Trinity Church in the City of Boston
The Rev. Morgan S. Allen
June 15, 2025
Trinity Sunday, John 16:12-15
O Lord, our Governor, how exalted is your Name in all the world!
Who are we that you should be mindful of us? Amen.1 Psalm 8:1,5.
Some years ago, a district court judge invited me to deliver the invocation at a naturalization ceremony. Appointed by George W. Bush, the judge would later aggravate Republican administrations and face threats of physical violence. In those days, he and I made a point of meeting for regular lunches, often at the old Threadgill’s south of the Colorado River in Austin.2 Now closed, Threadgill’s boasted the rich musical history of its venue and its neighbor, the Armadillo World Headquarters, with posters of the shows it hosted: from Janis Joplin and Willie Nelson, to Springsteen and Zappa. Eating flank steak and collards and cornbread, I could feel the gazes from neighboring tables around the room – some business-dressed patrons glancing admiringly at his pluck, while others lingered in a sharp scowl.
This week’s events – the escalating detainments of immigrants, the discouraging violence and destructiveness of a few protestors, the militarizing of the federal government’s response to public demonstration, the profession of our national weakness in a military parade, and, just yesterday, the assassinations of elected officials in Minnesota – holding all this has pointed me to my memory of those experiences back in Texas: the story I tell of that naturalization ceremony,3 I shared a perspective of this story in 2021. and the ongoing roil in the world outside it.
The ceremony itself resembled church more than I expected. A large congregation gathered in a high-ceilinged auditorium, and we all stood as an organ began to play [which certainly sounds (and felt) familiar enough]. The 345 men, women, and children prepared to become citizens of these United States of America processed the center aisle to their assigned seats. Leaders of this civic liturgy, vested in courtroom robes and clericals, added concluding punctuation to a long and energetic sentence.
Following the opening of court, we local clergy offered a series of prayers in several languages. A choir sang anthems, and a high-school color guard presented the flag. The presider led a version of our Episcopal calisthenics, as, together, we stood and sat … stood and sat … stood and sat again.
Three Fifth Graders from around the capital city had been chosen to read their award-winning essays in the “Celebrate America Creative Writing Contest.” Each composition reflected on the theme, “Why I am glad America is a nation of immigrants.” The essays voiced views of the world still unpolluted by the disappointments and cynicisms of our national experience. The authors’ parents pressed praying hands to their lips and offered teary encouragement from the front rows. The well-practiced school children read aloud of “Lady Liberty” … of “America’s promise” … of “God’s grace … shed from sea to shining sea.”
An Immigration Services Officer then readied for the “Oath of Citizenship” by reading aloud the names of the sovereign states represented in the Naturalization class and asking petitioners from each of these nations to stand when he named their country of origin. The effect took my breath away: from the call of “Croatia,” and the soft sounds of a mother and her cooing infant rising from their single chair; to the announcement of “India” and the thunder of springing seats as a hundred rose to their feet. In alphabetical order, the Officer read: “Afghanistan, Albania, Armenia, Austria … Brazil, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Cameroon … Honduras, Iceland, Indonesia, Jamaica … Slovakia, Somalia, Sweden, Trinidad & Tobago … Uganda, Ukraine, Yemen, Zambia, and Zimbabwe,” sixty-five – sixty-five – nations. And with all the petitioners now standing, the judge finally declared, “There being no objection to the recommendation of the examiner,” the “presentations and the motion of the examiner for admittance to citizenship … [is hereby] approved and granted.”
Without any cue, the decorum of the court dropped like a magician’s curtain. The room filled with camera flashes and raucous applause. The families and friends of these new citizens clapped and danced, sobbed and cheered.
Every year on Trinity Sunday, we in this parish celebrate our “feast of title” and explore one of our Christian faith’s great mysteries: our God who is Three, and who is One – who, in the language of our prayers, is “a Communion of persons and a Unity of being.”4 From the “Proper Preface” for Trinity Sunday, The Book of Common Prayer, pp. 361, 380: “It is right, and a good and joyful thing, always and everywhere to give thanks to you, Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. For with your co-eternal Son and Holy Spirit, you are one God, one Lord, in Trinity of Persons and Unity of Being: and we celebrate the one and equal glory of you …” Our Trinity Sunday commemorations work against the notion of these ideas as anachronistic whispers of some ancient argument or theological gameplay about angels fitting on the head of a pin. Rather, the Trinitarian language we inherit voices the real encounter of God’s real people, our forebearers who have sought to understand God’s action in the world: the power of a Creator, who calls the creation into being; the love of a Redeemer, who calls the creation into renewal; and the gift of a Spirit, who calls the creation into eternal life.
