of faith working through love? Will you?
Friends, even in a time of outrageous cultural and political decline, even in the summer of 2026, there is the possibility of something new, something better, something lastingly good. God can bring good out of evil. God can bring good even out of nightmare that is America, 2026.
This morning we worship on Trinity Sunday. The Triune God summons us to relationship and complexity and courage to seek the truth. The Spirit of God leads us into all truth: Come Trinity Sunday we recall that there is, by God’s triune grace, a self-correcting spirit of Truth loose in the universe. If you love Jesus, and especially if you love the Bible, then you may just find courage not only to defend a moral life in a post-moral culture, but also to preserve freedom for those who have found a whole new life, and so are very harbingers of the new creation.
To conclude, think of Franklin Roosevelt, as a young man, losing his legs, his mobility, his strength, right in the heart of his moment, his leadership, his life. But he not only continued, he prevailed. He prevailed. He not only prevailed, he soared. He soared. Creation gave way to new creation. He drew on God in three persons, blessed Trinity. And his very favorite hymn is the one we sing today:
O Trinity of love and power
Thy children shield in danger’s hour
From rock and tempest, fire and foe
Protect them where so er they go
Thus evermore shall rise to thee
Glad hymns of praise from land and sea.