Sunday 31 May 2026 | The Rev’d Clare Barrie
Based on Genesis 1:1-2:4a, Psalm 8, Matthew 28:16-20
May I speak in the name of God the Holy Trinity – Creating, Redeeming, Sanctifying. Amen.
+ + + +
A lot of clergy dread preaching on Trinity Sunday because it’s so hard to get beyond limited analogies: the Trinity is like ice, water, and steam, and so forth. There are things in life that we find hard to understand — like quantum physics, or depreciation, or Year 11 maths. Maybe we should leave the Trinity in the same too-hard basket.
But talking about God as Trinity expresses the human experience of God: as Spirit, moving over the waters of creation, and as the Advocate and companion with us always; God as Jesus the Son, embracing the fullness of the human condition; and God as the Creator, in time and beyond time, always and everywhere, power and mystery.
But it would be easy for us to sit here and say, “so what?” in response to the idea of the Trinity. What is the point? We talked about this frustration a bit at our recent Women’s Discussion Group meeting.
We are living through extraordinary, distressing times: what does it matter if God is three-in-one? How is that significant?
Trinity is God-in-relationship, which means the essence of God is difference. And being in relationship means always loving and caring for and seeking the best for someone who is other than myself.
And we are made in God’s image.
Which means it is part of our essence to be in relation to others. Of course, we need time to ourselves — especially introverts! — but what gives our lives meaning, what helps us grow and deepen, is connection: being in relationship with others.
And when we say, often quite glibly, “God is love,” it’s the Trinity that lies behind our words. God is indeed love: God exists, at heart, as a relationship of love — one God in three persons.
Like the beautiful Rublev icon of the Trinity — so well known, and we have a reproduction here in church — the three figures sit at the table together. The beauty of it is that the fourth side of the table is open, as if to invite us in.
And the Trinity has all kinds of practical and political implications. If God is, in essence, God-in-relationship, then God’s nature is a relationship of true equality and mutual fellowship and transparency.
There could be no stronger critique of all our hierarchies of domination and exclusion. There could be no stronger rebuke of all our economics of greed and exploitation, both of other human beings and of the creation.
I think there could be no better day than Trinity Sunday for Christians to pause and consider how we live with difference — how we perceive those who are other than ourselves. Because that is the demand our faith makes of us.
We who are baptised in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit are baptised into the dance — the life — the identity of the Trinity.
But it doesn’t stop with us. Jesus says, “Go therefore and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…”
As these words from Matthew’s gospel suggest, that means we have something to do. We have a task. We have a mission.
We are called to be dynamic, always on the move, connecting, caring, drawing others into relationships of love and transformation in Christ, honouring difference, walking alongside, listening, allowing encounter with others to transform us. This is a trinitarian way of being — a missional way of being.
And this week, the question of what it means to be human has come sharply into view for us here in Aotearoa.
On Friday, Parliament passed the Social Security (Modernisation) Amendment Bill, widening the use of automated decision-making in the welfare system. The Government says this is about efficiency: faster decisions, fewer errors, more consistency, and freeing case managers for more human work. And of course, no one would object to a system that is more accurate, more just, and less frustrating for people who need support.
But Trinity Sunday asks us to pause before we accept efficiency as the highest good.
Because when decisions are being made about people’s survival — about income, housing, food, children, disability, debt, and the basic capacity to live — Christians have a particular responsibility to ask: what understanding of the human person is at work here?
In his new encyclical on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence, Pope Leo offers a form of public theology. He is not writing only about church doctrine or only for Roman Catholics. He is asking what our shared life should look like if every human person is made in the image of God.
And he begins with the Trinity.
Leo writes that God is not solitary power, but communion: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, love given and received. And because human beings are made in the image of this Triune God, we are created for communion — with God, with one another, and with creation.
That means our dignity does not depend on our abilities, our wealth, our social position, our usefulness, our productivity, or even on the right or wrong choices we have made. Human dignity is not something we earn by being efficient, compliant, employable, or easy to administer.
Human dignity is a gift, given by God before anything we achieve or fail to achieve.
That’s hugely significant when we think about technology, especially technology used by the state.
A person seeking a benefit is not a data point. A person asking for help is not simply a risk profile, an eligibility category, a cost to be processed, or a problem to be managed. A person is a child of God, made for communion, whose life is held within the love of the Trinity.
This does not mean technology can never be useful. It may well help remove unnecessary delays or repetitive processes. It may make some decisions clearer or faster. It may free people to do more of the relational work that computers cannot do.
But Christian faith gives us a test: does this system deepen justice, dignity, relationship, and care? Or does it distance us from the human face of the person in need?
One of the dangers of automated systems is that they can make judgment seem neutral. They can give the illusion of being unbiased. They can turn poverty into administration and compliance. They can make it harder for people who are already struggling to be seen, heard, and accompanied.
And even if a system is not “artificial intelligence” in the popular sense — even if it is automated decision-making rather than a chatbot or generative AI — the theological question remains the same. What vision of humanity is being built into the system? What does it notice? What does it ignore? Who can challenge it? Who is believed? Who is being reduced to a form, a category, a number, a pattern?
Pope Leo warns that when technology becomes the ultimate criterion, the human person risks being reduced to data, a cog in a machine, or a commodity.
That is precisely what our faith cannot allow.
Because if God is Trinity — if God’s own life is mutual love, equality, and self-giving communion — then the systems we build must be judged by whether they honour that truth. Especially when those systems have an impact on people who are poor, disabled, unemployed, isolated, or already treated with suspicion.
The Trinity is not an abstract puzzle for theologians to solve. It is the truth that God is communion, and that human beings flourish only when our lives, our communities, and our public systems reflect something of that communion – the living pattern of the Trinity — a way of being in our lives and in our community that reflects equality and mutual care and transparency and love.
St Augustine, the great theologian-bishop of Hippo in North Africa in the fourth and fifth century, had this to say about the Trinity and our love for one another: “Now, love is of someone who loves, and something is loved with love. So then there are three: the lover, the beloved, and the love.”
Knowing God as a relationship of love, God the Holy Trinity, is the foundation, the bedrock of the universe; it is the dynamic heartbeat of all creation.
And we are invited into that great, holy dance.
But learning the steps will mean unlearning some of the other steps we’ve been taught. It may mean unlearning the habits of a world that teaches us to see some people as burdens, risks, costs, cases, or data. It may mean learning again to see each human face as a person made in the image of the Triune God.
That’s our mission: to live into our baptismal identity, the trinitarian identity given us when we were washed with water in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
To be part of the holy dance at the heart of the universe;
to invite others in to share the dance;
to become more and more like the God of love in whose image we are all made.
This is our calling.
Amen.