Meaning

A Sermon for Trinity Sunday

June 15, 2025 at Holy Communion

“I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit” (Isaiah 57:15). In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ☩ Amen.

This week our parish had a guest. A man I had connected with at our recent diocesan synod, who is a priest in this diocese and also a palliative care physician, stopped in on our Wednesday Men’s Fellowship for lunch and conversation.

He recommended a book which, he said, he re-reads every year or two because it means so much to him and to his pastoral and medical practice. It’s *Man’s Search for Meaning* by Victor Frankl. Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist who was interred at Auschwitz. *Man’s Search for Meaning* is the autobiography of his time in the camp, but it also describes his observations about the other inmates and reflections on what those observations would later mean for his practice of psychotherapy.

His key observation was that the people who survived the camps were not the physically strong, the young, those who entered the camps healthier than the rest. The survivors were those who had a reason to live. They still hoped that they would someday, perhaps even soon, get out of the camp and get on with the relationships and activities that gave their lives meaning. If you think there is even a small chance that you will wake up tomorrow and the nightmare will be over, that you’ll get to see your spouse and your kids again, get to go back to your hometown, carry on your vocation, then you have what it takes to just get through the day. Frankl called this “meaning.”

So our guest described how his practice of palliative care is as much a practice of pastoral care as of medical. His job is to help people find meaning in their last months or days of life. He told us that research shows how, in nursing homes where the stereotype is that people spend much of the day sitting in their chairs staring at the wall, patients are much more likely to thrive if they are given some small responsibility, like caring for a cat, or a houseplant, or visiting a certain other patient every day. That is a “meaning” for them during their time of physical decline.

Notice how meaning works: the meaningfulness of my experience depends on my investment in the meaningfulness of someone or something else. The meaning in my life is the meaning that other people and things bring to it. Or you could put it the opposite way: the meaning in my life is the meaning I *give* to the other people and things in my life. Meaning is relationship. Meaning is how I become myself by being in relationship with you, and you become yourself by being in relationship with me. Our relationship is “what we mean to one another.”

And that’s why we’re talking about it now. Today is Trinity Sunday. Having celebrated the Feast of Pentecost, we are ready to celebrate the Godhead of Jesus Christ, of his heavenly Father, and of the gift of his Spirit, all together in a single festival. We declare the essential Christian mystery that our one God, the foundation of all that is, “in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), is three persons in a single essence. That is to say: Christians believe that the First Principle of everything is relationship, and so meaning. The original instance of meaning is the relationship between the Father and the Son, between Father and the Spirit, and between the Spirit and the Son.

I was recently asked, What is God? God is self poured out into self, love exchanged for love, mutual transparency and perfect knowledge. And who is God? God is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit: the Father whose Son is Jesus and whose Spirit fills the world; the Son whose Father is in heaven and who breathes the Spirit over creation; and the Spirit which is the breath in the nostrils of both Father and Son. There is no one without the others, and so God is one even in his threeness.

But I want to return to the conversation at the Men’s Fellowship. As the discussion about meaning developed, someone said that he had recently listened to a podcast which said that the purpose of life was to be in relationship with God. His question was, “Really? It seems that all sorts of things have purpose. Even right now, I’m eating lunch for the purpose of satisfying my hunger.” And his point is very well taken. His lunch does have meaning to him in relationship to his goal of having energy to work out later. Even the most banal things we do have meaning: we brush our teeth daily because there is a relationship between that action and an outcome (in this case, health) which is meaningful to us.

But there’s something to be learned from that. We can practice what we might call “the mysticism of ordinary things,” or what one writer called “The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life.” There is no cranny of this world in which the Triune God is not present as the one who gives meaning, and so existence and life. There is no pinch of salt which is not the overflow of the Father’s love, no pebble which is not a divine Word, no droplet of dew over which the Spirit does not hover. The world is always informed by meaning, and so is always a touchpoint for the God who is Meaning.

But there’s a further point. Another one of the men responded to the first, saying that perhaps what the podcaster meant is that relationship with God is the *ultimate* purpose of life. “We do everything for reasons,” he said, “but some reasons build up to other reasons.” He’s quite right. I go to the grocery store to buy flour, so that I can make bread, so that I can eat bread, so that I can live, and in my life I have many purposes, like preaching sermons, and broadening my mind by reading good books, and deepening my relationship with my family.

But ultimately I believe what that writer said: the purpose which gathers all other purposes up together, is the ultimate meaning I find—and could find nowhere else—in relationship with God. And how could it be otherwise? At this point it’s pretty much basic math. If meaning is found in relationship with an other, then ultimate meaning must be found in relationship with the ultimate Other, the Other beyond whom there are no further goals, because that Other is the origin point from which all things come.

So the debate between believers and unbelievers over purpose in life is not so much whether there is finite meaning in the world, purposes that can orient us from one moment to the next, but whether there is ultimate meaning at the heart of and beyond the world. Is there an ultimate place where, like the elders in our reading from Revelation, there is nothing left to do but cast our crowns on the ground and worship him who lives for ever and ever (Revelation 4:10)?

I believe, in fact I declare, that there is. And that place of worship on high, the focal point of final aspiration, is present here with us at this altar below; it is a symbol of the one above. The bread which we break is the sharing of body with body, and the cup which we bless the pouring out of self to self. There is meaning to be found here, because what is given is fellowship with the Most Holy Trinity.