The Sunday Preachers Hate
A Reflection on the Trinity based on John 16:12-15
THE DANGER OF SPEAKING FOR GOD
I’ve come to be suspicious of those who claim to speak for God. Although, as a minister, people often seemed to think that I was God’s mouthpiece in some way, I always tried to encourage people to treat my sermons with curiosity, questioning, and suspicion. I always felt that my job was not to tell people what to think about God, but to encourage them to think for themselves and help them to think critically about God, faith, the world, and life. Even now as I write, my hope is not that my readers will agree with everything I say and come to think as I do; rather, I hope that my words will spark new questions, give birth to new ideas, and inspire new insights. If I have anything of value to share, it will be found not in simple agreement with my perspectives but in the creative friction of critical wrestling with what I share.
The problem with trying to speak for God is that we usually get it wrong. I once heard about a person who believed God had given them a word of prophecy for their church. They stood up and loudly proclaimed, “Thus saith the Lord: ‘This church is confused! The leaders are confused! The people are confused! Even I, the Lord, am confused!’”1 It is all too easy to put our own words in God’s mouth even without claiming to prophesy in God’s name. This is why we must exercise great humility and caution when speaking about God, and even more so when claiming to speak for God. What we say about God shapes our lives and world. For example, it is no secret that US foreign policy in the Middle East is strongly influenced by evangelical Christians and Christian Zionists2 and that Donald Trump was elected as President (twice) on the back of the white evangelical Christian vote.3 In contrast, leaders like Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Martin Luther King Jr. were motivated to challenge the racist systems of their times because they believed God to be loving and just. Richard Rohr is right that “You become the God you worship”4, and the God we worship is shaped by the language we use about that God.5
The moment we begin to speak about God, we have to recognise that we are moving into territory beyond our understanding. As Rob Bell notes, “The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God.”6 This means that, as Ilia Delio puts it, “Any conceptual talk of God is not God-talk but ego-talk, a projected ideal of God.”7 This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t ever talk about God. That would, quite simply, be impossible. It does mean, however, that we need to be aware of the limits of our language and the inherently symbolic and metaphorical nature of the words we use to speak of the mystery we call God. And perhaps one of the most difficult words about God in the Christian faith is ‘Trinity’.
After the long Easter season which concludes with Pentecost, the Revised Common Lectionary shifts into Ordinary Time with the only Sunday that is dedicated to a doctrine. I suspect that for many preachers, Trinity Sunday is one of the primary days that they would prefer not to be in the pulpit. The idea of the Trinity can be hard to get our heads around and harder to preach on, but it invites us to enter into the mystery of God more deeply, and to work out more carefully how our understanding of God affects our lives and relationships.
INTO THE MYSTERY
Marcus Borg helpfully explains that part of our problem with the Trinity is that the English words we use to describe the Godhead mean different things than the Greek and Latin terms from which they were derived.
In the fourth century when trinitarian doctrine was formulated, the word persona in Latin and its Greek equivalent prosopon referred to the mask worn by actors in the theater. Actors wore masks not for the sake of concealment (as we might wear Halloween masks today), but to play different roles. The etymology of the Latin persona reflects this; its roots mean “to speak through,” “to sound through.” In a quite literal sense, persona as a mask is something an actor speaks through. Applied to the Trinity, the ancient meaning of persona/prosopon suggests that for Christians the one God is known and speaks in three primary roles or ways: as creator and the God of Israel; in Jesus; and through the Spirit.8
As Borg points out, this “external” understanding is based on three primary roles by which we experience and know God, but there is also a way of understanding the Trinity ”internally”, in terms of the relationships within the Godhead. While we always need to exercise care and humility in our God-talk, this is most important when speaking about the “internal“ relationships within God, because God is beyond our capacity to understand, describe, or analyse. But when we speak about our “external” understanding and experience of God, our language can become a doorway that leads us into a deeper connection with God, others, ourselves, and our world.
In his final words to his disciples in John 14-17, Jesus offered some enticing insights into the way God is revealed to us and how we can experience God. For some theologians, his words offer a clear and authoritative description of God as Triune, but these claims are based more on reading the Trinity into the Bible than discovering it there. Ilia Delio reflects the consensus of most contemporary scholars when she writes that “Neither the word ‘Trinity’ nor the explicit doctrine of the Trinity appears in scripture. Furthermore, neither did Jesus nor his followers intend to contradict the Shema in the Hebrew Scriptures: ’Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is One Lord’ (Deut 6:4).”9 Nevertheless, the Lectionary reading from John 16:12-15 for Trinity Sunday does offer us a few insights into what faith in a Triune God can mean for us.
Firstly, without trying to describe the specific details of the internal relationships within the Godhead, the concept of God as Triune ensures that we remember the unbreakable unity between Jesus, his Divine Parent, and the Holy Spirit. As Gilberto A. Ruiz points out, in John 14:6 Jesus referred to himself as “the way, the truth, and the life.” Now in 16:13, he describes the Spirit as the one who will guide or lead the way (the original word for ‘guide’ includes the word for ‘way’) into all of the truth that God has given Jesus to share.10 Many writers before me have pointed out the unavoidable truth of the unity in the Godhead, but what it means is that what Jesus is, so are both the Parent and the Spirit. If our view of God does not line up with the vision of Jesus we find in the Gospels, then we need to change our view of God.
