Trinity Sunday 2019

Trinity Sunday, 16 June 2019
Grace and St. Peter’s Church, Baltimore

In the early 1960s I was an awkward, skinny 14 or 15 year-old paperboy for the Las Vegas Sun.  In those days paperboys donned an odd garment with big pouches front and back, folded the newspapers and secured them with rubber bands, filled the pouches and trudged along the prescribed route, throwing the paper with more or less accuracy toward the front door. It was a repetitive activity, and left your mind free to roam.

My family had moved to Las Vegas a year or so earlier from a small college town in southeastern Washington State so that my father, an Episcopal priest, could start a new congregation. To say I was unhappy would be a gross understatement. Pullman was an intellectually and culturally rich place for a young teenager, and Las Vegas was not. I took refuge in a small circle of friends and in the liturgy, memorizing the Communion service from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. I repeated its eucharistic canon like a mantra, over and over as I walked along.

It was about 5:00 or 5:30 in the morning. The air was cool, the streets were quiet, and I was walking along the north side of West Riverside Drive as it neared the Tonopah Highway. There were three or four houses in a row in which lived a set of Mormon families, all of them named Stewart. One did not inquire too closely in early 1960's Las Vegas just precisely how people were related, but one did wonder. As I passed the third house, I was overcome by a sense of comforting goodness, a sense that the entire universe was actively enfolding me and everyone and everything else in an indescribable warmth of acceptance, purposeful movement forward, and happy outcome. I knew in that moment what Julian of Norwich had already discovered: that the whole world is a small thing, as I was a much, much smaller thing, in God’s hand, intensely loved, and that all would be well.

That experience has never left me.

I begin with an experience this morning because I believe that, even if we do not realize it, our faith is always grounded in our experience. God is always with us, always breaking through our shell, always leading, guiding, accompanying, comforting, encouraging, opening us to new possibilities. And sometimes God’s presence breaks through in our lives. As I try to unfold some of the mystery of God this morning, I hope your own experiences will present themselves to you.

Experiences like ours, but from long ago and far away, have been remembered and written down and achieved  canonical form in the Holy Scriptures, in theology and in the histories of the people of God. It is wonderful to read and study them. But it is even more wonderful to find them alive in ourselves.

I link theology and our experience of God because when we think of God we are really thinking about reality, our reality. When we articulate our own human experiences, our growing knowledge of the nature of the world, our histories, and our imaginations about the world we live in, we are always looking for Something More. We can’t always easily put it into words, and when we do, later, after time passes, we usually discover how limited our words, our descriptions, our analyses were. But still we are impelled to do it. Not everyone gives the word God to these attempts. But whether our vocabulary is secular or sacred, we are all urged toward the same ineffable greatness and mystery.

In our own religious tradition our experiences seem to fall into threes, which we might call beginnings, encounters, movements.

What are the principles of existence? Why is there something instead of nothing? What is the nature of the energy which brings it all into being? Is there a direction, a telos, as Aristotle would call it, or is it all simply accidental process? Is there a purpose? In our traditions, Jewish, Christian and Muslim alike, we call this God. As Christians we call it God the Father. 

How does this divine directionality translate itself into concrete reality? How does it make this directionality physical and operative in the world? How is God’s intentionality made incarnate, so that the universe structures itself, follows and reflects God’s rationality, from simple addition to complex mathematics, through all the scientific disciplines, each of whose growing body of knowledge carries us more and more profoundly into the mind of God? In our tradition we call this the logos, the Word. Its first incarnation is the universe itself, but there are others. Angels, seen at first as human but afterward understood to be That One himself among us for a brief but unforgettable intervention. The High Priest emerging from the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement, for that moment Yahweh himself in flesh before his people. Jesus Christ with us in the flesh not for a moment but for a lifetime. Jesus in whose cross and sacrifice we glory, taking his flesh and blood mystically into ourselves at the eucharistic table, invited as we are to share his life, his actual life given for us so that we may be with him, and in him, and through him, one with the Father. All this is God the Son, ever begotten through all time, choosing our human form to sit at the right hand.

And what is this wind that tingles our ears, ruffles our hair, pushes us from behind, whispers breaths of possibility and draws us on? What is this irresistible energy, this fire of all-consuming love which from time to time seizes us and moves us, propels us into something new, warms our hearts and kindles in us a strange and unaccountably empowered daring to act as if God’s love is true, and in doing, finding that it is? What is this enfolding warmth and assuring kindness speaking now to a person who does not want to be a prophet, now to an overworked mother, now to an unemployed young man on the street, now to one weary in years, now to a lonely 14 year old paperboy, now to me, now to you? The energy of divine comfort and assurance, of divine imagination and possibility, of divine purpose, finding a place, perhaps all unknown, in our days and lives? This we call the Holy Spirit, eternally proceeding, eternally enlivening, eternally drawing us on to the next great thing that God has prepared for us, if only we will enter into his gifts to us.

This we believe is the structure of reality, not simply as a thought system of our own construction and our own choosing, but the first principle of the universe itself, the laws of mathematics and physics and astronomy, of time and space, of the expanding universe, indeed the life of the One from whom and by whose mind and restless, creative and saving energy we believe comes all the purpose of what is. The Trinity is our religious description of the way things are.

And if the Trinity does describe the way things are, why should we be surprised if we are occasionally seized by the Spirit, lifted into the life of the Son, and drawn into the loving purpose of the Father, if only for a few moments. How wonderful to find all that as we trudge along the humdrum paths of our lives’ paper routes. God is there, and everywhere, waiting and wanting us to open our eyes to the glory all around us. Even now. Even here.

I hope and trust that we all have had experiences of God, and that we will have more. That we will find the Father’s creative purpose for us, that we will meet the Son as God enters into our world and our lives, that our hair will be ruffled and our hearts comforted and warmed and our vision uplifted and confirmed by the Holy Spirit. That we will be borne aloft before the throne of God and invited into the endless Alleluia of praise for the love of God, Who has brought all things into being and set them in motion for inexpressible Good.