The Holy Trinity is no laughing matter. Well, actually it is, just don’t tell jokes about it.
The 
modern Christian calendar confronts us every year with a Sunday devoted to an inscrutable doctrine one week after the exuberance of Pentecost, the gift of the flaming Spirit. This is always a challenge for parish pastors and preachers: Can I really say something that is “correct” yet still palatable? Spoiler alert: No, you can’t.
I’m not a fan of jokes about the Trinity told by preachers on Trinity Sunday. I’ve done this myself, many times, but I won’t do it again, not until I become a better (more divine) comedian.
Comedy takes many forms. I laugh the most when a joke shows me something ridiculous about myself that the jokester clearly shares. Solidarity is comforting, and it’s often very funny.
Religion presents far too much material for derision, the kind of comedy that evinces winces more than laughter. There’s plenty of material left for a different kind of humor, the life-giving kind, the kind that casts a bright light on the broken human condition we all share and that then appears in the spotlight of divine solidarity.
That’s not what I usually experience when preachers make jokes about the Trinity in a sermon about how they just “don’t get it.” Note to self and other Christian preachers: The Trinity is actually what countless Christians have proclaimed over many centuries to be what we mean by “God.” Let’s at least take it seriously; even more, let’s take it laughably.
The doctrine of God as Trinity carries profound consequences that really do bear on matters of life and death. Precisely because of this, preaching on it ought to be genuinely laughable. I’ll return to that laughter in a moment.
Why so deadly serious? Christian history presents a host of reasons, but I’m thinking today of contemporary Western society, especially in the United States, where virtually any genuine or effective notion of the “common good” has vanished from our public discourse. I consider this cultural climate a direct legacy of the severe individualism of the “European Enlightenment,” which extolled the virtues of individual reason. Important, necessary, glorious things sprang from this, but so did many dolorous wounds. Among them: every man (and especially every woman and child) is on her own, resolutely autonomous and adrift on a sea of impossible choices and hideous dead-ends. And the implications of this in a society of misogynistic white supremacy are legion.
The ancient societies who crafted Trinitarian doctrine lived with a decidedly different view of what it means to be human. I don’t mean to valorize their views (problems abound), but they did seek to make their understanding of God at least consonant with their understanding of human life, which is not a life of autonomous isolation but one that is entangled with countless other creatures utterly dependent on each other.
Right there the essence of God as Trinity appears—we do not worship an isolated entity, gloriously enthroned on a distant seat of self-sufficiency. Whatever “God” means, the word ought to inspire deep, essential, resilient sociality: communion.
Many other religious traditions harbor similar insights about the relational character of the Divine and I resist supposing Christians have any religious monopoly on this. And still, in contemporary American culture, where “Christianity” ostensibly holds sway, it’s high time to retrieve and recover and reconstruct the profound insight underlying that ancient doctrine: “God” is love, from all eternity, and therefore social and communal; God is communion itself.
Given how far Western society has traveled from this foundational insight, I do think sermons on Trinity Sunday ought to be “laughable.” Let us laugh, good-heartedly, at how desperately we Christians have tried to define and label and categorize divine life while resisting its implications for our own lives; let’s laugh at the stilted language of our creeda
l formulas, not from derision but from profound humility; let’s laugh at the very idea that we are alive—stumbling, joyous, pained, glad, wounded, and ecstatic—and in our laughter, touch the life of God.
I frequently touch the amazing grace and absurdity of life itself as I watch my Australian shepherd dog Judah play on a beach and dance in the crashing surf. I laugh. From the belly. I shout and sing as I watch that dog embrace life in its fullness. It’s thoroughly, entirely, completely laughable. And my laughter revives my soul.
So let us not tell jokes about the Trinity. The best belly laughs don’t come from “jokes.” They come from seeing ourselves for who we are in the midst of pretending to be something else; from seeing our foibles not as tragedy but simply the sinews of our relational selves; from seeing all our stilted gravitas as just bad acting, the kind we can howl over and then tumble into each other’s arms with a sigh of relief that we don’t have to pretend anymore. We can just be riotously grateful for life. And laugh.
We don’t have to pretend to know everything, know how to do all the things, know how to be good or proper. We don’t have to pretend to be self-sufficient, or having all our shit together, or living as perfect grown-ups. We can just be the idiosyncratic creatures of a wildly loving God who made us for each other, for love. I laugh at this, when I can see it and feel it, the kind of laughter that soothes my belly.
The Holy Trinity is deadly serious—not because we have to get it right, but because in trying to do so, we might just laugh at ourselves and find ourselves alive, together.
Let’s say that from our pulpits this Sunday, the feast of the Holy Trinity, and then laugh—good-heartedly, from the belly, as we fall giddy into the embrace of all those others who make us who we are. The humans, the dogs, the cats, the trees, the oceans and their beaches. All of it.
It’s so laughable, I want to cry.
And I often do, the tears laced with traces of a divine joy.