Secondly, God’s creative word that was revealed in Christ is now with us and within us by God’s Spirit. Meda Stamper notes that “Words for ‘say,’ ‘speak,’ and ’declare’ appear seven times in these four verses”, and so this God-given, creative, liberating word that Jesus embodied and which is now in us by God’s Spirit, empowers us to be “love-bearers in, for, and with God to the world.”11 This means that if our lives don’t reflect the restoring, liberating, healing, and recreating values of Jesus, we have not yet learned to follow Jesus’ way.
Finally, Jesus said, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now” (John 16:12). This indicates that, while we may like to think that the Bible contains everything God could ever want to say to us, Jesus declares that God’s revelation, and our experience of God, life, and the way of Christ, is evolving. As Chelsea Brooke Yarborough puts it:
Jesus reminds the disciples and those of us witnessing now that so much of faith is staying attuned to what is coming, and trusting in its unfolding. It is receiving the gifts of wisdom from the Spirit and walking through the uncertainty, even as we trust the certainty that we are not alone and that the Trinity (above, around, within us) is guiding us to the truth that looks like love.12
As much as it may seem that believing in a Triune God means believing that God never changes and that our faith should never change, Jesus’ words indicate that we are always to be in a process of divinely-motivated evolution.
THE GOD OF MANY FACES
If we use these insights about the Trinity from John 16:12-15 as a foundation, we can then explore other surprising images of God that can shape and empower not just our faith, but our presence and actions in our lives and relationships. One such image is that God is a God of many faces.
You’ve probably heard the story of the elementary school teacher who was teaching art to a class of six-year-olds. One little girl was particularly involved in her project, and so the teacher went over and asked her what she was doing. She replied confidently, “I’m drawing a picture of God.”
“But no one knows what God looks like,” the teacher replied.
The little girl responded, “They will in a minute!”13
There seems to be a global war on diversity at the moment. Our human differences are too often seen as not just problematic, but dangerous. Everyone who doesn’t fit the white, capitalist, heterosexual, cisgendered, evangelical mould, is viewed as threatening, less valuable, and less human. But the Bible celebrates diversity, and the doctrine of the Trinity affirms that diversity is essential to our understanding and experience of God. Kathleen Norris is right when she writes, “For Christians, the Trinity is the primary symbol of a community that holds together by containing diversity within itself.”14
In the Gospels, God is shown to have more than one face. We call them Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but as one colleague once said to me, “God has to be more than two men and a bird!” God is one, but that doesn’t mean that God is only one thing. God is diverse in God’s divine Self. Diversity is not something God does; it is who God is. And this means that God can be other things too. As retired Professor of Judaic Studies, David R. Blumenthal writes,
Three is not enough! God, in God's fullness, is more than three. God, in Whose Image humanity is created, has more than three dimensions. The awesome complexity of the human personality—in which Image humanity is created—suggests that there are many more than three basic dimensions to God's personhood. Indeed, if we, humans, are more than trinitarian, certainly God is more than three.15
If we are all created in God’s image and likeness, then we are also diverse beings who are not just one thing. We are diverse within ourselves, as much as we participate in diverse societies. Every human being we could ever encounter reflects something of God’s many-faced glory. This is why we cannot connect deeply with God, ourselves, and one another until we learn to embrace and celebrate both our diversity and the diversity in the heart of God. But when we open ourselves to difference, we find that we can encounter God in ways, people, and places we would never previously have imagined. And when we embrace God’s many faces, our experience and understanding of God—and of life—grows and expands.
The musical Godspell was banned in South Africa during the apartheid years because, in it, Jesus is portrayed as a clown. But traditionally, clowns or court jesters were the only people who were allowed to speak the absolute truth to the king. For centuries, many believers have understood Jesus’ life and work through the lens of the ‘holy fool’ or ‘holy clown’.16 In the light of this, the clown can be a challenging face through which to encounter and connect with God. But so can the crucified one, the dove, the wind, the flame, the resurrected one, the Creator, and so many more.
THE EXPANDING COMMUNITY OF GOD
Another revolutionary image of God we can glean from the concept of the Trinity is that God is an ever-expanding community. God is inherently relational,17 and God invites us to be part of the cosmic love affair that is God’s nature. As Ilia Delio wrote, “A God who is seeking completion in creation is one who is open to change and new relationships, which reflect the essence of God as love. Where there is real love, there is real relationship and the desire to grow more deeply in love.”18
At the end of Matthew’s Gospel, the disciples are sent to baptise people from every nation. This means that the community of God is meant to be constantly expanding—including all kinds of people who look, speak, think, love, dress, act, and even believe differently from one another. The book of Acts is the story of how the first Christians carried God’s love to all people, including them in the expanding community of God’s love, “in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1:8)
In Genesis 1:26-27, we are told that it's the combination of male and female—in relationship, in community—that reflects God’s image. We cannot fully reflect God’s image alone. We each reflect only a small fraction of the divine, and so God has welcomed us into God’s community of love to experience more of God’s presence and to see more of God’s glory through one another. And then, God asks us to share divine love with other people, inviting them into this same diverse, loving community.
