The Rev’d Ivica Gregurec

Trinity Sunday, 31 May 2026

Readings: Genesis 1:1–2:4a; Psalm 8; 2 Corinthians 13:11–13; Matthew 28:16–20

There is a joke that circulates among clergy, reliably resurfacing every year at about this point in the calendar. A preacher, struggling with their Trinity Sunday sermon, wrote in the margin of the homily/sermon notes: ‘Argument weak here – shout louder.’
Most of us who have ever stood at a lectern on this day, know exactly how they felt. Trinity Sunday is the one feast of the year on which you are expected to explain the inexplicable, define the indefinable, and sit down within twelve minutes. So I will proceed carefully, honestly, and (hopefully) without shouting.

In the liturgical calendar, this is the only feast day that points to the doctrine, rather than to the event from Jesus’ life. But the place to begin is not with the doctrine but with the readings, because the readings do something quietly remarkable. They do not begin with a formula. They begin with a poem. ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth’. Five words in English, three in Hebrew. And in those three Hebrew words – bereshit bara Elohim – something special is already happening, because the verb ‘bara’, to create, is used in the Hebrew scriptures exclusively of God. Only God creates in this way: not from existing materials, not by struggle or competition with other forces, but freely, generously, by the power of word and breath and will.

Notice how the creation happens. God speaks. ‘Let there be light’. And there is light. The world comes into being through language, through utterance, through the going-forth of something from within God into the void. And moving over the face of the deep, before the first word is spoken, is the ‘ruach Elohim’ – the spirit, the breath, the wind of God. Creator, Word, and Breath: the attentive reader of Genesis has already encountered, in the very first verses of scripture, something that will take the Church four more centuries to name.

The Psalmist stands in the same tradition of wonder. ‘When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established – what are human beings that you are mindful of them’? Psalm 8 is an act of astonished gratitude. The immensity of the cosmos does not crush the Psalmist into nihilism. It produces, instead, a deeper amazement: that the God whose fingers set the stars in place should be mindful of creatures as fragile and brief as we are. Majesty and intimacy held together, the vast and the particular in a single breath of praise.

We know something about cosmic immensity that the psalmist did not. We know that the observable universe contains something in the region of two trillion galaxies. We know that the light reaching us from the most distant of them left its source nearly fourteen billion years ago. We know that on the timescale of the cosmos, the whole of human history is an eyeblink, and the whole of an individual human life is very nearly nothing at all. And yet, here is the thing that science tells us but cannot itself explain: it is conscious beings on this small planet, who are doing the knowing. The universe has produced in us, something that can contemplate it. That is not nothing. The psalmist, I think, would not have been entirely surprised.

Now come forward from Genesis to the last verses of Matthew’s gospel, and feel the weight of what is happening. The eleven disciples (eleven, not twelve; the gap where Judas was is still there, still felt) go to the mountain in Galilee, as they have been told. They see Jesus and they worship him. And Matthew adds a detail of extraordinary candour: ‘But some doubted’. Even here, at the culmination of everything, in the presence of the risen Lord, some doubted. Matthew does not smooth this over and he lets it stand.

And it is to this mixed company of worshippers and doubters together, that the great commission is given. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. It is the first time in Matthew’s gospel that this threefold name appears as a single, coordinated formula. And it is given not to the theologically certain but to a community that includes people who are still not entirely sure what they are looking at.

That is worth holding. The Trinitarian formula is not a password for the already convinced. It is a commission for the honestly uncertain, a name to go out into the world with even when the going out feels like a risk. The broad Anglican tradition has always understood that faith is not the absence of doubt but the willingness to act in spite of it, to step off the mountain and into the world with a name that is larger than your own understanding of it.

So, what is the doctrine of the Trinity actually protecting? This is where the first millennium heresies become genuinely instructive, because they were not just academic exercises. They were serious attempts to make sense of the same experience, and they failed in ways that still matter.

