One of my very favorite phrases in this world is, “More is caught than taught.” I first learned it when I was a preschool teacher, and it consistently rang true. If I sat crisscross-applesauce on the carpet ready for Circle Time with my hands in my lap, soon the kids would follow. If I made sure to push my chair in every time I got up, it would be picked up quickly, and even when reminders were needed, I never had to teach these direct actions. When we look at our own learning, we see how this is true for a variety of aspects, but my favorite is language. I’m sure I learned the difference between you singular and you plural in grade school, but I know that I learned that y’all meant a group of people and all y’all meant everybody and you and ‘em was your family or friends before I ever went to school. A formal teaching of this sort of communication was never needed because I was surrounded by it before I could make sense my surroundings: more is caught than taught.
Today, in the life of the church, we celebrate the Holy Trinity, and there may be nothing more telling of “more is caught than taught,” than when it comes to what we understand about the Trinity. As for the holy scriptures, there isn’t much found when it comes to teachings about the Trinity. We know that generally that Christ was the son of the Father and that at Pentecost, the promised Advocate, the Holy Spirit, came into this world. When it comes to formal teaching in the academic world around the Trinity, the exact opposite can be found; rather than spare words that allude to truths, one can find no shortage of metaphors and illustrations and paragraph after paragraph trying to explain the mystery of the Holy Trinity. How can the three persons of the Godhead – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—truly be one being? The very short and quick answer is that I don’t know, truly no one knows. We have ideas, and we let these formal and informal teachings shape what we know, and by God’s grace we continue to grow in understanding of this great mystery. What I do know, though, is that the Godhead is far vaster than the narrowness of my own understanding.
In the Gospel lesson set for today, Jesus invites the apostles to join in God’s work in this world to make disciples and to welcome folks into this life of faith through baptism in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but the part of this invitation, this Great Commission, that most captured my soul is that he says to “teach them to obey everything I have commanded you.” Now, the danger of the time and location where we find ourselves is that we have thousands of years of Christian history and Biblical scholarship that tend to make us forget exactly what we have been commanded to do.
It is necessary, I am convinced, that a key part of being a Christian in today’s world is to critically analyze what we have collectively caught when it comes to our understanding of how the Godhead moves in this world. There are all sorts of assumptions about God and Christ and the Holy Spirit that we all carry; some we have spent years of our lives trying to untangle and figure out how we learned to put God in such a narrow box.
When I think about Christ’s invitation into the Great Commission, I’m especially convicted by the implication to teach others to obey what has been commanded by Christ. Because if more is caught than taught, I hope that I’m able to encourage those around me to put their swords back in their sheaths as Christ did to Peter when he cut off the ear of an enslaved solider; that I will choose not violence and power, but the difficult way of love. If more is caught than taught, I hope that I am able work toward the liberation of those folks who are oppressed like God did for the Israelites in the Exodus; choosing not to be known to the powerful and privileged but the marginalized and oppressed. If more is caught than taught, I hope to be like the Holy Spirit and intercede with sighs too deep for words in my prayers to God; because I don’t need to understand something to be affected by it.
We are all tasked with this Great Commission; we are co-missioners with Christ in this world, but friends, we cannot do this work if we choose to cling to our narrow understandings of God the Creator, God the Redeemer, or God the Sustainer. The invitation this day is not just to go around asking folks if they’ve accepted Jesus into their hearts or rushing folks to get baptized, the invitation found in the Great Commission on this Trinity Sunday is one of building relationships and co-creating a community that is built upon the things that Christ has taught us. The three persons of the Trinity need not be fully understood to affect and change your life. A key part of this discipleship into which we are invited is to pay attention: where is God the Father, the liberator of God’s people, present or absent in our lives? How are we shaped by Christ’s relentless example of a life of love? And how do we attend and sustain the people and communities around like we learn from the Holy Spirit? The Trinity is not something about which anyone can teach us, but the Trinity is something that we can let shape our lives so that those around us will see God’s work in and through us.
The invitation of this day is that about being a witness in this world, not by teachings or debates, but by a life so shaped by the Holy Trinity that those around you cannot help but to wonder what y’all are up to. The invitation of this day is to be so molded by the Trinity that our very lives are witnesses to this mystery. And the invitation of this day, in Christ’s Great Commission, is for all of us is to go out into the world to be witnesses to the movement of God’s love in this world.
A sermon delivered to the people of Christ Episcopal Church in Bowling Green, Kentucky on June 4, 2023 for Trinity Sunday A.
Becca Kello 