What is the most significant day of the liturgical year? Christmas? Good Friday? Easter?  Pentecost? There’s probably no single right answer. All of these days are significant. But they’re also situated in a narrative, in the larger story of the liturgical  year, that has a certain logical climax. I want to make a case that the entire trajectory of the liturgical year points to today. Advent to Christmas, Lent to Easter to Pentecost—that whole movement culminates with Trinity Sunday. Let me explain why I think this is so.  

The liturgical year is really the story of God—how God’s own life is revealed among us, so that we and all of creation might be transformed, reconciled and find meaning and purpose in God, in God’s very being. It’s a story that begins each year with Advent, the season of longing. I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that many people, regardless of where they might be on the religious or spiritual spectrum, long for ultimate fulfillment. It might be a longing for cosmic truth and meaning, or a longing for peace shared by all. Perhaps you can identify with that. But not everyone is preoccupied with this kind of big-picture longing. Many people are bewildered by more immediate concerns—such as how they can get through tomorrow, the challenges of exercising compassion to annoying family members, or obnoxious neighbors, or an unbearable boss. Some people long for more meaningful and purposeful work, not the kind of employment that leaves one trapped in a profit-driven vortex. Other people just long to make ends meet without the fear and anxiety each month that it won’t happen. Each one of us, in our own way, has a longing; we long to know how it is we ought to live. I think it’s really a longing to be reconciled with the Source of all life—what the Christian creedal tradition has called God the Father. We shouldn’t sentimentalize God the Father as a daddy figure in the sky. God the Father simply means Source, and our ultimate longing is to be one with the Source of all things—to be fulfilled in who we were created to be in the first place. Today’s first reading tells us that God created humankind as the very image of God. Our original purpose is to reflect God outwardly to each other and to the world. If we’re honest, each of us experiences detachment from that purpose. All too often our daily routines distract us from living into our original identity. So Advent, which inaugurates each liturgical year, is when we intentionally contemplate what we really long for—to be grounded in the eternal Source of all things.  

Christmas is God’s response to our longing. Christmas is the gift of Emmanuel—a name that means “God with us.” Radiating from the Source of all things is the eternal Word, the Light of the world, that calls to us and illumines us through the life of Jesus of Nazareth. This is what the creedal tradition has called God the Son, God’s Word incarnate—what Bishop John A. T. Robinson called “the human face of God.” If there is any confusion about how we should we live, study the life of Jesus. If there is uncertainty about what it means to be the image of God, Jesus shows us the way. In fact, he calls each of us—just as he called his first disciples—to follow him. And it’s a challenging, upending call. He calls us to lay down our lives, our quest for stability and certainty and comfort, and to follow him into uncertainty and sacrifice. Why? Because this is how the world will be saved. Our ultimate longing will not be satisfied by striving for more power and stability; it is satisfied in simplicity, in following the same trail that Jesus blazed. Along the way, Jesus never deviated from what he declared in the Nazareth synagogue at the beginning of his public life: “I have been anointed to bring good news to the poor, release to prisoners, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom to the oppressed.” When our lives are fully oriented to this work, we are drawn back to the Source of who we are and our longing is fulfilled.  

But the way of Jesus isn’t easily followed. As we unpack the gift of Christmas, it only takes a few weeks to realize how unsettling the gift is. That’s why, as we set out to journey with Jesus after Christmas, we are brought to the 40-day season of Lent. This is when we reflect on our own mortality and complicity in our broken world, how we invariably deviate from the way of Jesus and look for short cuts. The challenge we’re faced with on Good Friday is how to make sense of Jesus dying alone, after taking the bold step of putting his life on the line and challenging the heart of political and religious power. His companions bailed on him because they didn’t want to be arrested and executed. What would you and I have done? As the old Spiritual asks, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”  

Easter is the great turning point in this grand narrative. Jesus’ death is not the end of God’s gift. In his resurrection, Jesus conquers death, which is what the disciples were really afraid of. He appears to them in mysterious ways, transforming their doubts, reassuring them that taking up their cross, as he called them (and us) to do, is not a futile endeavor. He now calls us, as we hear in today’s Gospel, “to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” A Mennonite friend of mine recently pointed out that the expression “all nations” occurs in only one other place in Matthew’s Gospel—in chapter 25 where Jesus describes a future event of judgment. The nations will be judged, Jesus says, on the basis of whether they fed the hungry, welcomed strangers, clothed the naked, cared for the sick, and visited prisoners. That is the life of discipleship Jesus calls to embody, and he calls us to summon the whole world to live in this way, for that is how the world will be saved. Baptism is our visible commitment to this life.  

Which brings us to where we arrived last week: Pentecost. Pentecost is about the fire of God, God’s Holy Spirit, coming upon all those who desire to follow the Way of Jesus, just as it descended on Jesus himself at his baptism. It is the fire of God’s very being transforming our humanity so that our life might be united with God’s own life.  

And so we arrive finally at today, the first Sunday after Pentecost: Trinity Sunday. This is when we reflect on the journey of the liturgical year, from our Advent longing all the way to the gift of the Holy Spirit. But it’s not so much our journey; it’s about God’s story: God the eternal Source, whose Word radiates to us, embodied in the human person of Jesus. That Word addresses us in a call—“Follow me,” Jesus says—which points the way back to our Source, where we find who we really are and how we should live. God’s Spirit is poured out on us, saturating us, so that we are empowered to follow the way of Jesus with boldness.  

The story of God the Holy Trinity, as it is lived out repeatedly through the logic of the liturgical year, is the story that shapes our own lives as Christian people. Some of us, depending on our personal circumstances, might linger at different points in the story, whether the longing of Advent, the hope of Christmas, the challenge of Lent, the anguish of Good Friday, the joy of Easter, or the empowerment of Pentecost. That’s to be expected, which is why we need to go through the cycle of the liturgical year, again and again. We need it to push us along so we don’t get stuck in any one place and lose sight of the goal. The point of all of it, as I’ve tried to show, is to recognize that our lives are part of God’s life: eternal Source, incarnate Word, and Holy Spirit. Amen.