Trinity Sunday - Sunday, June 16, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. John Forbis, OHC
Trinity Sunday - Sunday, June 16, 2019

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

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

In Burnt Norton of the Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot writes, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” 

We and the disciples are faced, this Trinity Sunday, with the Farewell Discourse again, just when we thought it was all over.  Jesus thinks the reality the disciples can’t bear is truth amid saying goodbye to their teacher and friend, anticipating and being confounded by his impending death that he has predicted to them again and again.  By this point, the disciples must realize that it is inevitable.  It’s a strange scene upon which to even try and overlay the Feast of the Trinity. 
 
But perhaps in this passage, lies a key that could unlock the Trinity conundrum for us.  We could consider the possibility that there is not a more appropriate scene upon which to be thinking about the Trinity.  All the disciples understood at the time is that Christ’s departure threatens to end all their hope in what will come.  We have the advantage of knowing that there is so much more awaiting them … and us. 

Yet, I wonder if some of the resistance and confusion around the Trinity is due to another reality, that is hard for humankind to bear, that God is full, rich, abundant, multiple, yet one.  In my limited vision how can I bear that he is both, that in God is the possibility of abundant creation and life beyond my imagination?  How can I bear that the Spirit will come right before me and give me a message directly from God?  This Spirit, Jesus doesn’t explain or describe very well, other than to say that she can only speak what she hears from God. 

Her identity is filled out a little bit better by Paul in the First Letter to the Corinthians, 2:10.  She really listens to God’s truth.  “What no eye has seen nor ear heard nor the human heart conceived, What God has prepared for those who love him.  These things, God has revealed to us through the Spirit, for the Spirit searches even the depths of God.” 

In this light, the Spirit is no small comfort and evokes such beauty, but it can also be an ominous prospect.  God is much safer as one single entity at a remote distance, watching us live our present stuck between what Eliot again describes as the intolerable reality, “what might have been and what has been”.  The disciples are certainly in this place now.   

The Son, fully a part of humankind, also bears being in the space between “what might have been and what has been”.  The difference is that it is by his own choice.  He comes to where we are and dies a cruel death, showing us just how such a present can lead us to death. 
 
But what Jesus’ life and teaching offers is the good news that God is not just one.  God is not alone.  God calls us to a present full of multitudes, a new Creation, the Incarnation and Resurrection and a Pentecostal fire and breath, a present of an indwelling of the world by all three, God, Son and Spirit, within us.

Psalm 8, assigned for today, asks the question:  “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established, what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?”  Judging by how we don’t honor God’s image in ourselves, in each other and in Creation, it is a perennial question for humanity.

The Spirit, “a master worker” or as another translation has it, a little child at God’s right hand, seems to have no interest in the question.  She might be too busy, tugging on God to play with her in the molds and shapes of mountains down to the “world’s first bits of soil.”

“I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.”  She comes by this delight honestly because God’s image is still in us.  God takes delight in us. 

Paul writes in his letter to the Romans that we ARE justified by faith, believe it or not.  But our faith or belief in God’s grace is not enough.  What about Jesus’ faith and love for God’s limitless life?  This love is what he has from God, and his glory is to see that love declared to us. 

We can’t escape the Spirit.  She responds by “raising her voice … on the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand; beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals” and cries out what the Son doesn’t have words for. 

When the Spirit declares to us what can only be said by God, she glorifies Jesus.  Paul claims, we “share in that same glory”.  What she declares to us that is God’s given to the Son glorifies us.  Then, suffering leads to endurance, to character and finally hope.  Peace does not mean the end of suffering, but it is the persistence of hope and assurance that no matter how much reality we bear, we have God’s love poured into us and are still capable to pour that love out of us into each other and the earth. 

Indeed, this truth is beyond what we could bear, except by the majesty of the movement of heavens, a circle drawn on the face of the deep, the formation of skies, the rush of “fountains of the deep” and the wild sea barely contained by God “when he marked out the foundations of the earth.” 

How would we live differently if we didn’t just accept that God desires to make a home among us, with us and within us, but that the Trinity in all their progeny and multitude is already howling through us?  Maybe we could finally embrace the one and only Divine Present breathed through with eternal Future.  Amen.