Trinity Sunday

Rev. Bobby Musengwa

Transitional General Presbyter,

Last Sunday I worshiped at Holy Trinity in San Antonio. It was Pentecost Sunday, and the Holy Spirit was buzzing in palpable ways. People were excited as Tobias Green was preaching his inaugural sermon on his pastoral journey with that congregation. One could tell of the presence of the Holy Spirit in our midst. It was a beautiful mystery.

A priest once told of an old legend about St. Augustine walking along a beach, watching a young boy try to empty the ocean into a small hole in the sand using a seashell. 

When Augustine pointed out the impossibility of the task, the boy replied: "I have as much a chance of doing this as you have of explaining the vast mystery of the Holy Trinity."

It's a story worth hearing again this Trinity Sunday. 

Augustine himself — the son of Africa, one of the greatest minds the church has ever produced, and is considered as one of a handful doctors of the church — wrote extensively on the Trinity, yet concluded: “If you have understood it, what you have understood is not God.” 

The great Thomas Aquinas of the Middle Ages, a friar, priest, theologian, and philosopher, echoed this when he wrote that whatever can be known or understood is less than God himself.

So where does that leave us here at Mission Presbytery, in our congregations and homes, trying to make sense of the Trinity, of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?

It leaves us exactly where the Gospel wants us — not as analysts, but as recipients of love.

The passage from Matthew 28 that grounds Trinity Sunday is striking in its simplicity. Jesus doesn't offer his disciples a theological statement. I am fascinated by theological statements.

Jesus sends them out in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We are baptized into a relationship before we are taught a doctrine.

And that relationship, the Apostle John reminds us, begins with love. 

In a Greco-Roman world, like some rural villages I know, where philosophers described the divine as self-absorbed and distant — where the gods of popular religion were unpredictable at best and dangerous at worst — the Gospel announced something almost unthinkable: God so loved the world.

Knowing some villages with beliefs of capricious gods, this message hits the mark. It is an invitation to enter into the holy embrace of God.

The message does not say God loved a nation, nor the righteous. Jesus says God loves the world — God loves humanity in all its brokenness and estrangement.

The mystery of the Trinity is not a puzzle waiting to be solved. The Greek word mystērion points us toward something deeper: a sacred reality we are invited into, not merely asked to understand. 

The Good News is that unlike the mystery religions of the ancient world, or village religions, or modern cultish politics, this mystery is not reserved for a privileged few. 

It has been proclaimed openly, to everyone, in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

This week, as we go about our lives and ministry across Mission Presbytery, perhaps the invitation is simply this: to stop trying to empty the ocean with a seashell, and instead to wade in. To trust the one who promised, "I am with you always, to the very end of the age."

The Holy Spirit is in all our congregations, in Holy Trinity Church, and in all of us. This was the promise of Jesus in Acts 1:8:

"But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." 

We have the power and the promise from Jesus himself. That promise — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with us — is mystery enough to last a lifetime.

Grace and peace, 

Rev. Bobby Musengwa

Transitional General Presbyter,

Mission Presbytery