Speaking Of Trinity Sunday

Summary

In this episode of Speaking of Faith, Bishop DeDe explores the significance of Trinity Sunday, discussing the nature of God, the relationship within the Trinity, and the importance of understanding faith in a contemporary context. Bishop and Adam delve into the complexities of gender in relation to God, the struggles individuals face with faith and scripture, and the invitation to see Jesus in our everyday lives. The conversation emphasizes the need for humility and curiosity in understanding God and encourages listeners to engage with their faith more deeply.

Takeaways

• Trinity Sunday invites us to reflect on our understanding of God.
• The nature of God is complex and transcends human conceptions.
• Gender plays a significant role in our understanding of the divine.
• Faith often involves wrestling with concepts that don't make sense.
• Understanding scripture requires looking beyond surface meanings.
• The relationship within the Trinity is foundational to Christian faith.
• We are invited to see Jesus in the marginalized and outcasts.
• Our beliefs shape our actions and interactions with others.
• Curiosity and humility are essential in our spiritual journey.
• Engaging with faith can lead to deeper understanding and transformation.

Chapters

00:00 Understanding Trinity Sunday

02:54 The Nature of God and the Trinity

05:48 Exploring Gender and God

09:13 Wrestling with Faith and Understanding

12:00 Struggles with Scripture and Faith

20:57 Seeing Jesus in Our Lives

AI Disclosure: To support our staff in their limited time, many of our episode summaries are first generated by AI and then edited by the Communications Director to accurately reflect and preview our podcast episodes.

Transcript

Bishop DeDe (00:02.87)
Welcome to the podcast. I'm so glad you're here today. We're going to speak of faith. My name is DeDe Duncan-Probe. I'm the Episcopal Bishop of Central New York. I'm joined by Adam Eichelberger, our Director of Communications. And today I'm so excited to talk about Trinity Sunday. Now, for those of you who may not have ever heard of Trinity Sunday, it is a Sunday in the calendar of the church where we

talk about, celebrate the being of God. There's been all of these weeks we've talked about the passion of Jesus, the Passover, the appearances of Jesus. All through the year we talk about the Jesus walking and being and being part of our world. And on Trinity Sunday, we step back and say, so what we believe about God. It is a commemoration of more God's being.

the Trinity, the relationship of God. And it also, for those who may not be aware, is the Sunday that most often, if a priest or a rector has an associate rector, they will have the associate rector preach. It is the probably biggest substitute preaching Sunday of the year, because most people really don't want to talk about Trinity Sunday, because it has long been tied to orthodoxy.

tied to if you don't believe this you're heretic and people have been burned at stakes and executed and all sorts of things because When you believe something passionately that passion can overrun you and so It is will not surprise many people who know me to know that this actually is my favorite Sunday to preach is Trinity Sunday Whenever I have the opportunity I want to preach on Trinity Sunday because

I happen to think Trinity Sunday is where after all of the teachings and all of the theology, our lectionary turns to us and says, so who do you say that Jesus is? Who do you say God is? How do you understand God? What is your Christology, your way of viewing Jesus? What is your theology, your way of understanding God? What is your understanding of the Holy Spirit? It's important to recognize that throughout scripture,

Bishop DeDe (02:24.93)
There really is not a place where scripture codifies what we call the Trinity. There is throughout scripture, the working of the Holy Spirit, this person Jesus who comes as the son of God to us and through his passion, death and resurrection as our savior, and then God, the creator of all. In Genesis, you have this wonderful moment where God says, let us create man in our image. There's a plurality in the

in the Hebrew and these places throughout scripture. And there's only really one place where in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is mentioned. But it's never really talked about as a ontological reality of God. This understanding that we have that God has come to us in three distinct ways as creator, as spirit and as Jesus, the savior.

And so down through the ages, our understanding of that has shifted and changed in many ways. It also has been used as a lever to control people's thought. We are a monotheistic religion, and so it's hard to talk about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and not feel that slide a bit into polytheism. What does it mean that we believe in one God who has acted in three ways?

