Trinity Sunday (Mother Marisa)

Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And blessed be his kingdom, now and forever. Amen. 

The words have changed. Only a week ago we said, “Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!” But now something else passes our lips. It’s a familiar phrase, one we say somewhere around 60% of the year; and yet to speak the Triune Name, to bless Him: what a mystery that is, and what a miracle.

We may not think in those terms — because who does think about the Trinity? Even priests avoid it. We quip that Trinitarian doctrine is a matter for theologians, and then make the curate preach on this particular Sunday every year. To do so, though, to equivocate when it comes to the One in Three and Three in One, is to miss a gift. For this encounter and any encounter with the Triune God is a blessing. We say it. We bless him; and in doing so he blesses us. 

Which is actually incredible and maybe even a little unbelievable. God blesses us — us, who get him so wrong so much of the time. Such is the human predicament. Since time immemorial, when people began to look from their hands to the sky and wonder if anyone was up there, humankind has been calling on almost any god but the LORD. Thor, Zeus, you name it — pagan antiquity came up with some pretty sophisticated substitutions. But now, after two World Wars and the Atom Bomb and the Internet, most modern people have settled on worshiping the god of their imaginations, the deity that deals in thumbs-ups and bright smiles, a deity in which our world believes and proclaims. “God,” in this age, is the affirmative voice that resides somewhere in our subconscious, a voice that wants us to be happy and that is eager to show us the path of self-fulfillment, where the individual is the beginning and end of everything. 

But then life happens, as it always does. The toddler cries all day or the relationship falls apart or the beloved parent or friend or spouse forgets our name. What can we do, what can anything or anyone do when that happens? What could we buy that might alleviate the emptiness that rushes up to meet us? What could we watch that might loosen the grip of pain and fear that threatens to consume us? What could we say when there are simply no words left?

Very little. Maybe nothing. When tribulation comes, there is no mortal power within us that can surmount our suffering. And there is no mortal power outside of us that can transform our suffering. On our own we are frail and fragile and helpless — but with God we are not. Which is not just something nice to say. It is the truth. 

We’ve all searched, desperately at times, for the cure to our sorrows or the balm for our anxieties. And, like most people, we have looked at the sky and screamed at the clouds even if we weren’t sure that anyone was listening. That is part of our nature. Each of us knows, whether by the beating of our hearts or in the movement of our souls, that Someone is listening. Someone does care.
 

And we know his Name.

Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

He is no figment of our imagination. He is not someone we can control or even fully comprehend. He is God of gods and Lord of lords. 

The saints and doctors of the Church have taught us that God is of one substance. He alone is divine, all-holy, all-powerful, unchanging. Or, to put it another way, He Is Who He Is; and no one and nothing else is like him. 

And yet he doesn’t exist in isolation. God speaks. He breaths. He loves. God is unity in community: Three Persons in One Being, a being that is perfectly at rest. Perfectly content. Perfectly whole. We could spend years meditating on the ways the Church has conceived to speak about the Trinity; but, perhaps this morning, all we need to remember is that the God who made everything that is is the God who redeemed everything that is is the God who sanctifies everything that is. We live and move and breathe in his reality, a kingdom marked not by selfish self-fulfillment but by selfless self-giving love. 

Such is the nature of the One we worship, a God who will draw us out of ourselves and into his Life, that we might be united with Him. That we might come into the presence of God Almighty, the creator of heaven and earth, not as a caricature of what humankind can be but made into the very image of his Son through the working of his Spirit. 

Which doesn’t happen in one day. This is a journey, a pilgrimage that happens at walking-speed and according to the tempo of our own heartbeat. God will lead us away from the cramped and cracked altars we build in our hearts toward his heavenly throne. Abiding with the One who is near us, all around us, and in us, we will find God. We will encounter Him. And he will stop us in our tracks, bring us to our knees, and lift our hearts to the place where the Holy One sits and from which the Holy One came down and to which the Holy One always returns. 

And that’s the key: Worshiping the Holy Trinity — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — is really not about understanding a doctrine. It’s not about the ability to speak with confidence of a mystery we can’t actually comprehend. Worshiping the Trinity is about surrendering ourselves to a God who is above all and through all and in all, and who nevertheless humbles himself to meet us where we are.

And, mystery of mysteries, we know when he does. Every time our spirit longs for hope and healing, every time our hearts cry, “Abba, Father!” the Spirit bears witness to our spirit that we are God’s children, the beloved of the Trinity. 

As we take hold of that faith, as we grow in him, as we grow in love, we will begin to live with the kind of peace and joy that binds the Father and the Son and the Spirit together, until we become the kind of children who are always looking for, always running toward, always begging to be held by the Beloved. 

Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And blessed be his kingdom, now and forever. AMEN. 

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