Trinity Sunday: playing favourites

Posted on May 31, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for Trinity Sunday, 2026

Is it wrong to have a favourite person of the Trinity?

One of the things I love about Trinity Sunday, which is always the first Sunday after Pentecost, is how we find ourselves thrown into confusion by the image of a God who is One, who is Three, who is Spirit, who is Incarnate, who has known breath and who breathed breath into being. We are tempted to try to make sense of it all, with pictures and patterns of three-leafed clovers and Celtic knots. But God is not a mathematical problem, and God – while we can see God everywhere – God will always be more than our vision can contain, or our words describe, or our hearts need.

God is more than a formula: Father, Son, Holy Spirit; Creator, Christ, Holy Ghost; Maker, Redeemer, Sustainer. God is always defying the algorithm. There is nothing artificial about God. God is always more than we can create even in our dreams.

In the beginning, Genesis tells us, before there was anything, before there was nothing, before there was even a word for nothing, there was God. And God breathed over the nothingness that had no name – Spirit – and God spoke creation into being – Word made manifest – and God created something out of nothing. Everything that is, everything that breathes, whether with lungs or leaves or through the heaving of the tides; everything has its genesis, its origin, in God.

And God continued to be with, to breathe with, to love God’s creation. God walked in the garden of Eden in the cool of the day, and burned like fire to lead the people of God out of slavery, and brooded like cloud over mountaintop moments, and brooded like a mother hen over her chicks, loving the creation that God had made. God made sea monsters and calmed storms. God had fun with creation, at least from time to time.

And God became human, lived, died, defeated death, because God loves us enough to live with us, and because God is more than our life can contain, and God gives us more life than we can imagine.

And God, the Spirit, descending like a dove, found us refuge from the Flood, found us out when we were afraid and hovering behind locked doors. And God, the Spirit, sang to us in the language of our hearts.

 It’s all there, in the stories of the Bible, and there is so much more. It is part of our DNA. It is our history and our hope, the ground of being and our glory, and it is always more than we can ask or imagine.

So when Jesus tells us to go and make disciples out of all kinds of people, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, this is at least something of what he means. Not to have all of the right answers about how God can possibly be three and one all at once, or whether it’s ok to have a favourite person of the Trinity, or fine to be totally confused about the whole thing; but to tell the stories of how God made me, a whole person, out of next to nothing. Of how God walked with you in the cool of the evening, when you needed not to be alone any longer. Of how God burned like fire within you until you could keep silent no longer, or burned like fire before you to show you the way to freedom, or sheltered you as a mother hen shelters her chicks with the strength of her feathers.  

And when Jesus told his disciples all of this, the eleven who were still with him, they worshipped him, but some doubted. Because the mountain was high and its sides were steep and their bodies hurt and they remembered the betrayal that reduced them from twelve to eleven, and the cruelty of the cross, and the fear that kept them confined behind locked doors. Some doubted.

And that was ok, too, because they were there, with their friends, with their community, and they were with Jesus, and Jesus came to them. And this was a story they would tell, too, of how when they doubted, and thought all was lost, their community held them, and Jesus promised beyond hope that he would be with them always, to the end of the age, even if they couldn’t always see it.

I don’t really have a favourite person of the Trinity. I have all of the favourites, depending on the story, depending on the day, and I know that it doesn’t really matter, because they are all One, and they surround me and sustain me and love me. You know God loves us, right? And when the world is troublesome, and life is weary, and truth is elusive, and freedom like a cloud on the horizon, God is there, in the cloud, in the fire, in the fragile feathers, in the cool breeze, God’s glory humming over all creation like the colours of the rainbow. Amen.

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Incongruity (or, Fireworks at Pentecost)

Posted on May 21, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

No gentle breeze to nurse the flames
but a gust, a buffet that knocks out
other sources of power, so that
all we see is one another’s wonder
by light of a fire that reveals,
does not obliterate the features
of God imposed upon the other,
singular yet polyphonic,
inebrious yet wholly within reason,
for a given value of the word;
of that Word which is beyond all value,
which is on our lips and well
beyond our understanding.