And how do we understand that? Often people will talk about, know, I am a wife, a mother, a sister, a friend. I have different relationships with people. But that's a little, doesn't quite get there really, to talk about the ontology, the being of God. This is the Sunday I get to say ontology a lot because I like the word ontological reality. Who are we?

Who is God as being before all else? Now, some of the things we know about God are how God acts. So God's creation, God's act with the Spirit, and then through Jesus. And so our understanding of God is, as Paul would say in Corinthians, dimly, but then we will see face to face. It is by faith that we understand God to be the three persons.

Bishop DeDe (04:48.674)
This is a lot of orthodoxy right here where we talk about the economic Trinity, how God has acted, where we talk about these things. Now there have been times that people have talked about modalism and so I don't want to get too far out with this because I can get quite granular it really turns out. I like this stuff a lot because I'm very curious about who God is beyond our knowing.

I said in a previous podcast that I had a theological professor who used to say that we are always Hamlet trying to describe Shakespeare. And I think that's very true. We are God's created beings and we're trying to understand the creator. In our contemporary concepts of God, I think we sometimes get too locked into pre-modern ways of speaking where God is a humanoid or God is where we tried to

to humanize God so much that our understanding of theology becomes rooted in what we can see and know and understand. So that expansiveness that happens with ascension, when we talked about Ascension Sunday, or God's acting in Pentecost that is beyond us, our ability to really receive the salvation of God depends on our ability to be humble and curious to see that God is beyond our conceptions. So with the Trinity and who got

ontologically is, it requires us to be humble and curious and to see that in all of life there is this dance of creation and spirit moving and of being and of the salvation of Jesus being an invitation to a way of living and to be transformed by love. And so on this Trinity Sunday, our invitation is to think

Who do I really say that Jesus is? How do I understand the relationship of Jesus with God the Creator? What is my understanding of the Holy Spirit? It is worth noting that in our Nicene Creed and other places, we talk about the Holy Spirit who descends from the Father and the Son. The seriousness with which these things were taken in previous generations is clearly demonstrated in the fact

Bishop DeDe (07:17.314)
That for thousands of years, the Greek church and the Roman church were separated by those few words, the philly oak way. Does God descend from God, the creator only, or from God, the son also? We as contemporary people may not understand that always. We may say, well, why is there such a big deal about that? Isn't this just about what you believe? And yet that gets us back to the purpose of this podcast. Yes.

What we believe has import in our life. If we believe studying helps us in school, we'll study more. If we believe that being kind to our neighbor is a virtue that we value, we'll be kinder to people. If we think that greed is good, that will change how we act as well. So speaking of our faith helps us to be both intentional and aware of how what we're believing is manifested in our life.

and how it might either be helping or harming us. And so how we see Jesus on Trinity Sunday matters because it will inform our faith in ways that are very profound. I often ask people, what's your favorite hymn? That's a great way to know our relationship with the Trinity a bit. If someone's favorite hymn is What a Friend We Have in Jesus, for instance, a wonderful hymn, Methodist in Origin, I will say that.

If that's our favorite, then that friend in Jesus is a wonderful understanding of the humanity of Jesus. If our favorite hymn is, you know, King of Kings and all, then our understanding is a more kingly, more empirical or an empire understanding of Jesus as Lord. So how we understand God, how we speak about God is always an invitation to how we believe and live our faith. How we

ontologically in our own being understand God's being. So I'm going to stop and pull myself back from the edge of just going full tilt into hardcore stuff. But Adam, as you listen to this, how is your understanding of the Trinity of God inform your own life and what questions might we have about that?

Adam Eichelberger (09:37.519)
Yeah, so for me, one of the things that's really great when I think about Trinity Sunday is it helps me kind of like you said earlier, Bishop, it helps me break down my preconceived notions about God. I think that whether it is in the art that we see or the way that we are taught about God, I like to kind of joke around sometimes when I say that God is angry sky grandpa.

