The Trinity: Breaking Down Barriers
June 8, 2025 The Day of Pentecost
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Acts 2:1-18
“The Trinity: Breaking Down Barriers”
Douglas T. King
“If a lion could talk, we should not be able to understand him.” These are not the words of a Dr. Doolittle denier. Rather, this fanciful turn of phrase is from the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein was one of the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century on semiotics. In other words, he was pretty smart when it came to thinking about language and communication.
He wrote about what he called “sprachspiel,” in English, language games. He argued because we each have our own different personal histories and agendas, we each speak our very own language. When we communicate with one another and do not realize this, it is as if we are attempting to play a board game together but we each think we are playing a different game. If I am speaking to you using language following the rules of Monopoly and you are speaking to me using language following the rules of chess it is really hard for us to understand each other.
So even if that lion could speak English to us, his agenda and experience of the world is so different from our agenda and experience of the world we would be hard pressed to have any clue as to what he was trying to express to us. Our understanding of language is significantly shaped by our personal experience. We may all nominally be speaking the same language but the meaning behind those shared words may be vastly different.
I wish Wittgenstein were with us today to explore our current communication dilemma. In many ways each of us is sealed off in our own private bubbles of newsfeeds and comment sections. We live in echo-chambers that present the world to us from our personal preconceptions. When speaking with someone from a different perspective one of us might as well be a lion and the other, a tiger or bear, oh my. We are no longer expressing ourselves from different language games. Now we often shout at one another from different language ghettos.
In this second sermon in our series on the Trinity, let me say, thank God for the Holy Spirit. For it is only the Spirit that speaks all of our individual languages. It is only the Spirit who can see beneath and beyond the words we say out loud to understand what is in our hearts.
Last week we read from Jesus’ farewell discourse in the Gospel of John about the intimacy shared between God the Creator and God the Son into which we are invited. As well, in Jesus’ farewell discourse, he speaks of assuring his disciples that although he will not be bodily present with them much longer, the Holy Spirit will be intimately present with them. We are told the Spirit will be our comforter and our advocate. The Spirit will sustain us and inspire us.
These are all wonderful things but sometimes we privatize the Spirit. We focus on what she can do for us individually. Today we hear of the greatest gift of all from the Holy Spirit; the ways in which she allows us to connect with one another.
Today I will let you in on a little preacher’s secret. Sometimes someone comes up to us after worship and tells us that our words were exactly what they needed to hear that day. Then the person will share with us what they heard of our message. And what they share with us will have absolutely nothing to do with the message we were seeking to convey. It will often be incredibly theologically and pastorally appropriate but certainly not in any way what we preached.
Does the person need a new hearing aid? No. Did they just hear what they wanted to hear? No, I do not believe it is that either. Oftentimes the message they heard was something they had never even considered before. What has occurred is that the Spirit has stepped in to ensure that person was fed what they needed that day.
I would always tell my anxious students, when they were preaching for the first time, that in the end it was not in their hands whether their sermon worked or not, that was the Spirit’s job. As the preacher, we are trying to share the Word of God and the person in the pew is trying to receive the Word of God and the only one who makes that connection possible is the Holy Spirit.
The concept of God in the form of the Trinity reminds us that the divine is not a single monolith. The divine is inherently communal and inherently interdependent. The three members of the Trinity are engaged in intimate communication with one another. And the great blessing to us is that we are invited to join in this intimate communication. And not only are we invited into this intimate communication, we are called to it. Christianity is an inherently communal faith tradition. It is nearly impossible to engage in a deep and meaningful faith journey in a vacuum.
This reality is the bedrock of what makes Presbyterians, presbyterian. We believe the best chance we have of understanding the will of God is by gathering together, worshiping together, studying scripture and theology together, serving together. No one of us alone has an unfiltered understanding of God’s will. But each of us and all of us have been blessed with some understanding of God’s will. Together we discuss and discern and learn in the hope that we may grow in our faithfulness together. And it is the Spirit that makes it all possible.
Only the Spirit can grant us the humility to understand that we do not have all of the answers on our own. Only the Spirit can open our ears to hear what those who think differently than us are actually saying. Only the Spirit can give us pliant enough hearts and minds to welcome ideas that are new to us. Only the Spirit allows us to experience real connection and compassion with and for one another.
For Presbyterians, the Spirit is often the overlooked member of the Trinity. On Pentecost we are reminded of just how essential she is. We celebrate the remarkable gift of the Spirit in our midst, speaking to one and all. But, great gifts often come with great responsibility. We are called to welcome and invite the Spirit into every element of our lives. We are called to invite the Spirit into our life here as a congregation. We are called to invite the Spirit into our personal relationships. We are particularly called to invite the Spirit into our conversations with those who think in deeply different ways than we do.
These days, we often define ourselves by placing ourselves apart from some other. We each speak from the perspective of our own personal language game and when the other person does not understand us we see that as a moral failing on their part. The Trinity teaches us that it is only together that we can be faithful; it is only together that we can honor our God. When we stop seeking to understand one another we are denying the work of the Holy Spirit and standing in the way of the workings of our Trinitarian God.
