Penelope Bridges
Let me start by saying that when I chose today’s date for my last Sunday at St. Pauls, I didn’t check the readings, so it is pure serendipity that we have not only St. Paul but also Jesus giving valedictory statements this morning.
Actually the Epistle doesn’t have to be read as a farewell at all: instead of “Farewell, put things in order”, an equally valid translation would be “Cheer up and pull yourselves together.” In other words, keep calm and carry on. Now that’s a parting word I can endorse.
Trinity Sunday is notorious for being a day when preachers commit heresy, a church term meaning false teaching or leading people astray from the Gospel. However we try to avoid it, if we venture into the risky territory of trying to define or explain the Trinity, we almost inevitably fall into that trap. In fact, last time I preached on Trinity Sunday, people left the church because of what I said!
To present the Trinity as truly one, yet three, is a steep challenge, and I’m not even going to try to parse it out. Instead, we might reflect on the ways in which we experience God, and see how that experience informs our understanding of God as a community. Perhaps that will lead us to find ways to live into our faith that will reflect the distinctive Triune nature of our God.
Our first experience of God, as Scripture makes clear, is as creator. In the beginning was God. God spoke and there was light. Creation is the first impulse of God, and the earth itself, the world that we see and breathe and smell and feel, is all one wonderful, diverse, extraordinarily beautiful expression of God’s loving will.
Our experience of God is enriched by the physical reality of who we are and our relationships with one another, sanctified and blessed by the incarnation of Jesus as one of us, flesh and blood, born, living, suffering, and dying as we do. We experience God incarnationally in the mystery of human love, when we come together in joy or grief, when we create community and celebrate our physicality.
And our experience of God is affirmed, strengthened and enlivened by the creative Spirit that abides in us, the last gift of Jesus to his followers, the Spirit that continues to surprise us, advocate for us, and move among us, generating the courage to reach for new revelations and new ways of being.
In our humanness we struggle to grasp the complexity and diversity contained within our God; but we can know and celebrate God in all of these aspects.
The medieval mystic Meister Eckhardt said, “God laughed and the Son was born. They laughed together and the Spirit was born. All three laughed together and humanity was born.” What a beautiful thought, that we were all created out of sheer, divine joy.
You won’t find a doctrinal statement about the Trinity in the Bible, but today’s readings were selected to demonstrate that Scripture, from the very beginning to the final words of the risen Christ, allows for a Trinitarian interpretation of God. The Genesis reading clearly spotlights the Creator God and mentions the wind (or Spirit) that blew across the face of the earth. Less obvious in Genesis is the reference to the Son, implicit in the incarnate Word that was in the beginning with God.
The epistle includes an explicit Trinitarian formula in the grace that we use at the end of our evening prayers. And the Gospel likewise, in the Great Commission at the end of Matthew’s story, calls on all followers of Jesus to spread the Gospel to the ends of the earth, baptizing believers in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
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I’ve chosen to give the standard Trinity blessing at the end of today’s service, but I’ve also asked the choir to sing an adapted verse of the great hymn to the Trinity, St Patrick’s Breastplate, as a musical blessing to send us on our way. The entire Breastplate lyric is printed in the back of your service leaflet. Tradition attributes the text to St. Patrick, and it’s called the Breastplate because the words weave a spiritual coat of armor around us as we sing it.
We might hear the middle portion as self-referential prayer: Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me; but the prayer goes on to encompass all whom we know or meet: Christ in hearts of all who love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger. The Breastplate is a strong declaration of the power of the Holy Trinity to bind all things together: just as the Trinity itself is a community of divinity, so the Breastplate exhorts us to embrace the community of all creation.
If ever there was a need for all creation to come together in unity and love, in the embrace of the Trinity, this is the time. Our world is fractured, broken to the point where teenagers’ hearts and minds are bewitched by extremist and evil intentions; where families languish in refugee camps for years and even decades; where those in positions of power use that power not to care for the people in their charge but to enrich themselves and escape the consequences of their misdeeds.
This brokenness makes a travesty of the Trinitarian community and is an offence against God. Diversity is built into God’s nature, and yet we hear daily of attacks against those who represent any kind of divergence from a particular, narrow model of humankind.
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In the Gospel Jesus commissions the disciples to go out and baptize in the power of the Trinity. That is our job: to share the good news so winsomely that people will want to be a part of this beloved community. What a blessing it is, to have this job of blessing others by inviting them to embrace the eternal community of the Trinity.
My friend the poet-priest Rosalind Brown, who wrote the text of the first hymn we sang today, writes, “Trinity is how God is: holy, glorious, creative, beautiful, life-giving, everything that is not isolated and static.” ( p72 Fresh from the Word Canterbury Press 2016)
This is the God we know, love, and worship: holy, glorious, creative, beautiful, life-giving, everything that is not isolated and static. Father-Creator, Son-Word, Spirit-Wisdom, a God who knows us intimately and loves us anyway, a God who eternally dances in community, drawing us and all people into the dance again and again, so that we may be fully immersed in the joy of life abundant.
The priest scholar Henri Nouwen wrote that God is Love, Beloved, and Lover. Love causes all of creation to come into being. Love sends the Beloved to personify Love. The Beloved calls the Lover down on the disciples, to send them to the ends of the earth bearing the Gospel of love. We know that God is Love, Beloved, and Lover. So that’s my charge to you now: go out into all the world and spread the Gospel of love, making disciples of all people in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and rejoicing in the beauty and glory of our loving, liberating, and life-giving God.
