Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Scott Borden, OHC
Trinity Sunday - Sunday, May 30, 2021
In all of this combined tradition, Trinity Sunday stands out. It doesn’t call to mind an event, but rather a doctrine. To be sure, it is an important doctrine. But how do remember, in the liturgical sense, something that did not occur. I fully intend to leave that question hanging…
In the church calendar this is really the first Sunday on which Trinity could happen. God, the first person of the Trinity, has been known to us since the beginning of time. And Jesus, the second person of the Trinity has been known to us since Christmas… more or less... But the Holy Spirit only became known to us last week – after Pentecost. Jesus promises us that as he goes, he will send another… the Very Spirit of God… the third person of the Trinity.
Before last week, Trinity Sunday would have had a missing person…
The Holy Spirit may be the most vague of the persons of the Trinity. Our older language of Holy Ghost might be more conducive to vague reflection. The non-corporeal nature of ghosts makes it hard to be too literal in our thinking. The third person of the Trinity does not need to be personified...
Just as Jesus brought about a crisis, a turning point, in the way we relate to God, the Holy Spirit brings yet another turning point. If there is one God in three persons, and one of those persons is a ghost, how do we develop concrete ideas about God? I intend to leave that question hanging too.
Trinity Sunday has an interesting place in the marking of time – something central to our church year. Here in the US, we count our Sundays for much of the year as “Sundays after Pentecost”. But just across the ocean, the Church of England counts “Sundays after Trinity”. So, in South Africa, where inclusion is a great virtue, we have both Sundays after Pentecost and after Trinity – the numbers being one off… So, a Sunday might be listed as the 2nd Sunday after Pentecost, 1st Sunday after Trinity and 7th Sunday of Ordinary Time… a trinity of counting...
Our Roman brothers and sisters are more familiar with Ordinary Time. In the Anglican Communion it is not so prominent, but it is part of our collective tradition. And so, while I’m not exploring the questions I’ve left hanging, I’d like to explore the notion of ordinary time... the question on nobody’s lips.
In a nutshell, Sundays in Ordinary Time are any Sunday that isn’t part of some other season. Sundays of Advent or Lent are not ordinary. But Sundays after Epiphany or Pentecost are… It’s a bit of a new concept, having come about in the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Ironically, the “reformed” churches use a numbering system more traditional than the “unreformed” church…
I don’t have any particular devotion to Ordinary Time – at least I didn’t. But I find a rather startling alignment of our lived world and our liturgical world. The church is returning to ordinary time after Eastertide. And I can’t help but feel that the world is returning to ordinary time after COVID time.
Now, as vaccinations become more common than not, things are beginning to open up. Restaurants, stores, theaters, even cruise ships are beginning to reappear. “In Person” church is coming back. After a worldwide pandemic I can’t think of anything more welcome than ordinary time.
Of course, the worldwide emergency is far from over. We can begin to relax in North America and Europe, but that is not at all true for our brothers and sisters in India, Asia, and Africa. We now know what needs to be done in regard to COVID, and we have the means to do it. We just need, collectively, to have the will to do it.
Yet as we prepare to return to Ordinary Time… to Sundays after Trinity, or Pentecost, or whatever you like, we would do well to consider what going back to ordinary might mean.
Before COVID we lived in a world where it was ordinary for about one percent of the world’s population to own about half of all the world’s wealth. It was ordinary for that small percent to live in unfathomable comfort while even in a fabulously wealthy country like the US, many people went hungry, died because of lack of basic health care, lived in shacks, and had no access to safe drinking water or basic sanitation. That was ordinary – it was also a moral outrage. Going back to ordinary time could be a moral outrage…
Our challenge, in coming to the end of COVID time, is to move to a new normal, a new ordinary. As it happens, the second Person of the Trinity has given us a great deal of insight into what “ordinary” should be. Think Beatitudes...
It is easy, at least I find it easy, to get tangled up in the notion of what constitutes justice both theologically and philosophically. Achieving justice in our highly interconnected world is no simple thing. It’s nearly impossible to comprehend… just like the doctrine of the Trinity…
But we don’t need to understand the Trinity – we need to live it. We don’t need to understand God’s justice – we need to live it.
Some years ago, I heard our Brother Christian preach about the Trinity. Christian was notorious for four-minute sermons – and he generally could say more in four minutes than most of us could say in four hours, or even four days.
Speaking on the Trinity Br Christian noted that he is not much of a theologian, so he doesn’t claim to know much about the doctrine of the Trinity. He described his view as just a simple view of the Trinity.
This is how he described that view: “I can love God, but I can't say I really understand God. God is simply too big and too vast. And I can say I love the Holy Spirit, but the Spirit is so mysterious that I can't say I even understand who or what the Spirit is – so I'm not really sure what I mean when I say I love the Spirit. But I can understand Jesus – Jesus the human being... I could stand next to Jesus, eat with Jesus, put my arms around Jesus, laugh and cry with Jesus. I can relate to Jesus.”
But Br Christian didn’t stop there. He said that the things he could understand, think, feel, or attribute to Jesus, he should also be able to understand, think, feel, and attribute to God and the Holy Spirit. The qualities of Jesus are, after all, the qualities of the One God in three persons.
And, more importantly, Br Christian noted, the things he could not think about Jesus, he supposed he should not think about God or the Holy Spirit either.
For example, he said, he could not imagine Jesus causing a volcano to erupt and destroy a city. And if he couldn't imagine Jesus doing that, then why would he imagine God would do such a thing. Yet we often respond to tragedies with a sentimental thought that God must have had some purpose... we just cannot understand it.
I cannot imagine Jesus swatting an airplane out of the air, or causing an earthquake, or hurricane, or flood, or worldwide pandemic – and if not Jesus, then not God, not the Holy Spirit.
A belief in the Trinity – in one God in three persons – liberates our ability to think about and relate to God. It’s not nearly as complicated as we want to make it. We can look to the face of God that we can relate to. That could be a different face at different times. If I’m listening to a stunning piece of music or hearing a moving poem, I’m probably going to be looking to the Holy Spirit. If I’m looking at a parent struggling to feed their children, I’m going to be leaning on Jesus. If I’m looking at stars scattered across the velvet of the night sky, I’m looking at God.
We can’t go wrong looking at God. It is when we turn away – turn away from beauty or from ugliness – that we go wrong. St Patrick’s Breastplate proclaims, “I bind unto myself today the strong Name of the Trinity.” Binding ourselves to the trinity, like so many Godly enterprises, is a process, not a conclusion.
If we bind ourselves to the Trinity, then we must be prepared to live in the midst of the Trinity – in the presence of God – at all times.
There is a movement within Christian tradition to approach everything with the question “What would Jesus do?” I think a better question might be “What would I do – knowing that Jesus is right here with me, seeing what I’m seeing, holding my hand, giving me strength.”
For me, the danger of Trinity Sunday is an apparent invitation to go into my own mind. What do I think about this doctrine?
But the invitation of Trinity Sunday is to go out of my mind, so to speak, and into my heart where I can experience Jesus’ passion and compassion. It's not an invitation to stay in my own heart by myself – it's an invitation to open my heart.
The Doctrine of the Trinity starts with three persons, but it doesn’t end there. Jesus tells us that we are one just as Jesus and God are one... Just as the Holy Spirit dwells in us and we in the Spirit.
As St Patrick’s Breastplate calls us, we bind ourselves to the Trinity and that binds us to seeing God in all other person and in all of creation.
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