Bishop DeDe (09:40.462)
if

Bishop DeDe (09:49.698)
Bye.

Bishop DeDe (10:02.03)
Excuse me. Yeah.

Adam Eichelberger (10:04.399)
that he's just sitting up there waiting to smite us because he's so angry about all of our bad habits and all that stuff. And Trinity Sunday, when I think about the Trinity actually, not just on Trinity Sunday, but all the time, it challenges what I've actually come to understand about God and gives me room to let God be more creative in how God reveals himself to me. And even in the sense that there are times where I struggle with

Bishop DeDe (10:10.68)
Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (10:16.834)
Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (10:21.006)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Eichelberger (10:32.625)
using a singular, and not to get into something that sounds like a hot button thing, but like a singular pronoun when it comes to God. That there is something very fatherly about God, the protective nature, the defensive nature, but there's also something very motherly and nurturing about God. And also that those two things aren't exclusive to a gender, and that this thing that is God, the divine, is way bigger than the concepts that I've come up for it. And the thing that really, what I wanted to tie this to is we got a question,

Bishop DeDe (10:38.764)
Right.

Bishop DeDe (10:57.29)
Right.

Adam Eichelberger (11:02.417)
From a listener named John and John asks this Bishop What do you do with the parts of faith that don't make sense? and I think that this is a good one for Trinity Sunday because again like we we have the the the in the incomplete version of God will we get like st. Patrick, know st. Patrick holds up the the three-leaf clover and all that stuff So like what do we do when we with the parts of our faith that don't make sense?

Bishop DeDe (11:24.878)
Hmm.

Bishop DeDe (11:29.9)
Well, that's such a great and important question, especially around Trinity Sunday, because a lot of it we do just kind of, it doesn't make sense to us. So I think we naturally either dismiss it or overlook it or change it and just kind of make it more palatable. Listener, I would encourage you to think about how have you in your lifetime felt constrained by this understanding of Trinitarian theology? How has it helped you? How has it kept you from an understanding where it has felt confusing?

so all of us have ways that we wrestle with when things, when something doesn't make sense to us. one way is, obviously the invitation to go back and re and learn more about it, learn about what it meant at the time. Another is to sort of take to task, the things we have inherited that may not serve us very well anymore. When we were a child, as Paul tells us, we speak as a child, but when we become mature, we speak.

you know, more maturely about God. So sometimes we have to, there are things that for all of us where this has to be true or my faith is, you know, is confusing. So to take a look at that and have the courage to say, what do I believe? You know, over the last few weeks we've had, you know, St. Thomas who helped us to ask the question, what do you need to know in order to believe in God? To look at the ascension, how is it alive for us today?

So I think that we continue to decode and make familiar those things we don't understand. You you brought up gender. It's important to know that in the Hebrew scriptures, the spirit was always understood as female. Ruach, a wonderful feminine Jewish or Hebrew word. When, you know, the scriptures were translated into Greek, became Numa.

which is non-gendered, it's a, Pneuma is not male or female, and then when it went into Spiritu, became male. And that was done intentionally at the time of like the Nicene Creed in the councils, because you had father, son, so the Holy Spirit was male also. And where in the Hebrew scriptures, it would have been more, a bit more male and female. Some theologians even went so far as to say that there should be a female,

Bishop DeDe (13:59.018)
a savior because clearly Jesus was a savior for men. So down through the centuries, then that may be a good podcast for us to have later or for Megan to do in the theology for the rest of this podcast to talk about how gender in the Trinity has come to be, you know, either embraced or discarded. Some will say the Holy Spirit is feminine because of that. Well, OK, that's a first step. But if if you're kind of

bifurcating the Holy Spirit, the Trinity into different charisms completely with the gender, then how are they one? So God the creator being female as well as the Holy Spirit, clearly with Jesus and this incarnation of God in this being male, but how do we understand those particularities? Gender is very important to God. We can't, you know, try to...

say that, well, God, you know, we just don't think of gender. Well, you know, magnolia trees, there's all kinds of things in nature where we see that for God, gender is an important concept for God. It also is important for us. So when we're talking about the Trinity, it is an essential part of how do we see God. And if we're very threatened by gendering God or we're very threatened by non-gendering God having inclusive language.

