Sent While Still Becoming
Trinity Sunday is often approached with a mixture of reverence and anxiety. After all, how do you preach about a God who is both One and Three without reducing mystery to metaphor? Yet over the years, I have come to love this feast precisely because it invites us beyond explanation and into participation.
This sermon (not recorded this week) marks a particularly meaningful Trinity Sunday for me. Four years ago, I preached my very first sermon on this feast day as a seminarian just beginning to discern where God was leading. Now, as I prepare for ordination to the priesthood, I find myself returning to the same mystery with different eyes. The Trinity is not a doctrine to be mastered so much as a life to be entered—a life of relationship, communion, and love.
This sermon explores what it means to be formed by a God who is always creating, redeeming, and sustaining. It is a reflection on discipleship, vocation, and the lifelong work of becoming, reminding us that God does not wait until we have everything figured out before calling us to participate in divine love.
Consider: Who is God calling you to encourage, accompany, teach, or love? Where is God inviting you to be part of healing and reconciliation? What relationships, communities, or conversations have been entrusted to your care?
Listening with you,
Nicole+
Grace and peace to you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
I am so happy that today is Trinity Sunday. This is probably not something you will hear many preachers say today. In fact, I know clergy who avoid this Sunday at all costs, jokingly referring to it as “Heresy Sunday,” because the doctrine of the Trinity, one God in three persons, is notoriously difficult to explain. Pastors and theologians have spent centuries accidentally stumbling into ancient heresies while trying to come up with clever metaphors involving water or eggs or clovers.
And yet, this has become one of my favorite Sundays in the entire church year because over time, my faith has become deeply grounded in this mystery of God as Three-in-One: Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer—a God who is not solitary but relational.
And there is something especially poetic to me about the fact that today is Trinity Sunday because the very first sermon I ever preached was also on this day. I was in my very first homiletics class, taking my first shaky steps as a preacher. No pressure at all — just preach your first sermon on the most misunderstood doctrine in Christianity.
And now, somehow, here we are again at another Trinity Sunday. Only this time, I stand here at the end of a four-year discernment process that has led me here. On June 20, the Bishop will lay hands on me and ordain me a priest. And it would be easy to think that will be the end of the journey, somehow, that I have arrived at last. But that’s not true at all. It’s just another step on the journey because becoming is the work of a lifetime. Call it spiritual formation or discipleship. What it means is God is always drawing us closer.
What we celebrate today, unlike Christmas or Easter or Pentecost, is not a sacred historical event but a celebration of who God is. Trinity Sunday reminds us that God is not static or distant or unmoving. God is continually moving toward the world in love, continually drawing creation into deeper communion, continually calling new life forth within us and among us.
Our readings today move us beautifully through that mystery of God as Three-in-One. Genesis gives us God’s creative love, breathing life into chaos. Matthew gives us the commissioning and presence of Christ. Paul gives us the communion and fellowship of the Holy Spirit. And I think these readings together show us that the Trinity is not an intellectual puzzle waiting to be solved.
And so maybe the question this day asks us is not, “Can you explain the Trinity?” but “Can you learn to live within the life of God?”
Because from the very beginning of scripture, there is movement and rhythm within creation itself. This long passage from Genesis today is not trying to give us a scientific blueprint or a literal step-by-step account of how the universe was made.
If we look at it is poetry, as a love song, it tells us more about God than it does about how the world was created. Again and again, the text repeats its poetic rhythm: “And God said…” “And it was so…” “And God saw that it was good.” There is the voice of God speaking light into chaos. There is evening and morning, sea and sky, land and life unfolding in a kind of holy rhythm that pulses beneath the whole universe.
The imagery is full of wonder and Trinitarian mystery: the Spirit hovering over the waters, the Word speaking creation into life, the Creator calling all things into being. These are not isolated acts, but relationship and communion and love moving outward into the world.
It’s important to start here at the beginning because from the very beginning, creation itself reflects a God who is not solitary or self-contained, but eternally pouring Godself out in love. Which means that if we are created in the image of this God, then our lives, too, are meant to be shaped by that same movement of creative and reconciling love.
Spiritual formation is not primarily about mastering formulas or arriving at certainty; it is about learning, slowly over time, how to participate more fully in the life of God itself. It is about learning how to recognize where God is already creating, healing, and restoring the world, and then having the courage to join in.
And that movement outward, that divine invitation into relationship and participation, is exactly where Matthew’s Gospel meets us today. Because the Trinity is not closed in on itself. The life of God is always moving outward. Love creates. Love redeems.
The disciples stand with the risen Christ on a mountain in Galilee, and you can almost feel the uncertainty of the moment. Their world has fallen apart and been remade. Everything they thought they understood about power and death and the future has shifted beneath their feet, and now they stand at the edge of something entirely new.
Matthew tells us something I have always loved because it feels so painfully honest about human faith: “When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted.” Even there, standing before the resurrected Christ, some doubted. They have not resolved all their questions. They do not fully understand what is happening. They are still learning how to trust what they are seeing. And yet Jesus sends them anyway, to be a part of his redeeming work.
