The Trinity: Inviting Intimacy

June 1, 2025  Seventh Sunday of Easter
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
“The Trinity: Inviting Intimacy”
Douglas T. King

Back in the day, before security concerns precluded it, the gates at airport terminals were the scene of countless tearful farewells and heartfelt reunions.  Emotions ran high.  People said goodbye to loved ones they might not see for months.  Others leapt into each other’s arms as they reconnected after a long time apart.  Standing near an airport gate could provide a vivid collage of intimate moments on display.

Our text from the gospel of John is a deeply intimate moment between Jesus and the Creator God.  It is a father and son moment.  We have just heard a portion of the farewell discourse.  Jesus’ death is rapidly approaching, and like many facing their mortality, he has important things to say before he dies.  In the previous chapters he has in effect said goodbye to his nearest and dearest friend, his disciples.  Jesus has consoled them and told them not to fear.  He has promised them that they have a destination with him and that the Holy Spirit will sustain them for all that is to come.  

And now Jesus is speaking to the one to whom he will soon be reunited, to God the Creator.  The intimacy between them is clear.  Jesus calls God, Father, a more accurate translation would be Daddy.  The language in John can be dense but basically he is calling on God to ensure that the deep intimacy between Father and Son will also be shared with the children of God.
 
Today is the first in a three-part sermon series on the Trinity.  We will be considering three of the ways in which we can view the trinitarian nature of the divine.  The theological concept of the Trinity is clearly a tad slippery.  Do we have three gods or one God?  What does three in one really mean?  Countless words have been written to try and unpack the sleight of hand metaphysics of it all.  I wish I could unfurl some simple elegant metaphor explaining how the three persons of the Trinity are like a strawberry, strawberry jam, and a strawberry smoothie (about half hour until our strawberry festival, so hang in there, people).  But all those manner of metaphors inevitably fall short of the mark.  Perhaps it is better to capture snapshots of what the Trinity has to reveal to us about the nature of God.

In this text we are presented with a portrait of deep inter-relatedness.  Jesus speaks of “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one as we are one.”  Throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus repeatedly announces that he is inexorably linked to those who follow him and he is inexorably linked to God.  Earlier in this farewell discourse he explains to the disciples, “you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”

We are being told that all of the distances and divisions we perceive between each of us and between all of us and God are illusory.  They are a result of poor vision.  We have a depth perception problem.  It is as if we are only seeing things two-dimensionally.  And from that perspective we see ourselves as disconnected from one another and at times at a great distance from the divine.  But if we could truly see three dimensionally we would see that we are all deeply connected to one another and deeply connected to our God at all times.  

God is not high above and beyond us.  There is no great chasm we need to traverse to be in God’s presence.  When we hear how intimately connected Jesus Christ, who took on our mortal form ,is to God, we learn that the divide between mortals and the divine has been bridged.  God has stepped into our humanity that nothing may separate Creator from created.  

The divine’s decision to engage in mortal embodiment, to become incarnate, was a radical choice.  The poet, David Whyte, writes this of incarnation.  “Incarnation and the adventure of incarnation is moving from the invulnerable and the untouchable to the increasingly vulnerable and intimately touchable, from the invisible to the visible, from the protected to the unprotected…” (Whyte, p. 156)

There is inherent risk in pursuing the intimacy of incarnation.  So the possibility of what it offers must outweigh what is being risked.  The Trinity stepping into mortality to be in intimate relationship with us is a startling decision.  Being in closer relationship with humanity had to be worth dying for.  David Whyte writes of what may be gained with intimacy. “Intimacy always carries the sense of something hidden about to be felt and known in surprising ways; something brought out and made visible, that previously could not be seen or understood.  In intimacy what is hidden will become a gift, discovered and rediscovered again and again in the eyes of both the giver and the receiver.” (Whyte, pp. 154-155)  

This past Thursday is recognized as Ascension of the Lord day.  It is when we commemorate the risen Christ returning to the rest of the Trinity.  What is important to recognize is that the Christ who returns to the Trinity is changed from the Christ that existed prior to becoming human and mortal.  When the risen Christ is present before Thomas and the disciples in the upper room, he still possesses the wounds of his crucifixion.  As much as God was previously all-knowing, God had never experienced the limitations of our mortality, the physical suffering that accompanies our humanity.  God can now understand our limitations and sufferings the way in which someone can understand how one may ride a bike not by reading a book about it, but by actually hopping on the seat, doing their best to balance and begin pedaling.  In Jesus Christ’s return to the rest of the trinity, wounds and all, the entirety of God knows and feels exactly what we experience as we journey through this life.  That shared experience creates an intimacy never known before between the Creator and we, the created.  And in creating this intimacy God has allowed Godself to be, as David Whyte would say, vulnerable, touchable, visible, unprotected.  

When Jesus prays to God for there to be the same deep intimacy between God and humanity it is not some random wish.  He is about to make the daunting journey to the cross to make it possible; to breach the distance between the boundless and those of us who are bound by our humanity.  And in doing so, reminds us of all we share with each other in our mortal journeys, inviting us into deeper intimacy with one another.
 
The Trinity is a hard concept to grasp in a variety of ways.  But what is abundantly clear is that our Trinitarian God is not out there somewhere.  They are not even nearby.  The Trinity surrounds us.  At a previous church I served, I once had an engineer come to meet with me.  As engineers are wont to do, he came bearing a diagram.  It was his image of the Trinity.  It looked strikingly like an atom.  But instead of protons, neutrons, and electrons circling around, it was the Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit.  I was immediately struck by how much space there was within the divine.  And in the center, instead of a nucleus, it was humanity.  We are to be found within Godself.

All of our mortal challenges and limitations are occurring within our Trinitarian God.  Each and every moment of our greatest delights and deepest sorrows are occurring within our Trinitarian God.  All that we have ever or will ever experience is occurring within our Trinitarian God.  Our joys are their joys.  Our pains are their pains.  Imagine each of us and all of us within the divine in all times and all places.  What a neighborhood to make our homes.

To reiterate the words of David Whyte, “In intimacy what is hidden will become a gift, discovered and rediscovered again and again in the eyes of both the giver and the receiver.”  What a remarkable reality for us to claim as we step into each new day of our lives.  We live within the divine.

Thanks be to God. Thanks be to God, indeed.  Amen.    
    
Whyte, David, Consolations II, Many Rivers Press, Washington,
 2025.