On this Sunday as we celebrate the Pentecost let us not limit the power of the Spirit to all those years ago in Jerusalem. Let us call on the Spirit to blow through our community, our nation, our world. And, in faithfulness and humility, let us seek to listen to each other in the language of each. Let us allow the Spirit to do her good work that we may grow in faithfulness; that we may be the church, the community, the nation, and the world God is calling us to be.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Acts 2:1-18
“The Trinity: Breaking Down Barriers”
Douglas T. King
“If a lion could talk, we should not be able to understand him.” These are not the words of a Dr. Doolittle denier. Rather, this fanciful turn of phrase is from the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein was one of the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century on semiotics. In other words, he was pretty smart when it came to thinking about language and communication.
He wrote about what he called “sprachspiel,” in English, language games. He argued because we each have our own different personal histories and agendas, we each speak our very own language. When we communicate with one another and do not realize this, it is as if we are attempting to play a board game together but we each think we are playing a different game. If I am speaking to you using language following the rules of Monopoly and you are speaking to me using language following the rules of chess it is really hard for us to understand each other.
So even if that lion could speak English to us, his agenda and experience of the world is so different from our agenda and experience of the world we would be hard pressed to have any clue as to what he was trying to express to us. Our understanding of language is significantly shaped by our personal experience. We may all nominally be speaking the same language but the meaning behind those shared words may be vastly different.
I wish Wittgenstein were with us today to explore our current communication dilemma. In many ways each of us is sealed off in our own private bubbles of newsfeeds and comment sections. We live in echo-chambers that present the world to us from our personal preconceptions. When speaking with someone from a different perspective one of us might as well be a lion and the other, a tiger or bear, oh my. We are no longer expressing ourselves from different language games. Now we often shout at one another from different language ghettos.
In this second sermon in our series on the Trinity, let me say, thank God for the Holy Spirit. For it is only the Spirit that speaks all of our individual languages. It is only the Spirit who can see beneath and beyond the words we say out loud to understand what is in our hearts.
Last week we read from Jesus’ farewell discourse in the Gospel of John about the intimacy shared between God the Creator and God the Son into which we are invited. As well, in Jesus’ farewell discourse, he speaks of assuring his disciples that although he will not be bodily present with them much longer, the Holy Spirit will be intimately present with them. We are told the Spirit will be our comforter and our advocate. The Spirit will sustain us and inspire us.
These are all wonderful things but sometimes we privatize the Spirit. We focus on what she can do for us individually. Today we hear of the greatest gift of all from the Holy Spirit; the ways in which she allows us to connect with one another.
Today I will let you in on a little preacher’s secret. Sometimes someone comes up to us after worship and tells us that our words were exactly what they needed to hear that day. Then the person will share with us what they heard of our message. And what they share with us will have absolutely nothing to do with the message we were seeking to convey. It will often be incredibly theologically and pastorally appropriate but certainly not in any way what we preached.
Does the person need a new hearing aid? No. Did they just hear what they wanted to hear? No, I do not believe it is that either. Oftentimes the message they heard was something they had never even considered before. What has occurred is that the Spirit has stepped in to ensure that person was fed what they needed that day.
I would always tell my anxious students, when they were preaching for the first time, that in the end it was not in their hands whether their sermon worked or not, that was the Spirit’s job. As the preacher, we are trying to share the Word of God and the person in the pew is trying to receive the Word of God and the only one who makes that connection possible is the Holy Spirit.
The concept of God in the form of the Trinity reminds us that the divine is not a single monolith. The divine is inherently communal and inherently interdependent. The three members of the Trinity are engaged in intimate communication with one another. And the great blessing to us is that we are invited to join in this intimate communication. And not only are we invited into this intimate communication, we are called to it. Christianity is an inherently communal faith tradition. It is nearly impossible to engage in a deep and meaningful faith journey in a vacuum.
This reality is the bedrock of what makes Presbyterians, presbyterian. We believe the best chance we have of understanding the will of God is by gathering together, worshiping together, studying scripture and theology together, serving together. No one of us alone has an unfiltered understanding of God’s will. But each of us and all of us have been blessed with some understanding of God’s will. Together we discuss and discern and learn in the hope that we may grow in our faithfulness together. And it is the Spirit that makes it all possible.
Only the Spirit can grant us the humility to understand that we do not have all of the answers on our own. Only the Spirit can open our ears to hear what those who think differently than us are actually saying. Only the Spirit can give us pliant enough hearts and minds to welcome ideas that are new to us. Only the Spirit allows us to experience real connection and compassion with and for one another.
For Presbyterians, the Spirit is often the overlooked member of the Trinity. On Pentecost we are reminded of just how essential she is. We celebrate the remarkable gift of the Spirit in our midst, speaking to one and all. But, great gifts often come with great responsibility. We are called to welcome and invite the Spirit into every element of our lives. We are called to invite the Spirit into our life here as a congregation. We are called to invite the Spirit into our personal relationships. We are particularly called to invite the Spirit into our conversations with those who think in deeply different ways than we do.
These days, we often define ourselves by placing ourselves apart from some other. We each speak from the perspective of our own personal language game and when the other person does not understand us we see that as a moral failing on their part. The Trinity teaches us that it is only together that we can be faithful; it is only together that we can honor our God. When we stop seeking to understand one another we are denying the work of the Holy Spirit and standing in the way of the workings of our Trinitarian God.
On this Sunday as we celebrate the Pentecost let us not limit the power of the Spirit to all those years ago in Jerusalem. Let us call on the Spirit to blow through our community, our nation, our world. And, in faithfulness and humility, let us seek to listen to each other in the language of each. Let us allow the Spirit to do her good work that we may grow in faithfulness; that we may be the church, the community, the nation, and the world God is calling us to be.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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