Trinity Sunday 15 June 2025
Readings: Proverbs 8.1-4, 22-31; Romans 5.1-5; John 16.12-15
Theme: It’s Trinity Sunday, Stupid!
Have you heard the one about…..?
I don’t know about you, but I am pretty hopeless at telling jokes. I much prefer situational humour; the type which emerges in a context and unfolds the funny side of it. God, as Trinity, is very much a situational comic, a co(s)mic-story teller in three voices completely harmonized as One. The context within which God reveals Godself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is co(s)mic history. This is the theatre upon which the unfolding story of God is told. It is a context which has emerged over 13.8 billion years, with the ‘Johnny-come-lately’ of human beings emerging sometime less than one-million years ago.
This story of God is recounted in our first reading today from the Book of Proverbs. This is an ancient part of biblical literature whose objective is to stop us being so stupid, which is easier said than done, as I am sure we all aware from our personal experience. The thing about being stupid is that it occurs when we lack wisdom. We may know a lot of things, but that is not wisdom. Wisdom is not knowing a lot, but loving a lot. We need to love to be wise and being a loving person requires us to know God.
Knowing God is loving, because God is love. But you can only love, when you know who God is. This is why God reveals Godself to us throughout co(s)mic history, because only in coming to love God can we be wise and stop being stupid. We are stupid, of course, because like much of the rest of the cosmos we are but ‘dust and unto dust we shall return’.
Dust is not very intelligent! By nature, we are stupid because we are but dust. Only through the grace of God can the dust that we are be raised up to wisdom. Through the creative breath of the Holy Spirit, we are created out of dust in the image and likeness of the Son of God to the glory of God the Father. But knowing our nature to be dust teaches us an important lesson. Our sense of self-importance is misplaced, even though it acts as a powerful force in human experience. This is why coming to know God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is akin to getting a joke in a particular situation. Only when you are involved in the situation do you understand it. Nobody can really explain this to you as you need to get the joke for yourself. There really is no fun in having a joke explained to you, is there? But once we get the joke, the illness of our self-importance is ‘treated’, though it never fully heals this side of the grave. We now know that we are part of the joke and the purpose of the joke is to liberate us from addiction to our self-importance through realizing that we play a role in God’s co(s)mic story. The role that we play in God’s unfolding story of creating us out of dust to the glory of God the Father, is to get the joke. Ha Ha!!
Getting the joke, in biblical terms, is understanding who God is and who we are. God is love and we are dust. How stupid we are! But once we know this, we really do get the joke. We are just like that little toddler stamping their feet on the ground wanting whatever it happens to be at that moment. The way to stop our dysfunctional behaviour is to come to knowledge of God. This is why we have the Bible. The Bible tells us the story of God, so that in receiving its message, we can learn who God is and who we are. Once we know these things, we then know why we exist. Knowing why we exist is the beginning of our vocation story, because knowing that we exist to love God and so to serve one another, allows us to discern how the piece of dust that we are can best love God and serve one another.
Admittedly, this is a lot to take in. As the Gospel for today puts it, ‘I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.’ As Christians, the Son of God, Jesus, opens up to us the meaning of the Scriptures, but we have struggled to get the joke. So, the Holy Spirit is working patiently to ‘guide us into all the truth’ which is the ongoing conversation between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit about how these people can get the joke! Only God could not be exasperated by the length of time it seems to be taking for us to get the joke. It is just as well God has a sense of humour!
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.