And I think we need to hear that because so many of us imagine that discipleship begins once we finally feel ready, once our faith is strong enough or when our questions are resolved, once we have become the kind of Christian we think we are supposed to be. But the disciples are sent in the middle of their becoming. They are sent while they are still learning, questioning, and trying to understand what resurrection even means.
This passage that we call the Great Commission is not Jesus saying, “Go perform for God,” or “Go prove yourselves worthy.” It is an invitation to participate in the life of God already unfolding in the world. “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations…” Go and join the creative and redeeming work already happening around you. Go and become people who embody the love you have encountered.
And notice, too, that Jesus does not send them alone. He sends them with the promise of presence: “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age,” he tells them. And boy, do they need that ongoing presence of Christ because they are just as imperfect as we are.
The book of Acts and the letters of the early Church make that abundantly clear. These same apostles will argue and misunderstand one another and struggle to discern what this new community is supposed to look like. Their faith will remain imperfect. Their understanding will continue to be incomplete. And yet Christ is with them in the becoming.
And so, by the time we arrive at Paul’s letter to the Corinthians — written decades later, after Pentecost, after the Spirit has been poured out upon the Church — we begin to see what happens when imperfect human beings actually try to live together inside that calling. And it is messy.
The Corinthians are divided and fractured and struggling to live as the Body of Christ. They are falling out of rhythm with one another. And yet Paul does not abandon them or tell them they have failed at being the Church. Instead, he calls them back into communion, back into the relational life of God itself.
What does Paul say to them? He talked to them about relationship: “Put things in order.” “Agree with one another.” “Live in peace.”
Not because unity means sameness, but because communion requires mutuality. Harmony requires listening. Anyone who has ever sung in a choir or played in an ensemble knows that harmony is not created because every note is identical. Harmony emerges because different voices learn how to listen to one another and move together toward something larger than themselves.
And that is one of the deepest truths the Trinity reveals to us. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not collapsed into sameness, nor are they competing for power or dominance. The Trinity is perfect love held together without coercion, without rivalry, without one voice silencing another.
And Paul seems to believe that if the Church is truly living within the life of God, then our communities should begin to reflect that same kind of love — a communion shaped not by control or fear, but by grace and peace and mutual care.
Paul then concludes with a benediction that most of us will recognize: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.” While the early church may not yet have had the language or creeds to fully articulate the doctrine of the Trinity, they clearly understood that in Jesus, they had encountered a God who creates, redeems, and remains present with humanity through the Spirit. And this is not simply a blessing we recite at the end of worship. It is a vision for what the Church itself might become: a people shaped by grace, a people rooted in love, a people learning communion with God and with one another.
And that is where the Gospel turns back toward us. Because it is one thing to admire the disciples standing on that mountain in Galilee. It is another thing to recognize that Christ’s commission belongs to us now.
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.” Those words were not only spoken to the eleven. They have echoed through two thousand years of Christian history until they reach us. And so perhaps the question for us this morning is not simply whether we can explain this Three-in-One God, not whether we believe what the Gospel says, but how we are being invited to participate in it?
Who is God calling you to encourage, accompany, teach, or love? Where is God inviting you to be part of healing and reconciliation? What relationships, communities, or conversations have been entrusted to your care?
Because making disciples is not reserved for priests or bishops or people who feel especially qualified. Most of the time, it happens in ordinary relationships. It happens in friendships and families, around dinner tables and coffee cups, through acts of kindness, through listening, through showing up, through helping another person learn what it means to trust God a little more deeply.
The disciples were sent while they were still becoming. And so are we.
The truth is that all of us are invited into God’s ongoing life and work of redemption. Not perfectly. Not without questions. Not until we finally feel ready. But right here, in the midst of ordinary life.
And perhaps that is why the Church now enters what we call ordinary time. Because after the great celebrations of Christmas and Easter and Pentecost, we are reminded that discipleship is lived not only in extraordinary moments but in ordinary ones: In the rhythms of worship and friendship and prayer. In bread and wine. In grief and laughter. In all the small daily ways we continue showing up for God and for one another.
And I think that is part of why this Sunday feels especially meaningful to me. Four years ago, on Trinity Sunday, I preached my first sermon while trying to discern what God might be calling me to become. In a few weeks, I will be ordained a priest. Somewhere along the way, through discernment and seminary and ministry and formation, I have begun to understand that discipleship is not about finally having everything figured out. It is about continuing to say yes to the invitation to participate in the life of God.
And one of the greatest gifts of these past nine months has been the opportunity to do that here with you. You have allowed me to pray with you, learn alongside you, worship with you, and serve among you. You have been part of my becoming, just as I hope I have been part of yours. For that, I am deeply grateful.
And so my prayer for all of us is that we would continue learning how to live within the life of God — creating beauty, making peace, loving one another well, and trusting that even in the midst of uncertainty and becoming, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit are still with us, drawing us ever deeper into the rhythm of divine love.
Amen.