That's helpful information. And instead of it being threatening, I mean, back to the question of how do we deal with it to maybe stop for a minute and say, why is this threatening to me? What is it about that that stirs something in me where there's a fire of wanting to fight over it? What fear is that? And to know that God is bigger. God loves us. God cares for us. And we can ask questions of God without fear of

going to hell in pre-modern and modern way of understanding that we can ask God because we want to know God and be found by God, that searching and seeking and knowing that God loves us and wants to be known by us.

Adam Eichelberger (16:12.965)
This is really good for me to keep in mind, especially when I, I don't want to use the word struggle with the gender binary of God, but I mean, I'll, I mean, I'll be honest in my, in my roots being raised in the Roman Catholic tradition, like there is no room, there's no wiggle room in this. And I've even heard people preach very specifically about the gendered nature of the Holy Spirit. And for me, it kind of reminds me of Stephen Colbert.

Bishop DeDe (16:22.636)
We, think we all do. Yeah.

Bishop DeDe (16:29.71)
Mm-mm. Mm-mm.

Bishop DeDe (16:37.814)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Eichelberger (16:42.147)
Everybody knows Stephen Colbert from the Late Show. had this great quote, and Stephen Colbert is very overtly Catholic. He makes no qualms about it. He regularly has Father Jim Martin, who is a Jesuit priest on his show, but I digress. He told this story in an interview about how one time, I mean, he's done Catholic stuff all his life, gone to mass all the time, did Sunday school, et cetera. He went to an Episcopal service, and it was the first time he'd ever seen a woman standing in the position of a priest.

Bishop DeDe (16:42.734)
Right.

Right, yeah.

Bishop DeDe (17:02.35)
Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (17:05.998)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Eichelberger (17:10.989)
And he said that he got really emotional about it and that it showed him a whole nother part of God that had been hidden from him. And I share that very intimately because as I came to understand my faith through the lens of the Episcopal Church, I struggled a lot. Like for the first year or so, my priest was a man. But then the first time, and I think I shared this with you Bishop Dee Dee, that I had

Bishop DeDe (17:19.096)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Eichelberger (17:38.627)
I received the Eucharist and I heard a woman preach. I was like, this is an incredible part of God that I felt like cheated, like it got withheld from me. And Trinity Sunday gives me a chance to really reflect on that. And like you said, when it's uncomfortable, I can struggle with it and I can wrestle with it and really listen to what is the Holy Spirit trying to tell me and all.

Bishop DeDe (17:41.827)
Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (17:46.84)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (18:03.978)
Absolutely. Yeah. Cause we, know, for, for me, especially as a woman, grew up, the invitation to communion, communion was all men drawn near with faith. So as a young girl, as a young, I remember really feeling like, am I supposed to go forward? I mean, maybe I'm not supposed to take a wafer. I was, you know, born and bred cradle Episcopalian. And I, it made me question whether I was included in that. And then, you know, that the teaching at the time was, it means everybody.

And I thought, well, it doesn't usually mean everybody, know, restrooms are clear point, there's men and there's, you know, so, but to come to realize that God includes me in this and includes women in this and people who are non-binary and people who have different identities that God creates with diversity and invitation. And when we're threatened by that, then it is not.