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Beyond the borders

Posted on May 8, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

Beyond the borders of my body lie 
a floor in need of sweeping, 
a piano that needs playing, 
a spider that I saw while making tea, 
birds that want feeding, though 
the last creature seen there was 
a long-fingered raccoon, scooping 
handfuls of seed into its joyful jaws; 
a lawn that needs mowing, 
a wound in need of healing, 
tears that need comforting, 
bombs that won’t stop falling, though 
the call to prayer echoes over rubble; 
oceans that won’t stop rising. Oblivious, 
the cat lies warm across my legs, 
as though love were all that were needed. 

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Was it necessary?

Posted on April 3, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

We do not have Pharaoh’s excuse, 
whose heart by God was hardened, 
but from that evening in the garden 
we have pursued our own destruction. 

We cannot claim we didn’t know, 
with the fruit still sweet on our tongue. 
Was it necessary? Better ask the serpent,
ask ourselves what it would have taken to remain 
unstained by the sap and its syrupy lies? 

God who hardened Pharaoh’s heart but not ours; 
God who split the earth, poured out its dead, 
did you crack even then this heart of stone? 
Like a shell cracking open to reveal 
the seed within of good or evil, 
weal or woe, war or sweet desire. 

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The olive grove bears witness

Posted on April 3, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

They say that the pelican plucks out her feathers 
to feed her young with blood; I have never seen it, 
but I hear from the pilgrims who come to see where he 
fed our roots with prayers pulled out by the shaft. 

They came with torches; trees do not love fire. 
We shook and we swayed; we could not flee. 
We weighed in instead with our heady scent:
remember, we whispered, your roots. 

I have heard that the pelican thing is a myth, 
that it is the blood of others that colour her kiss. 
The torches of war still light up the sky. 
The pilgrims have fled and we remain rooted.

But do not imagine us helpless; we who have grown  
upon his blood and prayers these thousands of years.
We know what we saw that night, whom we sheltered. 
Remember, we murmur to all who will listen, your roots.

 

He came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives; and the disciples followed him. When he reached the place, he said to them, “Pray that you may not come into the time of trial.” Then he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, knelt down, and prayed, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet not my will but yours be done.” Then an angel from heaven appeared to him and gave him strength. In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down upon the ground. (Luke 22:39-44)

Now Judas, who betrayed him, also knew the place, because Jesus often met there with his disciples. So Judas brought a detachment of soldiers together with police from the chief priests and the Pharisees, and they came there with lanterns and torches and weapons. Then Jesus, knowing all that was to happen to him, came forward and asked them, “Who are you looking for?” (John 18:2-4)

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No longer Monday

Posted on March 31, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

It’s not Monday any more, but the scent still lingers in the house when they awaken, and Lazarus is grateful for the distraction; he hardly knows himself these days, still amazed at the complicated gift of life. The echoes of yesterday’s prayers whisper through the statehouse rotunda. In the garden of Gethsemane, millennia of olive trees bend low to the ground, patiently awaiting the promise of peace.

This is the reflection I had the honour of offering last evening, on the Monday of Holy Week, for a prayer vigil of the Episcopal dioceses in Ohio:

a bruised reed God will not break,

and a dimly burning wick God will not quench;

our God will faithfully bring forth justice. Isaiah 42:3

 

I’ve been thinking about the palm branches, strewn yesterday across the ground, trodden by the colt and trampled by the following crowds. Symbols of joy, of welcome, of worship, bruised by the realities that quickly set in of a world that is far from gentle.

When everything seems broken, and the powers of this world would reclaim even the cries of welcome and of worship for its own purposes: for the purposes of pride, of vainglory, of war:  Do not let it.

Now, it is Monday, and Mary is anointing Jesus for his burial (John 12:1-11). She knows that he is borrowing time. I wonder what conversation he has had with Lazarus about that, about those days spent on the plane of the dead.

