Happy Trinity Sunday!
Do you ever think about
God? If you do, “What image comes to
mind?”
Now, no image
can ever give a complete, or even an adequate, understanding of God. St. Augustine, not our St. Augustine of
Canterbury but rather the other St. Augustine, of Hippo, tells us that whatever
you think God is, that is NOT God.
To comprehend
God you would have to somehow grab hold of God, somehow get a handle on God,
and somehow figure God out and confine God.
But God is
always much bigger, or another way to put this, more mysterious, than we can
ever grasp. God is always too big, too
ineffable, too other in order to be grasped.
You just can’t do it.
So where does
that leave us? Well, you could say,
“Oh, God is a mystery. Never going to
get this one figured out, so why bother?”
And then basically ignore God. I
think a lot of people do that nowadays.
They just kind of write God out of their considerations, out of their
plans, out of their decisions, out of their life, and act as if God does not
exist.
It is not a
very good approach. Because ignoring God
doesn’t make God go away. God is still
there. God is annoying like that. Still lurking in our hopes. Still pushing those questions about life and
death and meaning and love and morality, like an itch we just can’t quite get
at. The God problem is still there, and
won’t go away.
Or we could
just declare God is Other, or another way to say the same thing, All Holy. God is totally different from us. We cannot picture God, cannot limit God,
cannot in any way conceive of God. That
is what Moslems do. In Islam, with its
strict adherence to monotheism, God cannot be pictured in any way. God is Other, Holy, and mysterious. There is one God, God, and God is totally
different from us. God is all Holy and
we are not. This approach is definite,
clear, but to me at least, not very satisfying.
And then there
is the Christian way. God is all Holy
and totally other. Absolute
Mystery. But this Mystery also has a
human face, which is the face of Jesus.
Christians make the outrageous claim that out of love for you and me
this Absolute Other, who is God, entered into human history about 2016 years
ago, in a squalid little village called Bethlehem, in a poor and defeated
kingdom called Judah. His name is Jesus. Jesus grew up in a dirt-poor hick town in the
sticks of Galilee, taught for a couple of years, ran afoul of the powerful and
was executed. But in His teaching and
life Jesus showed us that the truest nature of God is not power, not might, not
domination, but rather service and love.
Love is the truest nature of God.
And to make
this story even wilder and more spectacular, this loving God has come to dwell in
our hearts, closer to us even then our own breath. God’s own inner life, God’s Holy Spirit is poured
out on us so that we can live the life of God’s own being, for all
eternity. You and me in intimate union
with God! Pretty wild.
We call this
spectacular drama the Holy Trinity: The
Father Creator, the Son Redeemer, the Holy Spirit Sanctifier. Three, but essentially one. Bad math, but great theology.
That is what
we celebrate today, the Most Holy Trinity.
It means that God is the cause for all that is, God revealed God’s self
in the life and death and coming to life again of Jesus, and God dwells in us,
closer to us than our own breath. It is
a wonderful love story, and if you think about it, really pretty wild.
That is the
Most Holy Trinity. Happy Trinity Sunday!
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