Adam Eichelberger (18:36.049)
You

Bishop DeDe (19:01.952)
an issue for God, it's an issue within our own soul. Because God is always pushing us beyond our boundaries when we're called, you know, to love our neighbor, good heavens. Some of us can look around and say, there are some people that are very difficult to care about. So it pushes us beyond what we want into a divineness that heals and redeems us. Because often it's on the other side of that fear that we encounter the true nature of God.

that is beyond our conceptions. So gender is a very important part of that. Now for the Trinity and getting back to heal from that, we also have had centuries of over threat. If you don't believe this, then you're a heretic. If you don't believe this, you're out. And to recognize in that the sin of empire and the sin of supremacy that's human, God is the supreme head of the church. you wanna, know, Elizabethan,

in in Henry VIII, but God is the God in this relationship. We are not. And it's really hard to step away from that sense of threat and overt harm if you don't believe the right thing, you're going to hell. You know, the disciples didn't believe the right thing all the way through the gospels. know, Jesus is talking and they're off, you who's greater and who's this and who's that?

Adam Eichelberger (20:07.238)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Eichelberger (20:23.823)
Right.

Bishop DeDe (20:28.95)
And always Jesus is inviting, this is where the truth is. I am the vine, I am the branch. You need to be part of what I'm doing. And that's our invitation today just as much. If we have a hard time with God as father, well, what if God, like I said in earlier part, what if God's a bigger force than that? Not the grumpy old grandpa in the sky, but what if God is that sense of life that's in you?

causes your breath to happen and your heart to be? What if God is the ultimate creator to allow our thinking to expand beyond the barriers that have been placed so rigidly around us? Because only then, like you say, only then can we discover what God can truly be, a bigger, more broad understanding.

Adam Eichelberger (21:20.881)
Absolutely, and it's good that we're allowed to struggle with faith. The journey of faith is to not have it all figured out. It's to be willing to struggle with it. And this is a good segue, because we talked about the parts of faith that don't make sense. Mary had a question that I wanted to bring up this week, Bishop, and she asked, what part of scripture do you struggle with the most, and why do you keep reading it?

Bishop DeDe (21:24.728)
Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (21:28.526)
Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (21:47.022)
Mary, that is a great question. You know, there's many you can point to, whether it's the Philistines and, you know, in the Hebrew scriptures and the taking over of the land that's already inhabited. when we talk about the promised land, you know, and this is a very sensitive subject these days. You know, people were living there. When we talk about Paul with women and ordination, well, it sounds very constrictive.

Wives obey your husbands. These things can be very constrictive. Why do I keep reading them is because there's truth in them. There are things that we need to know, not truth about oppression or violence or harm, but the invitation of God to see the ultimate relationship among all things. And Trinity Sunday is key to that. The inter-relational aspect of God, that God is fundamentally, ontologically, again,

Relationship, relationship, relationship. We are invited into that relationship. And so I keep reading it to go deeper and understand. Paul in scripture is actually quite the feminist, which you don't get if you read it in contemporary language in contemporary times and don't understand the deeper meanings of what Paul is saying. And when you read about God's promise to the Israelites that God is saying, I am your God and you are my people.

and I will be with you always. So we have to read and go beyond our understanding and then struggle with it, wrestle with it. Jesus says scripture is worthy of reproach and correction even. So it's not meant to be, we need to change our mind. And I wanna make sure we don't end this podcast thinking that anything goes. You can think anything about God you want and it's fine. That isn't true either.

Adam Eichelberger (23:40.688)
right.

Bishop DeDe (23:42.924)
because not because going to hell or being punished a bit, but more because it's limiting. If we don't understand the truths of Jesus, the real, the ontological reality of God and what God's doing, then we'll lose the truth. Because the truth does set us free. And it sets us free of our own brokenness, of our own broken mentality.

but we are called to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love our neighbor as ourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. And then the commandments of Jesus throughout the gospels of I command you to love one another that they'll know you're Christians by your love. You know, these are the things that mark you as my disciples. Those are the borders. That's the boundary line.

