June 15, 2025 Sermon

Julie and I have been fortunate to have community as a central focal point of our relationship for the past 15 or 16 years. This has been true across various stages of our lives, from our college days and the years after, when we shared a house with close friends in Arkansas, to our time in the D.C. area starting in 2014, where we were part of the seminary community. Even today, in our current neighborhood, we're part of a cul-de-sac where many homes have children around our daughter Anna's age, fostering a strong sense of connection.

Just recently, while our kids were playing outside, I spoke with a fellow dad, Kyle, an economist teaching at Montgomery County Community College. We were discussing the ongoing conversations within the Montgomery County public school system about reallocating associations and the feeder system. This is especially relevant to us as we're on the cusp of changes driven by a new high school in our part of the county. Our conversation highlighted a perceived challenge: balancing community cohesiveness—where kids grow up together within the same school system—with the seemingly competing good of fostering economic, social, and cultural diversity by having children be part of communities beyond their immediate neighborhood. The question is how to successfully navigate the needle between increasing diversity and maintaining community cohesiveness.

This challenge has been on my mind a lot this week because it lies at the heart of what we celebrate with the Trinity. While I usually focus on the Old Testament, Epistle, or Gospel readings, this week, the "collect"—the unique prayer for the day—really captured my attention. This particular collect is one of Thomas Cranmer's translations from Latin, slightly edited and included in the earliest prayer books of our tradition, with roots going all the way back to medieval Anglican sacramentaries. The core observation, even in the Latin, asks for God's grace to "acknowledge the Trinity and worship the unity."

This phrasing is incredibly interesting. It suggests that when it comes to diversity, represented by the Trinity, the best we can often do is acknowledge it. In contrast, it feels much easier to worship homogeneity, the unity that binds us together. I want us to reflect on this, because in God's fundamental Trinitarian nature, we find the reality of community, diversity, and unity—all simultaneously true and part of God's ultimate being. Yet, as humans, throughout history, we often bifurcate these concepts, seeing unity and diversity as competing goods.

However, today, on Trinity Sunday, we are invited to recognize that diversity and unity are not opposing goods. Instead, they are seamlessly unified in that diversity. They are part of the truth of God's presence in the world and the truth of who we are as the church. It's so easy for us to seek out community during times of difficulty and trial, to find support among each other. In our epistle reading, the virtues of suffering—resiliency, endurance, strength of character—are framed in the first person plural. It's not just individual suffering that builds these traits, but when we as a community struggle together and are present with each other during tribulations that these virtues manifest. It's when we are together as a community that these virtues truly appear.

Yet, every community, no matter how homogenous we try to make it, contains diversities. There are individual life experiences, perspectives; we are never all the same. So, even within community, we always encounter differences. The question then becomes, how do we hold these two things together? I don't have an easy answer, but I invite us to recognize both realities: our diversities, our myriad gifts, perspectives, and life experiences, and to let these differences draw us into deeper relationships, ultimately leading us to find and claim community once more.

It feels like our world and society are at an inflection point, where community feels very tenuous, frayed, and uncertain. One of the greatest gifts we have in proclaiming our faith is to name the power of community—the power of being together. To unequivocally state that when we are together in our differences, not despite them but because of them, we build lasting, sustaining, and good community. This kind of community can transform the world and set wrongs aright.

It's also incredibly powerful that we celebrate Trinity Sunday this year in June. More often than not, it falls in June, which for many years in the United States has been Pride Month. I remember my mother, a nurse in the 1980s and early 1990s, and her doctoral research exploring ways to help those suffering from HIV-AIDS maintain their strict medication regimens. Even as a young child, I sensed the profound and powerful community that supported each other during that harrowing and uncertain time, where suffering and turmoil were widespread. The strength of that community was central to navigating the challenges ahead.

Also, every June, we celebrate Father's Day. For many years now, there's been a recognized epidemic of lack of male companionship in the United States. I listen to an outdoors hunting podcast, and I've been so pleased to see BetterHelp, a mental health service, as one of their main advertising partners, encouraging men to seek support and relationships to navigate this epidemic of loneliness and isolation. Here too, community is a central place of support in navigating struggles.

As a parish family, we sometimes find ourselves in places of difficulty and struggle. We, as a community, region, and nation, are experiencing this. Our great gift today is the centrality of community: community in the midst of our diversities, providing a path forward, a place of support and togetherness as we struggle, wrestle, and experience challenges together. Through this process, we find new life, strength of endurance, and hope—a provocative term in these dark times.

So this morning, friends, as we celebrate Trinity Sunday, may we acknowledge the beauty of diversity and, within it, also see the unity that is brought forward. Let us be together in our differences, and through those differences, be blessed to find our strength—our strength as a community, our strength to navigate the days, months, and years ahead. May we always feel the presence of our triune and unified God who gives us the hope, power, and strength to see better days ahead. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.