Sunday by Sunday, we hear several formulas to identify this Trinity:
. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit;
. Source, Stream, and Living Water;5 Cunningham, David S. These Three Are One. Wiley-Blackwell, 1988. Cunningham uses the image of “Source, Stream, and Living Water,” which I offer here.
. Creator, Christ, and Comforter;6 Name-That-Heresy for several of these!
No matter the metaphor we use, our Trinitarian language intends to give voice to the God in whom we recognize both difference and union: real difference and real union.
Think of our baptismal prayers and their declaration of the Grace that makes us “one Body and one Spirit … that profess “one Lord [and] one Faith” …. that shares “one hope in God’s call to us” – one and one and one.7 From the “Baptismal Dialogue,” The Book of Common Prayer, p. 299. Every week, our Holy Communion announces that no matter our history or our situation; no matter our color or our continent; no matter our significance or our sin; the Eucharistic table unites us in an inheritance prepared from before time and for ever. Created in the image of our generous God – and, thereby, called to bear God’s generous image – we as the Body of Christ must witness to the world this loving Divinity’s mystery.
Now, by setting a Naturalization ceremony beside Trinitarian ideas, I do not intend to imply the holiness of these United States. Yet, I do point to power of that civic image: the union we experienced stirred by the profound differences of those present: the Sudanese distance runner who escaped his burning village as a child to become an Olympian in this country, and who delivered the event’s keynote address; the Supreme Court of Texas justice, the child of immigrants who left Mexico to find work as a welder and a custodian; those Fifth Graders with their dear essays and their American-born, “middle-class” parents.
That experience – not so long ago – was an America of neither MAGA TikTok nor liberal echo chambers. We pledged allegiance, and we made room for one another. Gathering in real difference, made possible our real union – so many people, from so many nations, professing a commitment to “the common good,” believing that the pursuit of equality, freedom, and justice for all, remained worthwhile and achievable. Centering my American identity for a single sentence: it was into that United States my Deep South, backwater, public-school Civics teachers taught me I had been born, and so it remains the promise of the United States I still believe.
[Returning to our work of faith] People of God, see the taught, straight lines from masked agents stealing teenagers from high-school campuses, to a Middle East on the brink of all-out war; from spray-painting vulgarities, to dumping trash on cars, to throwing bricks at people; from bullies fearmongering on social media to the murder of partisan opponents. The enculturating of our divisions has taught us to doom-scroll these events and swiftly dehumanize their actors as either “for us” or “against us.” Perhaps especially here in self-proclaimed progressive New England where we have never quite outgrown our Puritan roots, we prioritize our personal righteousness, even before the practical work of effecting communal change. Our congregations too often seek to preserve members’ ideological, partisan, and social purity, fortifying as exclusive encampments only for those with whom we agree. Our Churches profess “radical acceptance” in one breath, yet we declare damnation for “opponents” in the next.
Hear me, yall, it does not matter what “side” you are on: making sides, taking sides, reinforcing sides, keeps us complicit in the world’s horrors. That divisiveness is itself a violence, and violence begets violence begets violence begets atrocity. As believers in the God who is Three and who is One, when we aggress one another – brutalize one another – we commit violence against the heart of God. When we take up arms against one another, we defy our nature, and we deny the very nature of God.
You have heard me say it before, and you will hear me say it again: we intuitively make these connections from one incremental cruelty to another, yet we dismiss the efficacy and urgency to begin our political action, to begin the work of our faith, in our most immediate circumstances.
On this Trinity Sunday we celebrate the wonders of our God,
. Creator, Christ, and Comforter;
. Maker, Redeemer, Sanctifier;
. Wellspring, Word, and Wisdom;
And we seek to love one another not simply as God loves us, but as God realizes Divine Love within the difference and union of the Trinity itself. So it must mean for us to be Trinity Church.
Held in common by this love;
Amen.