How we conceive of God, the Trinity, the relationship of the Trinity with one another that's beyond us, the gender of God, these are things within that boundary that we're invited to wrestle with, mainly so that as we wrestle with it, we can grow in our faith. If we cannot conceive that God is visible in a woman at an altar,

then we cannot, we're not seeing God in our daughters or sisters or mothers or friends or selves. Our healing comes from understanding that the deity is in us. And for another podcast, a similar thing to the old white guy in the sky, because when you talk about the old grandpa, most of it, you all the white pictures of Jesus, Jesus was Middle Eastern. And so he, you know, our,

Adam Eichelberger (25:22.533)
Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (25:32.942)
inherited racism, the system of oppression, is very alive in our concepts of divine. And so seeing God in feminine, seeing God in race, in ability, in how we, these markers, when we divide out and weed out, God is bringing together that the lost sheep will be part of the whole.

So Trinity Sunday is a big Sunday. There's preachers out there. There's a lot to unpack. primarily for this podcast, I want to draw deep to, or really highlight how we speak about God and how our concept of God may be helping us and may be hindering us from knowing God, knowing the ontological reality of who God is, the relationship, the dance of the Trinity, the holiness that's in all of us.

Adam Eichelberger (26:30.875)
That's so good. then, so as always, you listeners have been following along and you've been giving us some good kind of dessert questions as I've come to know them because we get into these big topics of theology and faith and how we speak about it. And we use words like ontological and stuff. And it's good to kind of, as we land the plane, you get the bisque off cookie, you know, to kind of end the trip.

Bishop DeDe (26:40.642)
Here we go. Yep.

Bishop DeDe (26:48.174)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Adam Eichelberger (26:57.241)
So this one, there's no name with this. So we're just gonna say anonymous. Anonymous wants to know, Bishop, if Jesus showed up in our diocese today, and let me make the caveat. This isn't like end of the world Jesus that we all kind of fear. Jesus is just here. If Jesus showed up in our diocese today, where would you take him?

Bishop DeDe (27:00.878)
Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (27:11.682)
Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (27:20.63)
What a great question. So listener, I want you to think if Jesus showed up in your life today, where would you take Jesus? You know, I'd want Jesus to meet, I would want people to meet Jesus first. And so I would take him, you know, to meet people. You know, I, boy, that's a, that actually is a really tough question because I would, you know, want to take him everywhere.

Adam Eichelberger (27:35.014)
Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (27:48.174)
to our churches, to our ministries, to our feeding programs, and to the people who are suffering in the hospitals or the outcasts, and to different areas where people, where their poverty, racial, the injustices that are. But it would just be, I'd want Jesus to meet everyone. So I'm not, you know, we need Jesus right now. And, you know, and maybe,

after we've met all the folks in the communities, you know, TV. you know, I don't know that it would, to see Jesus, if we can't see Jesus in the least among us, if we can't see Jesus in one another, I'm not sure we'd be able to see Jesus if Jesus was in front of us. Because, you know, the disciples had a hard time seeing Jesus. People who were around Jesus couldn't see Jesus.

So I think first and foremost is seeing Jesus in one another. One of the first things you learn as a priest is that when you go to the hospital, Jesus is in the person who's in the bed and that you have the privilege of getting to know Jesus in the outcast, in the sinner, in the saint, in the people. So it's wonderful to think about what it would be like to introduce and welcome Jesus, but I think we can do that today.

we can start with welcoming and introducing ourselves to the people in whom Jesus, to see Christ in all persons specifically. Well, friends, thank you for being part of this podcast. Big discussion, I mean, we're gonna keep talking about the Trinity because there's so much to unpack here. So I invite you to do that with your own self. I now hand you the baton, the things you.

wish I had said or weren't sure that I should have said or think that should be said, this is your opportunity now to go and to speak about the Trinity with people you love and feel safe having that conversation with, to think about how we speak about God's nature. Who do we say Jesus is? How do we believe? And how then might we speak about that to a world who needs to meet Jesus and is hungry for the love that God brings us? May you be blessed and be a blessing. And I look forward to speaking with you.

Bishop DeDe (30:15.213)
soon.