Trinity Sunday · A Morning Prayer Meditation

Three Times Holy

The lessons appointed at Morning Prayer: Isaiah 6 and 1 Saint Peter 1. 1–12

Trinity Sunday is the one Sunday of the year named not for an event but for a doctrine, and that alone is enough to make many of us uneasy. We feel we ought to be able to explain it, and we cannot. But the two lessons set for this morning do not hand us a puzzle to solve. They hand us a vision to behold and a gift to receive. We are not asked to take the measure of God. We are asked to worship him, and to receive what he has done.

The Vision in the Temple

The first lesson carries us into the Temple with the prophet Isaiah. He sees the Lord, high and lifted up, and the whole house filled with his glory. Above the throne stand the angels, and they cover their faces — even they cannot look full upon him — and they call to one another with one unceasing cry: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.

Three times holy. Not because there are three Gods, but because the one God is holy beyond anything a single breath can carry. The threefold cry is the nearest that heaven itself can come to saying what cannot be said.

Isaiah is undone by it. Woe is me, he says, for I am a man of unclean lips. And then mercy moves. An angel takes a live coal from the altar and touches his mouth: thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged. Only then does he hear the voice that asks, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? — and notice that gentle for us, the one God speaking as though he were somehow more than a single, solitary Self.

And here is something to hold onto. The very words the angels sang are the words our own office puts in our mouths today. On Trinity Sunday the Prayer Book opens Morning Prayer with Isaiah’s own sentence — Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts. When we pray this morning, we are standing where Isaiah stood. The vision is not a story about someone else. It is the company we have been brought into.

The Gift in the Letter

The second lesson could hardly seem more different. Centuries later, Saint Peter writes to ordinary Christians — frightened, scattered, far from any temple. He gives them no diagram of the Godhead. He simply tells them what God has done for them. And as he tells it, the one God comes into view as three.

They are chosen, he says, by the foreknowledge of God the Father; made holy by the Spirit; and cleansed by the blood of Jesus Christ. One rescue, accomplished by three. The Father reaches down to choose us. The Son comes to stand beside us and to cleanse us. The Spirit comes to live within us and make us holy. God above us, God beside us, God within us — and yet not three loves but one, not three works but one work of mercy with our own name upon it.

That is the Trinity as Scripture first gives it to us: not a riddle proposed, but a salvation described. We did not reason our way up to the three Persons. We met them — each one doing for us what only God can do.

Where the Two Lessons Meet

Then Saint Peter says something that quietly binds the two readings together. The old prophets, he writes, searched and longed to understand the salvation that was coming; they enquired and searched diligently, straining to see what was not yet theirs to see. Isaiah was one of those very prophets. He saw the glory, but as through a veil, and from far off.

What Isaiah glimpsed in the Temple, Saint Peter now names in the Gospel. The glory upon the throne has a Name at last: Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost. The vision and the gift are the same God — first beheld in shadow, now received in light.

So if the Trinity feels too high for you this morning, take heart. We were never meant to master it first and worship afterward. The angels themselves do not comprehend him; they only cover their faces and sing. And the coal that cleansed Isaiah’s lips is the very grace that still touches ours — in the Word, in the Sacrament, and in the daily prayer that makes us new every morning.

We do not come to Trinity Sunday to explain the mystery. We come to be received into it. Holy, holy, holy — and, by his mercy, his own.

O God, who hast given us grace to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity: cleanse our unclean lips with the fire of thine altar, that, with angels and prophets, we may behold thy glory and be made thine own; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.