Trinity Sunday Unity in Diversity

The Rev. Nancy S. Streufert

31 May 2015

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Yesterday, several of us laid to rest our dear friend Sarah Kavasharov in the memorial
garden at St. Albans. I first met Sarah in 2003, shortly after moving from southern
California to Humboldt County. When I joined Education for Ministry (EfM) that fall,
Sarah was in her last year of that four year seminar program designed especially for lay
ministers, developed by one of the seminaries of the Episcopal Church. Throughout the
academic school year EfM groups all over the country meet weekly to study Scripture,
reflect theologically on current issues and events, and worship together.
Most people who know us both pretty well agree that the friendship that grew between
Sarah and me was rather unlikely to happen. In some very important ways, we were
quite radically different. Besides the difference in our family and ethnic origins she
who grew up in Alaska, the daughter of a native Aleut mother and a stern, aloof father
from Kansas in a poor family torn by alcoholism and abandonment . . . and me from a
rather traditional, intact all-American Midwestern Protestant family we disagreed
about issues related to . . . you guessed it, politics and religion!
For example, justice in the world was a hot topic. Not the ends, we both agreed on
those, but it was the means through which these desired ends could be achieved that
caused our heated discussions: things like just war and military action oversees: it was
the early days of the Iraq war and I had just ended a long career in defense electronics
at Raytheon in southern California. And then there was religion . . . a student of
philosophy, Sarah questioned everything and was highly critical of Christian doctrine
that seemed to declare with certainty things that in her mind were indefinable.
But as we became better acquainted in the trusted environment of EfM where we could
share our innermost thoughts and wrestle with our beliefs with great intensity and
disagreement, but without fear of disrespect or ridicule, Sarah and I came to understand
that we could be good friends even if we disagreed heartily on big important things.
Beyond EfM and over the last decade our friendship deepened and our disagreements
mellowed as we discovered all the things we shared in common: crossword puzzles
especially the New York Sunday Times, detective murder mysteries especially those of
Reginald Hill and Arthur Upfield; the three young Italian tenors Il Volo whose videos we
watched together; Mozarts opera The Magic Flute; TVs The Good Wife; Vogue patterns
we once used for making clothes in our sewing days; and that we both became lawyers.
What I am getting at here is that Sarah and I became united in friendship while retaining
our unique and distinctive selves.
And that brings me to the feast day of the Holy Trinity that we Christians celebrate
today. The doctrine of the Trinity deals with the relationship of the three persons of the
one God: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit in unity, in
distinctiveness, with love as the underlying essence of their Being.

Trinity Sunday Unity in Diversity

The Rev. Nancy S. Streufert
31 May 2015

Every sermon I have ever heard preached on Trinity Sunday has begun with a lament
about the difficulty of the topic, and I think that what these preachers have meant is not
that they dont understand the doctrine themselves, but that communicating it to those
in the pews is the challenge. And they are right about that.
Its a paradoxical notion that a god of three persons could also be a monotheistic god.
But that doesnt mean that we cant make some sense of it without parsing the endless
theological debates that have been going on since the earliest days of the Church . . .
though some of us love to do this! And out of these debates over the first centuries
came the basic contours of the Christian faith as formulated in the Nicene Creed that we
affirm every Sunday.
Critics are right that the doctrine of the Trinity does not have an explicit biblical basis.
The New Testament writers say a great deal about God, Jesus, and the Spirit, but no
writer expounds explicitly on the relationship of the three that develops in later
Christian writings. There are two instances that come close, though: Paul ends his
second letter to the Corinthians with The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of
God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.
And at the end of Matthews Gospel, the risen Jesus commands his apostles to make
disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of
the Holy Spirit . . .
But the doctrine of the Trinity does not hang on just these two examples. As the early
Christians reflected on what happened at Calvary with Jesus death and resurrection and
as they reinterpreted the Hebrew Scriptures in a radically new way, it was nearly
impossible to explain away Gods Trinitarian nature a divine unity in diversity.
From the book of Genesis we learn that we are made in Gods likeness and image. Do
you recall that the pronouns are plural? God says, We shall make humankind in our
image. Of course biblical scholars and theologians have speculated and argued endlessly
about what this means, but there is overwhelming agreement that we, humanity, were
created to mirror the three persons in the divine Trinity in its relationship of harmony
and love unity in diversity centered in love.
In our baptism, we become incorporated into the divine life of God, i.e., we are taken
into the Trinity. And what does this mean? Br. James Koester of the Society of Saint John
the Evangelist describes it this way: By our baptism we are invited not merely to
understand, but to experience the Trinity. Every form of human community takes its
cue from the Holy Trinity, he says. In community we bear witness to the social nature
of human life as willed by our Creator. Human beings bear the image of the triune God
and are not meant to be separate and isolated.
Today is the day we particularly celebrate Gods glory and that praise and celebration
is permeated throughout our service today in the hymns, the Canticle of the Three
Young Men, the Scriptures, and the prayers.
2

Trinity Sunday Unity in Diversity

The Rev. Nancy S. Streufert
31 May 2015

Gods Trinitarian character: love in unity and distinctiveness. And that is why I told the
story of my relationship with Sarah: to illustrate that in our differences we could still be
united in loving friendship, reflecting however imperfectly the divine Trinity, a unity in
diversity that exemplifies the life that God intends for His entire creation.
So here is what I propose to you today and in the coming weeks and months get to
know someone who doesnt share your beliefs or your culture or who doesnt look or
act like you; go make some unlikely friends and really listen to their point of view; build
community in a way that has us living into the reality of the Trinity, our destiny as
baptized Christians.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.