“Today is Trinity Sunday, the Sunday after Pentecost, when good preachers

give bad sermons and bad preachers give you a blow-by-blow of Athanasian

Creed. For my part, I’m stuck this week on the words of the Second Council

of Constantinople in 553: ‘One of the Trinity was crucified in the flesh.’

In other words, to believe in the Holy Trinity—to say that Jesus is God—is

to say that when Jesus of Nazareth suffered and died on the Cross, God

suffered and died on the cross. And so it is that ‘theologically speaking,’

as the great American theologian James Cone writes in his final work, The

Cross and the Lynching Tree, ‘Jesus was the “first lynchee.”’”