Trinity Sunday

Today is the First Sunday After Pentecost, or Trinity Sunday, when the Church celebrates the mystery of the Holy Trinity after successively observing the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. At our parish, Trinity Parish in Bergen Point, it's not only our Patronal Feast (the liturgical day on the church calendar corresponding to the name of the parish), but also the occasion of our annual parish meeting. Some might suggest the Church inflicts Trinity Sunday on the unsuspecting faithful; it's considered a hard occasion to preach. I'm not sure why. Here's my sermon, slightly edited - see what you think:

Trinity Parish in Bergen Point

Trinity Sunday 2007 RCL

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Canticle 13; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15

R. F. Solon, Jr.

In the name of the Holy and Undivided Trinity! Amen.

Take out your Tidings, the worship bulletin for today, and turn to the prayer list page. You should find on it the old logo or seal of our own Trinity Parish in Bergen Point. [See above - RFSJ] Depending on your eyesight – and mine isn’t very good – you might be able to make out some of the detail. In the exact center is a circle that has the Latin word Deus – it means God. Around the center circle are three other circles. One shows a hand cupped around some tiny little people. If you look closely at a scan of the logo on a computer, you can seeing them praying! That gentle hand is the Almighty Creator. Over on the right of the center circle is a little icon of Jesus Christ, holding a Lamb on his shoulders and wearing a red and white halo. And below the center circle is a bird – a dove – descending from above with seven stars. That’s the Holy Spirit, and the seven stars included in the image are, I’m pretty sure, the seven-fold gifts of the Spirit that we celebrated just last Sunday at Pentecost.

There’s more to the entire logo as well. Connecting each of three outer icons is a bar that says “non est,” which is Latin again for “is not.” So the whole logo tells us that The Almighty non est the Son and the Holy Spirit non est the Father and the Almighty non est the Spirit. But there’s even more. Running from each of the outer icons to the center circle is a bar, and in that bar it says, “est.” In other words, the Almighty est Deus, the Almighty is God. The Son est Deus – the Son is God. The Spirit est Deus. The Spirit is God. What this ancient symbol of the Trinity, the Patron of this parish church, tells us is that God is One in Three and Three in One. The Undivided Trinity. What a paradox! How can three – Trinity – be One? How can one be Three and still be One?

I could perhaps end right here and now and simply throw up my hands and say, well it’s a Mystery! On to the Creed! Of course, that wouldn't solve much either, because the Creed itself has three sections, each corresponding to, you guessed it, one of the Persons of the Trinity. So that’s no help.

So what is this Trinity? What is this that we invoke at the beginning of our worship? We say “Blessed by God, Father, son, and Holy Spirit.” We pray "through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, One God." And at the end we often hear something like, “The Blessing of God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier be with you and those whom you love.” What’s all this about?

There has been so much written about the Trinity. The doctrine itself is embedded in all three Creeds that we confess at various times. Ask me about the third one at coffee this morning. But for all the words written, all the treatises published, and even all the excommunications cast, it seems to me it’s pretty simple to understand.

We know Jesus by many names but one that is supremely powerful is what John’s gospel calls him, the Word with a capital W. Think about "word" for a moment. The beginning of John’s gospel says this in Chapter 1: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The evangelist is speaking of Jesus. The very first thing that this Gospel says about Jesus has to do with the relationship between Jesus and the Almighty. In fact, I’d venture to say that the entire theme of the gospel of John is about how Jesus the Son of God is so closely connected to God the Almighty, whom he calls Father. And the Word was God. Jesus est Deus! And of course the Almighty est Deus too.

But what about the Holy Spirit? The first reading from Proverbs is a glorious poem from the lips of Wisdom. Wisdom is, of course, the first of those sevenfold gifts of the Spirit, and was with God at the very beginning of creation. Wisdom says, “When he established the heavens, I was there. When he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing in his inhabited world, and delighting in the human race.” And St. Paul, in the passage today from his letter to the Romans, speaks of God and Jesus Christ and the love of God that has been poured into us through the Holy Spirit. So the Spirit exists and has a relationship with the Creator but is clearly non est the Almighty. And yet the Spirit est Deus!

In other words, God is Love, or better yet the Lover from whom the whole universe burst forth in the force of that Love. But even before the universe began, the Lover had the Beloved, because Love, like a spoken word, must come out and be separate from that which loves. And it is Love itself that envelops the Lover and the Beloved and binds them together in the never ending and ever-deepening relationship of one to another. The Trinity simply is our expression of the God that is Love, the eternal Beloved who always existed, and the Spirit of Love itself. And when you think about it, you can’t really say what’s the beginning, which came first. You can’t have a Lover without Love. You can’t have Love without a Lover. And having a Beloved means there is One who Loves. It’s all about relationship, about being in relationship and wanting to be in relationship.

And our logo of Trinity Parish represents that fundamental aspect of relationship of God as well. Look at the logo again. There is a single circle running around the entire logo that contains all of this and indicates who we are as well. We – Trinity Parish in Bergen Point - are in essence enveloped by that same Lover, Beloved, and Love that binds them. Because it binds us together too. We who are members of Trinity Parish are part of the great circle of Lover, Beloved and Love. We who are the body of Christ here in Bergen Point become one with Christ and so feel the power of that all-encompassing Love of the Beloved. We, you and I, are drawn into the never-ending dance among the Three Persons of the undivided Trinity, the dance of life itself that existed before time and space, and will exist long after both time and space have ceased to be.

And we can take the Trinity as a model for our own lives as well. We know, because we have felt and continue to feel it, that the Three-in-One is always with each of us, loving us with that total love that forgives absolutely everything, no matter what. In our baptism we are incorporated into the network of the Trinity. That network of love will never break and we will never be cast out of it. It will never be offline to us! But sometimes, the love we try to model to others isn’t always enough. We try to imitate it, but we still get angry, frustrated, upset with each other. We sin, sometimes horribly, against one another, the earth, ourselves. Although our relationship in the network of the Trinity is forever, our own relationships with one another sometimes are not. We try to love and sometimes, perhaps often, we fail. You may have experiences, or are experiencing, something like that in your own life. I know I have. But let me tell you, you may find, as I have, in the back of my mind and my heart, that God stills me and still loves you, and that the brokenness of our lives and our relationships too is drawn into that network of Love that is the Three-in-One. That has been a great comfort and even joy. The Good News after all, isn’t complicated. It’s pretty straightforward. There doesn’t have to be much mystery about it. Lover. Beloved. The Love between them. We’re part of it, permanently. That’s it!

On this day we not only celebrate the Mystery of Unity in Trinity, but we also give thanks to God the Three-in-One, our Patron, for the founding and continued prosperity of our own Parish, named in honor of that same Mystery. As we eat and drink together at the Holy Table in the quintessential act of relationship, let us also give thanks for this parish church, founded in 1859 and now in its third structure. Today after our celebration we will take counsel together for the future of our parish at our annual parish meeting. We have much to talk about. We will, in just a few months, break ground for the additions to the parish complex. We will, on June 17, celebrate in a public way what we have done so far with our own ministry of relationships, the Windmill Alliance. We are discerning other relationships we may wish to enter into with other congregations and service institutions. We will elect a new slate of Vestry members to take their place in the leadership of our parish. And we will eat and drink some more, in that quintessential act of relationship among us. May we who bear the name of Trinity Parish in Bergen Point, and who have the Trinity itself inscribed in our logo, always honor our Patron by continuing to invite all people into relationship with God who is Lover, Beloved, and the Love that draws all together.

Amen.

RFSJ

(PS - Sorry about the inconsistent formatting - very frustrating!)