Trinity Sunday

In The Bear, Carmy believes he has to be perfect to matter.

He’s brilliant, driven, accomplished—but his inner voice never rests. He obsesses over every plate, every detail, every failure. He can’t sleep. He can’t breathe. And slowly, the belief that he’s only as good as his last performance begins to unravel everything—his health, his relationships, his sense of self.

But Carmy isn’t just wrestling with an idea. His body carries unhealed trauma—family wounds, grief over his brother’s death, shame he can’t name. That history doesn’t just shape his thinking—it drives his compulsions. The trauma and the belief feed each other: his wounds say he’s not enough, so he chases perfection. But perfectionism can’t heal wounds. It deepens them.

The show is a masterclass in how toxic beliefs don’t stay in our heads. They shape our habits. They distort our love. They form the kind of people we become. And when those beliefs intersect with our deepest wounds, they become nearly impossible to escape.

Bad ideas about God work the same way—only with higher stakes.

I once read a book called The Cruelty of Heresy. It argued that theology isn’t just mental gymnastics for religious professionals—it’s the difference between healing and harm. The early church didn’t argue over doctrine because they were bored. They argued because what we believe about God shapes how we live. Bad theology doesn’t just confuse our minds—it poisons real lives, often in the places we're already wounded.

If Carmy’s story teaches us anything, it’s that our spiritual wounds and our beliefs about God are deeply intertwined. Just as his trauma manifests in obsessive perfectionism, our deepest hurts often express themselves in performance-based faith. We carry both the wound that says we’re not enough and the theology that says we have to earn love. Together, they create a prison.

Which brings us to Trinity Sunday. Let’s be honest: the Trinity can feel like the ultimate abstraction. But if that book was right—and if The Bear is any indication—then what we believe about God really does matter. It can be the difference between trying to earn love and learning to trust it.

To call God Trinity isn’t to master the ineffable—it’s to proclaim who God is, and to trust that this God is for us. That the Father sent the Son not as a distant representative, but as his very self. That the Spirit is not some vague force, but the love shared between Father and Son—now poured into our hearts. That God did not come to raise the bar, but to carry us home.

But that’s not the Jesus many of us quietly carry.

We carry the version who’s more human than God, more example than Emmanuel—the one who shows us the standard and only accepts us if we meet it. Like Carmy obsessing over the perfect plate, we imagine Jesus as the master chef who always perfects the dish—and now it’s on us to recreate his masterpiece. Try harder. Be better. No excuses.

But that kind of gospel doesn’t heal. It haunts. Because once perfection is the goal, everything becomes a test—ourselves, others, even God.

Maybe you’re already there.

You’re carrying trauma in your body—absorbed messages about what you had to do to be loved.
And alongside that, you’ve taken in a toxic idea—a distorted image of God.

You feel it: the pressure to perform eroding your relationships and your rest.
You sense that the theology you’re carrying isn’t setting you free.

Here’s the truth: God’s love is not conditional. He doesn’t hand out impossible standards. He’s not waiting to catch you in failure.

The Triune God is so for you that the Father gave his own Son, and the Son gave his life, and the Spirit now lives and works in you—drawing you to follow the Son back to the Father, not because you’ve earned it, but because you’re loved.

Jesus didn’t just show us the way—he became it. He didn’t just model the good life—he made a way where there was none. He lived, died, and rose again—not just to inspire us, but to rescue us.

The gospel of the Trinity is not “try harder.” It is “It is finished.” And by the power of the Spirit, that finished work is already making us new.

That’s what the Trinity means:
Not complication, but communion.
Not theory, but love.
Not pressure, but promise.

God is not out to get you.
He’s come to get you—
heart and mind, body and soul—
and bring you home.

“The Burning Bush,” Marc Chagall, 1958.

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Please note: there won't be a Note next week as I'll be on vacation. I'll be back with a new one the following week.

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Think of these midweek reflections as a preview of what’s coming on Sunday—not the sermon itself, but a glimpse of where we’re headed. I’ll share the full sermon here after it’s preached.