Modalism – the view associated with Sabellius in the third century — said that Father, Son, and Spirit are simply three masks worn by one God at different moments: the Father-mask at creation, the Son-mask at incarnation, the Spirit-mask at Pentecost. It is tidy, and it is tempting, and it collapses the moment you read Genesis 1 carefully. The Spirit is moving over the waters before God speaks. The Word goes forth from the one who speaks it. These are not sequential costumes. They are simultaneous, interrelated movements within a single act of creation. The Sabellian God cannot do what Genesis describes. In our attempt to improve our language, there is a danger, in my opinion, to become modalists (Creator, Redeemer and Giver of life are not three independently working modes of one Deity).

Arianism – the position of Arius of Alexandria, condemned at the Council of Nicaea in 325, and one of the most influential heresies of the first Christian centuries, proposed that the Son was the first and greatest of God’s creatures: supremely exalted, the instrument of all creation, but not fully and finally God. ‘There was a time when he was not’ was Arius’s defining phrase. The Council rejected this because an Arian Christ cannot bear the weight that Matthew places on him. If the one who says ‘All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me’ is not truly God, then the commission is groundless and the promise ‘I am with you always, to the end of the age’ is the word of a creature, not the word of the one in whom all things hold together.

Tritheism, is the tendency to treat Father, Son, and Spirit as three separate divine beings cooperating closely. It never had a single great champion in the way Arianism had Arius, or Modalism Sabellius. But it has always been the occupational hazard of popular religion, the unintended destination of emphasising the distinctness of the three persons without sufficient account of their unity. A Tritheist universe has three gods. The Genesis poem has one: one source, one creative word, one animating breath, one ‘it was good’ spoken over everything that is made.

What the Cappadocian theologians, Sts Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus, worked out in the generation after Nicaea, was a God whose very being is relational, neither a solitary absolute, nor a committee. God is a communion: three persons in a mutual self-giving so complete, so interpenetrating, that it constitutes one divine life. The Greek word they reached for was ‘perichoresis’, a dancing around, a circling, a shared motion in which each is fully present to the others and none is diminished by the giving.

St Gregory of Nazianzus spoke and wrote, ‘No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendour of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Three than I am carried back to the One’ (Gregory of Nazianzus, Orations, XL).

Paul, writing to the Corinthians at the end of a letter full of conflict, correction and pastoral anxiety, closes with a sentence of three clauses that has echoed through Christian worship ever since: ‘The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you’. Paul is not doing systematic theology. He is blessing a fractious, imperfect, beloved community. But in doing so, he names the three movements of the divine life as they are experienced from the inside: grace that comes to us in Christ, love that grounds and originates all things, and communion (koinonia, shared life) that the Spirit creates among people who would not otherwise choose each other.

That last word, communion, is the one that speaks most directly to our own fractured moment. We live in an age of profound disconnection, politically, socially, personally. The loneliness epidemic is not a metaphor. The erosion of shared life, of the willingness to be genuinely present to people who are different from us, is one of the defining wounds of our time. Into this, the doctrine of the Trinity speaks not as an abstract metaphysical claim, but as a vision of what reality is actually like at its deepest level: not competition, not isolation, not the survival of the strongest, but communion, mutual self-giving, a love that finds its fullness only in the other.

The God of Genesis does not create out of loneliness or need. The love that is already the structure of the divine life spills over into the act of making a world, and the world that results is called good. The God of Matthew does not send the disciples out and then withdraw to a safe distance. The promise is presence: I am with you always.
The God of Paul’s blessing does not offer grace from afar and leave us to manage the rest. The Spirit creates among us the very communion that is the inner life of God.

We are, in other words, invited in, not to understand the Trinity, as Gregory was right that the understanding will always outrun us, but to inhabit it. To live inside the grace, the love, and the communion, and to let that living slowly reshape us into people who can carry it into the world.

We are to go, make disciples, baptise, teach. But we know that the one who sends us is the same one who hovered over the first darkness and called it toward light, who rose from the dead on the third day and stood on a mountain in Galilee with a mixed company of worshippers and doubters, and who promised, to all of them equally, to be with them always, to the very end of the age.

So, no matter if you believe or doubt, God is with you, now and always. Amen.