Trinity Sunday (Jan Heglund, June 3, 2007)

If you go to the average seminary preaching class, particularly the introductory preaching class, the instructor always tells you the following advice: When it’s Trinity Sunday, invite the Bishop to preach!

We find that language fails us when we talk about that which is truest, that which is most holy, and all of our language that we use about the divine is just groping. It’s almost like an experience you may have had when in the presence of something so exquisitely beautiful, or in the depths of a love that is so exquisitely powerful for you: you recognize that any words, however eloquent, to describe that experience are just babbling. So here are generations of church people who seek God through their minds – and that is a wonderful way to seek God. It is one of the manners of discourse, reflection and journey that the Episcopal traditional cherishes. “We do not ask you to leave your brain at the door.”

We also experience God in one another, in loving relationships, person-to-person, in gathered communities that do justice and love mercy: in the love between parents and children, between members of life partnerships, between friends. That love is of God. And we experience God in the reality of our journey. The Church knows that the root and ground of that experience of incarnation is available to us because God literally became human in Jesus. And so the Church identifies that experience of God, too.

As the faithful intellectual quipsters began recognizing that these experiences of God were all valid, all correct, they said, “We can have all three. It isn’t that one is right and the other wrong. All three of those qualities of experience of God are equal, equally important, equally accurate, equally faithful, and we can have all of them.”

The period between the resurrection of Jesus and the ascension was a period of intoxicating, exhilarating fear, wonder and awestruckness, but also of deep comfort because the one who had died was now living among them. That experience taught them that death is not the end, that nothing separates us from God. In that period, they fell in love with Jesus all over again. When Jesus ascended and those manifestations stopped, they were left bereft. They discovered they could get him back if they did one thing: if they gathered together and told the story. In their sense of grief they gathered over bread and wine, and they remembered, and discovered that when they told the story, he was with them. As these experiences accumulated, this community so incredibly empowered by their table fellowship with one another said, “There must be something about God that is community.” In other words, relationship must be the essence of God. And because relationships happen with people who are other from us, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit have an otherness with respect to each other, in their oneness.

The Trinity shows us that relationship depends on distinct persons who are different. If my relationships depend only on how much alike we are there’s really no reason for love or need for it – I simply love a copy of myself. Otherness is the gift. And because loving the other is how we deepen into God, these communities of table fellowship, it isn’t just that God wants us to be a community or calls us into community, it is that God’s very nature is community.

To understand the Trinity, what we need are eyes of faith. We are told that God is a trinity of equal persons who create themselves by relating to each other as a gift to each other. We sometimes respond to that in the way that ditzy girl on TV responded to a complicated commercial: “I totally don’t know what that means – but I want it.” I would say that in everything we want, we essentially want God. We want God the way a river unknowingly seeks the sea, the way a sunflower follows her master, the way a drowning woman gasps for air, a parched man craves after water. We want God the way a lonely man aches for companionship, the way a lover yearns for her beloved, suffering people crave comfort, a stranger longs for the familiarity of home. Love casts out fear as we discover our essential desire for unity, truth, goodness and beauty. We want oneness with our self, with all people, with creation and with God.

We want truth: the truth about ourselves, about different people, about the universe, the truth who is God. We want goodness: to be good ourselves, to wish all others goodness, to promote the good of creation and to praise the goodness of God. Finally, we want beauty: the unique beauty of self, the different beauties of all people, the composite beauty of creation and the radiant beauty of God.

And it is safe to want this God, because being absorbed into God, we remain ourselves so we can relate with God person to person. Our little truth is part of God’s larger truth, our goodness is a participation in God’s holiness, and we see our beauty in the eyes of God.

All these things we want..we are comforted again today by a certainty that exists in this world where so little is permanent or sure – and that is the existence of God Father, Son and Holy Spirit…God’s way of being with us always. The Trinity, the COMPLETE picture of faith and the one things that makes sense and adds meaning and purpose to life.

Much as the Episcopal Church is built on the 3-legged stool of reason, tradition and scripture, we are talking about three parts of a whole. If we appreciate the Trinity only as a network of divine relationships which pertain only to God and not ourselves, except insofar as we are asked to believe in this mystery as central to our faith, then our view and the experience of the Trinity is inadequate. More than a theoretical doctrine, the Trinity is the way we express our most fundamental relationships with God as well as God’s relationships with us.

Frederick Buechner says Father, Son and Holy Spirit mean that the mystery beyond us, the mystery among us and the mystery within us are all the same mystery. Thus, the Trinity is a way of saying something about us and the way we experience God. The Trinity is also a way of saying something God and the way he is within himself, i.e. God does not need the Creation in order to have something to love because within himself love happens. In other words, the love God is is love not as a noun but as a verb.

Buechner continues, “If the idea of God as both Three and One seems far-fetched, look in the mirror someday. There is (a) the interior life known only to yourself and those you chose to communicate it to (the Father); (b) There is the visible face which in some measure reflects that inner life (the Son) and (3) there is an invisible power you have in order to communicate that interior life in such a way that others do not merely know about it but know it is the sense of its becoming part of who they are (the Holy Spirit). Yet what you are looking at in the mirror is clearly and indivisibly the one and only you.”
God is one but within that absolute unity the church proclaimed a mysterious communion of persons. To see Jesus is to see the Father. To receive the Holy Spirit is to possess the indwelling God/Father, Son and Spirit.

The doctrine of the Trinity is a source of hope. In spite of our separation the GOD who brought us into being loves us, and through grace, has provided a way to bring us back into harmony. It is through our faith in JESUS that we can be restored to peace with God, a reconciliation that gives us the hope of sharing in the glory of God and enables us to endure suffering. It is the Holy SPIRIT who sustains us by assuring us constantly of God’s love and thus keeps our hope alive.

The joy of Trinity Sunday is in realizing that we are never alone. In police talk, it might be said, between the three parts of the Trinity, God always has our backs covered!

For Christians, the Trinity is the primary symbol of a community that holds together by containing diversity within itself. Author Kathleen Norris says, “I love to read about quarks, those subatomic particles that exist in threes. There is no such thing as one quark, but only three interdependent beings; I picture them dancing together as the heart of things, part of the atomic glue that holds this world together and to the atomic scientist, at least, makes all things on earth more alike than different. The quark is a good image for the Christian Trinity.

And so today, sitting here on Trinity Sunday, we are drawn back into that same dynamic. There are people here among us whose life-quest is mental and intellectual, who find God in their minds, in their thoughts, in their being, in their own intellectual curiosity to understand; also people who find the experience of Christ in the table and the telling of the story, whether that table is the Eucharistic altar, which is perhaps the table of all tables, or whether we find table fellowship in breaking bread with others in pot-luck suppers, in family dinners, in anniversary celebrations. Here we sit. As Gerard Manley Hopkins said, “I think we are wound with mercy, round and round and round, as if with air.”

That’s Trinity.

Amen.

Copyright 2007