FOLLOWING A TRINITARIAN GOD
If we get stuck too literally on the words, the idea of God as Trinity is mind-blowing and confusing—which is partly the point. As Richard Rohr writes:
Trinitarian theology was almost made to order to humiliate the logical Greek mind: It said, in effect: the Father is the Father, but the Father is also the Son, and in fact, he is the Father and the Son at the same time, which relationship is, in fact, the Holy Spirit. If actually encountered and meditated on, the doctrine of God as Trinity breaks down the binary system of the mind. For a Christian who lives in a Trinitarian spirituality, it makes either-or thinking totally useless. Perhaps, in addition to everything else, the Trinity is a blessing, to make us patient before Mystery and to humble our dualistic minds.19
The doctrine of the Trinity shows us that God has many faces and reaches us wherever we are, whoever we are. God is a diverse community of love, and we are created in God’s image. So we are also diverse, both in ourselves and in our shared humanity. Trinitarian spirituality is less about working out the details of God’s mysterious nature and more about refusing to create God in our image. It is less about defining God and more about encountering and experiencing God in new and surprising ways. It is less about believing intellectually in certain ideas about God and more about learning to find our place within the ever-expanding divine community of love. And it is less about us being individually ‘saved’ and more about participating in the all-encompassing divine unity and wholeness that hold everything together.
As Richard Rohr puts it, “And” is the very Mystery of Trinity.20
I have a strong suspicion that this story is an urban legend and probably never actually happened, although I have no evidence either way. Nevertheless, it is a humorous illustration of how easy it is to confuse our ideas with messages from God, which is something I have personally experienced and witnessed many times over the years.
See Tiffany Stanley, Why conservative American evangelicals are among Israel’s strongest supporters, February 6, 2025, on The Associated Press website (https://apnews.com/article/israel-netanyahu-trump-evangelicals-jews-gaza-52126902c8dc767238099a1cc1930a16). Accessed June 4, 2025
See Robert P. Jones, What White Christians Have Wrought, November 11, 2024, in Time Magazine (https://time.com/7174260/white-christianity-trump-election-essay/). Accessed June 4, 2025
Richard Rohr, Baking the Cake from the Bottom Up, Center for Action and Contemplation Daily Meditation, January 2, 2017 (https://cac.org/daily-meditations/baking-the-cake-from-the-bottom-up-2017-01-02/). Accessed May 15, 2025
As Marcus Borg notes, “…language is the medium through which people participate in their religion.” (Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning and Power—And How They Can Be Restored, HarperCollins, 2011 (ePub Edition), p.12).
In his chapter on God, he notes that “Both those who affirm and those who deny the reality of God have something in mind when they do so” (p.51). He then goes on to explore two ways the word can be understood and the differences these understandings make to our experience of God and how we live in response to it.
Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith, Zondervan, 2005, p.25
Ilia Delio, The Not-Yet God: Carl Jung, Teilhard De Chardin, and the Relational Whole, Orbis Books, 2023 (Kindle Edition), p.169
Borg, Speaking Christian, 2011, p.147-148
Delio, The Not-Yet God, 2023, p.171
Gilberto A. Ruiz, Commentary on John 16:12-25, May 22, 2016, on Working Preacher (https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/the-holy-trinity-3/commentary-on-john-1612-15-3). Accessed June 4, 2025
Meda Stamper, Commentary on John 16:12-25, June 12, 2022, on Working Preacher (https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/the-holy-trinity-3/commentary-on-john-1612-15-5). Accessed June 4, 2025
Chelsea Brooke Yarborough, Commentary on John 16:12-25, for June 15, 2025, on Working Preacher (https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/the-holy-trinity-3/commentary-on-john-1612-15-6). Accessed June 4, 2025
As far as I can ascertain, this story appeared in episode 5, season 5 of Highway to Heaven (1988), although it may have originated in a Christian teacher joke book. My version is based on the one shared by Angela on her blog, Autism Beauty Combines (https://autismbeautycombines.wordpress.com/2015/06/11/nobody-knows-what-god-looks-like-they-will-in-a-minute/). Accessed June 5, 2025
Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, Riverhead Books, 1998, p.289
David R. Blumenthal, Three is not Enough: Jewish Reflections on the Trinity, from his website (http://davidblumenthal.org/Trinity.html). Accessed June 4, 2024
For a more detailed reflection on the fool archetype and Jesus, see my article The Authentic Fool, April 3, 2025 (https://sacredise.substack.com/p/the-authentic-fool)
See Thomas Jay Oord, Open and Relational Theology: An Introduction to Life-Changing Ideas, SacraSage Press, 2021 (Kindle Edition), p.61
Delio, The Not-Yet God, 2023, p.30
Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See, The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2009 (ePub Edition), p.96
Ibid., p.115