at the First Congregational Church of Stoughton

United Church of Christ

I am holding in my hand a little volume called The All Better Book. In this book, author Suzy Becker asks elementary school kids to try and solve some of the world's toughest problems -- problems like what to do about the shrinking ozone layer and how to help people stop smoking. One of the questions she asks is, "With billions of people in the world, someone should be able to figure out a system where no one is lonely. What do you suggest?"

An eight year-old girl named Kalani said, "People should find lonely people and ask their name and address. Then ask people who aren't lonely their name and address. When you have an even amount of each, assign lonely and not-lonely people together in the newspaper."

A nine year-old boy named Max answered, "Make food that talks to you when you eat. For instance, it would say, ‘How are you doing?' and ‘What happened to you today?’"

And Shawna, age 9, suggested that “we could all visit one lonely person each week.”

With billions of people in the world, someone should figure out a system where no one is lonely. There is no pain like loneliness. And I'm sure most of us have felt that pain at one time or another. You may be feeling it right now.

Albert Schweitzer once said, "We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness."

Loneliness is different than being alone. We all need to be alone from time to time. Solitude can help us recharge our batteries and nurture our journey with God. Loneliness, on the other hand, is an empty sadness that comes from feeling unloved, from feeling that nobody cares.

When God created the world and everything in it, God said it was all good, except one thing. God said it was not good for the man to be alone [Genesis 2:18]. We were not created to live isolated and disconnected from one another; that is not God’s intention for our lives. And because it is not God’s intention, loneliness hurts. It's why being estranged from someone you love is so devastating, why breaking up is so hard to do, why divorce is so heartrending.

With billions of people in world, someone should figure out a system where no one is lonely. Well, someone did -- God. And the system is called community. The word “community” means common life; it is a fellowship of love which helps us experience not a heart that is broken, but a heart that is full, a heart that is alive. Community is rooted in the being of God; community is at the core of a church; and the heart of community is giving and receiving love.

To live in community with God and each other is what we were all created for -- that’s why it is so life-giving. To experience community is to know the joy of belonging, the delight of being known and loved, the opportunity for giving and growing, the safety of finding a true home. And God gives us a model for community – it is called the Trinity.

Today -- the first Sunday after Pentecost -- is celebrated by the universal church as “Trinity Sunday.” The words of the trinity are familiar. After the reading of scripture, we sing the doxology which ends, “praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost” and during the offering, we sing Praise to God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit, “One God, triune, whom we adore.” And many of the hymns we sing mention the trinity in some way. In short, the trinity is an undergirding tenet of our Christian faith. And even though the word trinity is not in the Bible, the concept is biblical.

In the first chapter of Genesis, we read about “the wind of God which swept across the land” – in other words, the Holy Spirit. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus gives the Great Commission, commanding his disciples to baptize in the name of “the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” which has endured throughout the history of the church as the baptismal formula for Christians. And in this morning’s epistle lesson, the Apostle Paul concludes his second letter to the Corinthians with this benediction: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”

The concept of the trinity came about in the first centuries of the church, when the early Christians grappled with how to express the three ways they had come to know God. One experience of God was as Creator. The term “Father” was attributed to this Creator God, and this analogy from human experience compares the connection between God and humanity to the intimate relationship between parents and their children.

For the early church community, another understanding of God came through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. God entered the world in the form of frail human flesh to participate in earthly human life – to share our “common lot.” Through the incarnation, the faith community came to understand that God was not just up there, but lived with us as one of us, sharing life’s pains as well as its joys. The imagery of a “Son” from human experience was given to Jesus to underscore his close relationship to God, the “Father.”

And the third way the early Church understood God was as the Holy Spirit. As promised by Jesus, the gift of the Spirit came on Pentecost, which we celebrated last Sunday, and the Holy Spirit is the presence of God working in our hearts and in our lives.

The early Christians realized that, to depict God, they had to somehow come up with a method for describing all three of these ways that God had been revealed to them. At the same time, they needed to be true to their monotheistic belief in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And so the trinity was the way the early Christians could remain true to the unity of One God while conveying their three experiences of God – the one God who is at once over us and with us and in us.

We are all familiar with the saying, “two’s company, three's a crowd.” That idiom – which, believe it or not, has been around since the 16th century -- is based on the belief that a third person spoils the ideal combination of a couple.

But in divine relationships, it’s a different story; the trinity is the model for relationships in the Christian church. The Trinitarian God is telling us that to be a true Christian community, we must open up our comfortable, established relationships to allow in a third. When we look at ourselves gathered here – whether it is me in relationship to you, or you in relationship with each other – there is always someone missing. That person can be the one who has not yet entered our doors for the first time. That person can be the one to whom God calls us to reach out. That person is the one we may not yet know but who transforms our congregation from the human dynamic of “two’s company” to the divine reflection of the trinity – “three’s company.”

The divine community we see in the trinity is the model of all genuine Christian communities, and we will never truly be Christ’s church unless we are open to the third person, the other, the one who is out there, who has not yet entered our doors, the one we don’t yet know.

And so, let us work together to ensure that this family of faith truly reflects the divine community. Let us reach out to the one that has not yet found us; let us ensure that we always have room – in our pews and also in our hearts – for the one who is not yet among us. Then and only then can we truly be the kind of church that Christ is calling us to be. Because it’s the system God created to ensure that no one is lonely – the fellowship of love called community, shown to us by the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.