Trinity Sunday June 16, 2019 St Austin’s Austin, TX
God walks into
a bar and orders a beer, a red wine and a spritzer. [pause.
Well, it is Trinity Sunday!]
Now that is –
of course – not only ridiculous, it is theologically all wrong. God is one.
There are not three separate wills and intellects in God. We say there are three persons in God, but we
don’t mean ‘person’ in the modern psychological sense of three separate
individuals.
We Christians
are monotheists. We believe there is
only ONE God. Like the Jews and like the
Moslems, we believe there is one and only one God.
But then of
course we are not content to leave it there.
We make it more complicated. We
go on to say that while God is ONE, God is a Trinity of three “persons” defined
by their relationships. The Trinity is
all about relationship.
In this we are
quite different from Moslems. For them
God is ONE and God is totally other. God
is completely and entirely different from us, or to phrase it differently, God
is all Holy. God is God, and we can
never comprehend nor touch God. God is
always distant and different.
We Christians
take a different approach. Yes we
believe God is all Holy, and entirely different from us, but then we also believe
that God is total and complete in God’s own self as a community of
relationships: God the Creator or Father, God the Beloved Son, and God the Holy
Spirit who is the Love breathed or “aspirated” between the Father and the
Son.
That is not
only nice for God, so that God is not lonely in God’s self, but from all
eternity God is a community, AND it also is very important for us. Because of the Most Holy Trinity, God,
without ceasing to be all Holy and Wholly Other, also became one of us in the second person
of the Trinity. God got deeply, intimately,
no-holds-barred, involved with us, with our hopes and dreams, our
disappointments and failures, our grime and our beauty and our love. God not only came for a visit, not only
dressed up in a human person like in a costume.
Rather, God truly and irrevocably became a human person, Jesus
Christ.
It is pretty
mind-boggling if you think about that.
The creator of all the billions of galaxies each with billions of stars
and God knows how many planets, and then all the dark matter and dark energy
which is even more, and who knows what else we haven’t yet discovered; that
very same God truly became a human, born of Mary, exactly like us in all things
except sin. He lived and preached, healed
the sick, died on the cross, and now lives in glory. His name is Jesus.
And Jesus did
this so that we could be joined to Him as members of His body, and so we can
share in God’s own life. WOW!
We experience
that life already in the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Sanctifier. God lives in our hearts through grace. God is not only totally Other, God is ALSO closer
to us than our own breath. That is a
great mystery, a mystery of the infinite God in relationship with you, with
us.
The feast we
celebrate today, of the Most Holy Trinity, is all about relationship: relationship within God, and our relationship
to God, invited in Jesus to enter into the very life of God. But it doesn’t stop there. Because that amazing reality, in turn, has
very definite implications for our relationship to each other. So, that crazy driver who cut you off on the
way to church this morning is not just some idiot. That driver may very well be part of the Body
of Christ.
We are called
to relationship with each other as part of our relationship to God.
Because, as the second reading
from St Paul today affirms: “the love
of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has
been given to us.”
Happy Trinity Sunday.
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