Today is Trinity Sunday, the day on the church calendar that we are thankful as Christians that our God is a Trinitarian God. So let’s take a look at this idea of God as Three in One.
The Trinity is a theological way of talking about Unity—Unity in Community.
In the beginning, based on what scripture tells us, nothing existed except God and chaos– the emptiness of deep, dark waters without any shape or form.
Now the wind from God, God’s breath, God’s very life, swept over the face of these waters, swept over chaos, and out of chaos came order, and not simply order, but community—
From God’s breath and God’s word the great community of creation unfolds; the universe, heaven and earth, and all of the teeming diversity of life in the sky and in the sea, and on the land, and we ourselves, human beings—
For we too are born out of this breath of God and word of God, made in God’s own image, born into community with God and with all of creation.
And God saw everything that God had made and behold, it was very good.
We all know what happens next.
We human beings, in spite of our assignment from God to care for one another and for creation, bring division into this perfect community.
And so begins the story of our descent back into chaos and God’s efforts to bring us back into community.
We Christians believe that after God tried all sorts of things and nothing worked to get us back into communion with God and with creation and with one another, God got radical.
God sent Jesus to live and die as one of us—God with skin on.
We know who God is, because we know Jesus, the man who came among us to show us how to live in the perfect community of love with God, with creation, and with one another, the man who in his dying and resurrection defeated chaos and death,
And Jesus has never left us and will never leave us. Jesus still lives among us.
Matthew’s gospel ends with these words, “And lo, I am with you always, to the ends of the age.”
Jesus is with us now and throughout eternity.
In Luke and John, Jesus sends the Holy Spirit to be his spirit with us, even in his physical absence. The Holy Spirit is the way we Christians understand the continuing and life giving presence of Jesus and the eternal breath of God in our lives.
And we see this understanding of God as Three in One beginning to form for the early Christians, in this ending of Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, for instance.
“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”
The Trinity is the perfect Unity in Community, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit dwelling together in perfect and everlasting love, creativity, order and expansiveness.
Scripture makes clear that God is always reaching out even as we and creation choose to exist in chaos rather than in this community of love.
God is always seeking to bring us and all of creation back out of the chaos, division and close mindedness that we keep throwing ourselves into when we sin, back into Unity in Community, that pulsating center of love that is the Trinity itself.
I need three volunteers.
Thank you. Now I’d like for the three of you to join hands and make a circle. And circle around—that’s good. OK, everyone—we have one circle here with three parts making the circle and we’ll pretend that inside this circle there is perfect unity and love—but there’s something not quite complete about this circle when it comes to helping us understand the Trinity—does anyone have an idea about what could be different about this circle to make it more like the Trinity?
Right!
OK, volunteers, face outward, and you’re holding your hands out and hoping to draw everyone into your circle, and your circle keeps on getting bigger and bigger and bigger as you draw more and more people in—
That’s what the Trinity is all about –Unity in Community, a community of love that is never complete until all of creation has been drawn back into this vast expanding circle of perfect love.
As Christians, our first challenge is to long to be in this circle of love with God and with one another and with creation,
And longing for it, to stay in it—but that’s not all. We can’t simply be in a circle looking within –
Our challenge as Christians is also to look outward, reach outward, to draw others into this great circle of love, so that they, in turn, can do the same.
Jesus puts it this way at the end of the gospel according to Matthew—
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”
Longing for God, living in God, reaching out with God’s love—
With the hope that someday, God will once more see everything that God has made and be able to say—and Behold, it IS very good.
Amen.