Powers and principalities would like Lazarus to have stayed dead. It is not right, they feel, for God to reverse the engines of entropy, which are so efficient at keeping the world at war, its people in confusion. The powerful are ravenous for more power, while the poor grow ever more hungry.

But God will do more than to preserve the bruised reed. God will do more than refrain from extinguishing the flame from a dimly burning candle. God can and will do more than we dare ask or imagine.

Where the palms lie bruised and bleeding from their leaves, I imagine the people who gather their fibres to weave baskets for bread. They will not let the worship go to waste nor the songs of praise wither. They refuse to give up on hope.

Even where the flame sputters and dies, all hope is not lost. Lazarus, with his final breath, must have thought it too late for Jesus to come; it wasn’t. His disciples may have thought it was too late for him to defeat the powers of death, of this mortal and immoral world; it wasn’t.

Not through might, nor money, nor armies, nor even angels, but through love. That was the way of Jesus. His tenderness to Mary, his truthfulness to Pilate, his faithfulness in prayer, cleaving to the psalms, even at the point of death: Jesus knew a better way to be defiant, and to remain undefeated by the world.

And in our prayers, our songs, our lived and living faith, may we remain lovingly, peaceably, indefatigably defiant of anything that does not reek to high heaven with mercy, resound to the depths of the earth with compassion, fill the room, the house, the world with the community of love, the beloved community of God, until all are gathered in.

 In the name of Love, in the name of Mercy, in the name of Justice, in the Name of Jesus. Amen.

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If these were quiet …

Posted on March 25, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

Think of the palms, crushed and bruised 
by the colt and the crowds, 
and of the ones who came back, the poor, 
the quiet, who came back to collect 
their broken stems and bleeding leaves, 
and wove them into something new, 
something to sell back to the capricious 
crowd on another day, 
so that nothing may be wasted, 
so that their hosannas may not 
waste or be swept away. 

___________

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God’s time

Posted on March 20, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

His last breath took him by surprise.

Until its vapour dissipated in

the ragged inhalations of his sisters,

beginnings to convert his death into ululation;

until then, he had thought that he would come.

Hard to say what happened next:

his astonished body wrapped and sealed,

cooling and settling in the garden tomb,

until he wondered how, in death, he could still hear

his sisters, his friends, his name.

Until light struck him like the dawn

as though the world still turned

as God intended, night before day,

he had thought it was too late.

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A world of miracles

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

Do you also want to be his disciples? asked the man.

Then try this: Listen.

Listen to the stories of the one you have walked by

a thousand times in as many days

dripping with pity without breaking your stride.

Open your eyes to the mundane miracle:

Mud, water word;

ingredients that made a world

and some body to see it, and love it

as God intended.

Open your minds to mercy, your hearts to healing.

He shook his head. I have never seen the stars, he said,

but night is coming.

So for the second time they called the man who had been blind, and they said to him, “Give glory to God! We know that this man is a sinner.” He answered, “I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” They said to him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” He answered them, “I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?”  – John 9:24-27

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Dramatic irony

Posted on March 8, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

Dramatic irony, it was taught to me,
is when the audience, we,
have intelligence unavailable
to the characters at play.

The author knows more.

You do not know the day,
says the Word, nor can you create it
out of war, out of loathing, out of thin, cold air,
however close you think it comes to heaven.

Yet the hour is now here, the Word has spoken,
who speaks it into being with a breath;
the hour of spirit and truth.

The trouble is that we still do not see it:
the Spirit that moves where it will,
the truth that whispers beneath its breath,
that Love is God, waiting in plain sight
beside the well, and all else irony.

I find myself drawn to the contrast between reports this week that some military commanders are framing the war against Iran as an effort to bring about the end times, as though we may decide these things for God, in our wisdom; the contrast between that and Jesus’ words to the woman that the hour is already come, quietly, unnoticed over a cup of water, when reconciliation happens, and the truth of God’s love for the world, in all of its invented factions and fractions, has been revealed.

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