Trinity Sunday 2018

Trinity Sunday 2018

    Today the Church celebrates the great mystery of the Trinity, which I always thought was kind of redundant in a way… isn’t every Sunday Trinity Sunday?

    Earlier this week, the minister provincial of my order asked us to fill in this sentence:  We are an order because… Most of us included being a community somewhere in our answer. In the lives that we all live as Christians, having a community of love and support around us is incredibly important to our wellbeing and to the life of the whole community.  WHen I was in the navy in boot camp, our mantra was “Teamwork is the key to success”. We knew that our lives could depend on another at any time, and we did not serve alone. It is the same for us. We cannot live this life that we have been baptized into without a community.  We need others to hold us accountable… we need others to love and be loved by… we were created to be together, and it is in being together that we mirror God’s life. In the great mystery of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we see, perhaps imperfectly the life of God which is lived in God’s community of the Trinity.  Three persons, one God is impossible for us to truly grasp… it is a math problem with no solution; and it is also hard to realize sometimes that God’s time isn’t linear… all persons of the Trinity have always been.., and they have always all been involved in God’s actions. What is said of the Father, is said of the Son and of the Spirit… God so loved the world, that God gave all things life, and loved us so much that we too are adopted into the life that is God’s life lived in community….

    We cannot love in a vacuum by ourselves…and love is difficult, but it is also life giving.  God knows both of those realities, especially because of the life the Son lived in Jesus. How difficult it must have been and still is to love those who betray him and misunderstand his message… and yet, he loves by pouring out the Spirit upon us so that we might love and understand just a little bit better.  Let’s face it, the story we have been been brought into makes no sense. Why would God, the creator of all that is, give up his Godliness to become human, only to be betrayed and killed by those whom he loved? And even when that went bad, continue to pour out Godself in the Holy Spirit, so that good news might still be preached and worked in the world?  It makes no sense to us because we are not God. Our love, our sense of peace and justice is rather finite. God’s very being is love… it has no beginning and no end… and because God loves, you and I are...Because God loves, you and I are… God has loved us all into existence… You and me, and the people we love most, and the people we hate and fear most too… All of life has been loved into existence because God so loved the world… And because God so loved the world, we are to love the world as well…as our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry said last week, Love is the way… help us oh holy and blessed Trinity to live in the way…

    I want to leave you today with a poem full of wonderful images.  Last week, I sang to you, a song by Alana Levandoski. Today, I leave you with a piece of poetry that is spoken in her song, The Christ hymn.  The poem is written by Joel McKerrow… and as I kept listening to it, it brought to mind images of the Trinity…. Images of creation, Jesus, and the overflowing of the love of God in the Spirit….

And this is he who takes all that he is and bestows it  freely
Gives meekly, takes infinite power and bows the knee
Have you ever seen God on the ground?
Palms pressed to the floor
Sweat dripping on the dirt
The cut and stretch of being human
A sacred shelter of presence
The fullness of he, creator of kingdoms and galaxies
Of principalities and every moment crafted through time
The divine placed wholly in human flesh
The infinite squashed down into finite
Like fitting 10,000 angels on the top of a pin
Like the entire ocean is poured into a pool
Like the wine is running over
Like It is bursting at the seams
The Christ, he was bursting at the seams