trinity sunday – Binary-Breaking Worship

Scroll lower to view reasons for revision + downloadable sheet music.

Unaltered lines are in light gray; altered lines are in black.

Holy, holy, holy!
Lord God Almighty
Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee
Holy, holy, holy!
Justice wed to mercy,
God in three persons, blessed Trinity!

Holy, holy, holy!
All the saints adore thee,
Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea.
Cherubim and seraphim,
falling down before thee,
Who was and is and evermore shall be.

Holy, holy, holy!
Sacred darkness cloaks thee,
Granting us mere glimpses of thine untold Mystery.
Still, thine image shows thee
in each human body:
Thou art our breath, our love and artistry.

Holy, holy, holy,
Although almighty,
Thou stripped off omnipotence to share our frailty.
Only Thou are holy,
yet thou chose the lowly —
With the despised, there shall thy Spirit be.

Holy, holy, holy!
God of the lowly!
All thy works shall praise thy name
In earth and sky and sea
Holy, holy, holy!
Justice wed to mercy,
God in three persons, blessed Trinity!

Reasons for Revision

This hymn by Anglican archbishop Reginald Heber (1783–1826) is a lovely piece of pure adoration of the Triune God. My personal appreciation of it centers on how it spans centuries — published the year Heber died, it’ll be two hundred years old next year! — and traditions:

I grew up singing it in Catholic Mass; I sing it now in a Presbyterian church; and I enjoy queer musician Sufjan Stevens’s cover of it. Heck, even the non-Trinitarian Latter Day Saints/Mormons sing it (altering “God in three persons, blessed Trinity” to “God in His glory, blessed Deity”). Thus when we sing this song we do so together not only with “cherubim and seraphim,” but with a vast cloud of human witnesses.

To better encapsulate the hymn’s expansive nature, and to infuse it with key concepts from liberationist theologies, I have revised parts of it with several goals:

To move from an emphasis on God’s “might” to God’s solidarity and abiding Presence.
To remove an instance of patriarchal language (“sinful man”).
To move from an equation of darkness and sightlessness with sinfulness (“Though the darkness hide thee / though the eye of sinful man thy glory may not see”) into an appreciation for the thick darkness — Hebrew עֲרָפֶל arafel — from which God guided the liberated Hebrews.
^ That stanza on God’s hiddenness is the part of the hymn I changed most — I ended up turning it into two stanzas! Refocusing that hiddenness around Mystery rather than sin, and taking the opportunity that afforded me to explore how the Trinity chooses to relate to humanity in the Imago Dei, in the Incarnation, and through the Holy Spirit.

I am thankful to Dr. Matt Webb for his input on my revisions. If you notice anything more to change up in this hymn, let me know!

Sheet Music

Holy Holy Holy! Revised Download

A Queer Reflection for Trinity Sunday

There’s something queer about a Triune God.

A diagram of the Trinity featuring a triangle with each angle labeled The Father, The Son, and the Holy Spirit respectively. In the center of this triangle is the word "God." Connecting lines between each angle read "is not," so that it reads "the father is not the son is not the holy spirit is not the father," while lines that connect each angle to the center read "is" so that you get the message "the father is god, the son is god, the holy spirit is god."

How can one Being also be three Persons? The math doesn’t seem to add up! Some spend years attempting to articulate this theology in a way that doesn’t fall into “heresy”; others give up with a laugh and accept it as a Mystery. Ultimately, the God of the Universe is ineffable, beyond our understanding — yet we are called to seek ever deeper relationship with God, and promised that if we seek, we will find.

When people decry queer identities as nonexistent, overly complicated, or paradoxical, I can’t help but think of our impossibly Three-in-One God. I think also about my own gender journey: how I struggled as a child to name what I was feeling because I had no language to describe it; how once I discovered others had words for what I was experiencing, I delighted in every one I could uncover; and how, ultimately, even my favorite words I’ve found to describe myself fall short.

Words like trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer certainly help others understand and relate to me better, but I’ve learned to be okay with the fact that they might never fully know me, just as I may never fully know them — or at least that the deepest understanding is beyond words. Turns out that the children of a Mysterious God are micro-mysteries in ourselves!

What I’m left with is this: if we worship a Triune God, why do we try to squeeze the humans made in that Infinite, Ineffable Being’s image into two narrow boxes? And if we celebrate how, in the Incarnation and Resurrection, Divinity burst through the binaries between Creator & Creation, Life & Death, surely the binary between male and female is not so insurmountable!

Together, let us pray:

Holy God, whose very existence is relationship, we marvel at your mystery. Protect this day and always those of your children who, like you, defy easy definition and resist restrictive categories. Teach us to recognize your wisdom and holiness shining within them, for only together in all our diversity do we reflect your image. Amen.

___

Reasons for Revision

Sheet Music

There’s something queer about a Triune God.

Further reading: