The First Sunday after Pentecost: Trinity Sunday, June 15, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bernard Delcourt

The First Sunday after Pentecost/Trinity Sunday, June 15, 2025

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

 Click here for an audio of the sermon

In the name of the Lover, the Beloved and the Love ever flowing.

The Trinity is the Christian doctrine concerning the nature of God, which defines one God existing in three, coeternal, consubstantial divine persons: God the Father, God the Son (Jesus Christ) and God the Holy Spirit, three distinct persons sharing one essence/substance/nature. 

While the biblical text doesn’t name the Trinity per se, Jesus talked about his connection with the One he called Abba, and then he promised us the Holy Spirit, who would guide us into all truth. The Trinity is evoked in scripture.

So, now that we have the theological definition of Trinity and a scriptural basis for it, what does it mean for our life in God and our love of God?

Evagrius of Pontus, a Greek monk of the 4th century who came from what is now Turkey in Asia and later lived out his vocation in Egypt, said: "God cannot be grasped by the mind. If God could be grasped, God would not be God." So don’t expect to fully grasp the mystery of the Trinity after my sermon is over.

Our faith teaches that God is One God, in Trinity of Persons in Unity of Being: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It is not easy to grapple with the concept of the Trinity. God is full, rich, abundant, multiple, yet one. God is not alone. God is a collective; a community of three.

The Creator, the Redeemer and the Sanctifier pour themselves out in love. Each receives the love and the love overflows in all of Creation. And we are not so much called to struggle with the concept of the Trinity as we are to relate to the persons of the Trinity.

If you are like me, you can relate to only one person from the Trinity at a time. And depending on circumstances, I call upon one rather than the other. Sure, some of my prayers address the Trinity as the Sacred Three, the ever One, the Trinity. But most often I call on Jesus. Next in my popularity chart is God the Creator. And apologies to the Holy Spirit but she comes in third spot nowadays.

We’re tempted to analyze and explain the Trinity by our intellect, but mystery can only be encountered by the heart. Mystery is that which cannot be apprehended by reason, but once apprehended, is not contrary to reason.

The mystery of the Trinity is a paradigm of what it means to be human and to relate humanely to others. God is always relating, within God’s self, and beyond God’s self, a love and joy so unimaginable that it cannot be contained.

Henri Nouwen called the Trinity a “House of Love”. He wrote that in that household “there is no fear, no greed, no anger, no violence, no anxieties, no pain, even no words, only enduring love and deepening trust.”

Jesus’ teaching to “Love your neighbor as yourself” is an admonition to love the other as a continuation of our very own being. It’s seeing that your neighbor is you. There are not two individuals, one seeking to better oneself at the expense of the other, or to extend charity to the other. Each is equally precious and necessary.

That is the kind of Love that goes around among the Trinity. The triune God is showing us how to empty oneself in self-giving love and at the same time being constantly replenished by God’s love.

When we open ourselves up, we move away from any need to protect our own power, we mirror the Trinity where all power is shared, where there is no domination, threat, or coercion.

To say that God is Triune is to mean that God is social in nature. It is also to say that those made in God’s image are likewise intrinsically social. If we believe in a Trinitarian God, then we must hold fast to the truth that God is community—a completely loving, mutually self-giving, endlessly generative relationship between equal partners.

True union does not absorb distinctions but actually intensifies them. The more one gives one’s self in creative union with another, the more one becomes one’s self. This is reflected in the Trinity, perfect giving and perfect receiving.

We mirror the Trinity where all power is shared, where there is no domination, threat, or coercion.

Br Christian Swayne, OHC, of blessed memory once noted that he was not much of a theologian, so he didn’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. 

So, here we are, spiritual beings relating with a Triune God and one another. Living as related beings means that we seek out the voices in our midst that are not heard. It means we work through all of the barriers that seem to divide us, dismantling power systems based on hatred and domination. It means we treat the Earth, not as a reservoir of food and fuel, but as a dynamic and living organism to treasure and nurture. It means we learn to love the complexity within ourselves, having patience with the parts of ourselves that still need conversion. It means we give thanks for having been created as a part of a web of life and love that pours out of God’s own inner web of connectivity and relatedness. That’s how we live out the mystery of the Trinity in our very being.

As Br. Scott Borden said, I thank God because one of the most important theological concepts in Christianity is steeped in mystery. A mystery that we simply cannot easily explain away. And that makes our minds, formed by modernity, just a little bit crazy.

Or as Saint Paul put it, “… the foolishness of god is wiser than men.” Thanks be to God. 

Glory to the Creator, and to the Redeemer, and to the Sanctifier, as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.

The First Sunday after Pentecost/Trinity Sunday - May 26, 2024

 Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Josep Martinez-Cubero

Trinity Sunday, May 26, 2024

• Isaiah 6:1-8
• Romans 8:12-17
• John 3:1-17

 Click here for an audio of the sermon

It is Holy Trinity Sunday.

Time to dust off the Dogmatics.

Speak of God as H-2-0:

water with three parts –

mist, liquid, ice.

Or a three-leaf clover will do

to disclose the Three-In-One.

Why do we bother with

images, icons, projections of God

worthy to be shattered

by the mystery unsolved?

How dare we define the Divine,

Domesticate the Godhead?

Go ahead: Draw your pictures,

Color your triangles,

Speak of the Three-In-One,

And the One-In-Three.

Use the Athanasian Creed litmus test

Of Father / Son / Spirit.

But all the while do not trust

The limit of language,

The confinement of metaphor,

The simplicity of simile.

The Ancients knew

One could not be

In the presence of the living God

And live.

Moses beholds God’s backside,

Jeremiah – God’s fingers in his mouth,

Isaiah God’s robe and a hot coal.

The Christ confined in flesh,

Spirit unmanageable,

Cosmic-Creator.

Expand do not contract God

For God is the Great Iconoclast.

And we at last

With Job

Stand in the Divine Presence

Jaws dropping

In muted wonder.

Kenn Storck / May 25, 2015

Used with permisssion copyright @apoemasunday by Pr. Kenn Storck.

That poem by Lutheran Pastor Kenn Storck best expresses my sentiment about having to preach on this day. It’s not that I don’t like the Trinity, on the contrary, I find it most important and fundamental to the Christian faith, even if baffling. It’s a feast different from other Principal Feasts of the Church’s Calendar because it celebrates, not a Biblical dramatic event like Jesus’s birth, the Resurrection, or the coming of the Holy Spirit, but a doctrine- an approved theological idea. 

This theological idea explains the mystery that is God, and the Christ, and the Holy Spirit and the relationship of the three in a clear, organized, and neat way. As a “J” on the MBTI, I love clarity and organization and neatness. At the same time, I’m mindful that we can’t have a completely authentic experience of God if we stay with the clear, organized and neat formulas. As the great 4th century Egyptian Desert monk Evagrius Ponticus (344-399) observed: “"God cannot be grasped by the mind. If [God] could be grasped, [God] would not be God." Similarly, the Syrian monk and bishop John of Damascus (676–749) wrote in his Exposition of the Christian Faith (I.4): "It is plain, then, that there is a God. But what [God] is in [God’s] essence and nature is absolutely incomprehensible and unknowable. God then is infinite and incomprehensible; and all that is comprehensible about [God] is [God’s] incomprehensibility." And the 13th century German Dominican friar, theologian and mystic, Meister Eckhart, dared to pray: “I pray God, rid me of God.” His point being that, not until we rid ourselves of our assured ideas about God do we begin to actually experience God.

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity was ‘created’ to describe, define, and safeguard the human experience of God, as the source of life beyond any limit we can imagine, God coming to us uniquely through the life of Jesus of Nazareth, and God as the ultimate depth of life. For early disciples, encountering Jesus was encountering God directly.  At the same time, Jesus spoke of God as both distinct from him (as when he prayed to God or spoke of God as the One who sent him) and “one” with him. Likewise, they experienced encounters with the Spirit as encounters with God directly. At the same time, Jesus spoke of the Spirit as a guiding, challenging presence distinct both from him and from the One to whom he prayed. So Christians sought out ways to express this mystery that God is properly conceived as both Three and One. 

What’s interesting is that, Science, once considered the enemy of religion, is now helping us realize that we are in the midst of awesome mystery, and mystery is that which cannot be apprehended by reason, but once apprehended, is not contrary to reason. This Mystery of the relatedness of God’s very being, the multiple-ness of God’s very unity invites us to be at peace in the unknowing. Quantum physics, and cosmology are now helping us look at this Mystery of the Triune God with a new level of understanding. Reality is relational. The Holy Trinity is about relationship, indwelling, and interrelatedness. It is about God within God, mutually depending and dwelling together in a holy unity. And we are invited to be a part of this Mystery through which God relates to us. Rather than an esoteric picture of God “up there”, God is right here with us, creating, redeeming, and sustaining us; a God “in whom we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

God is always relating, within God’s self, and beyond God’s self, a love and joy so unimaginable that it cannot be contained. And we are invited to participate in that love and joy of God through Jesus Christ in the Spirit. It is an invitation into relationship. It is Jesus who teaches us through his ministry of love and healing, to live our interrelatedness with God, and with one another. His teaching leads us to a God whose very essence is structured around loving relationship. 

In his Commencement Address for Oberlin College in 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “… all life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly… Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.”

In his short essay, ‘Ubuntu: On the Nature of Human Community’, the late Desmond Mpilo Tutu (1931-2021), who was a Nobel Prize winner, anti-apartheid activist, former archbishop of Cape Town, and good friend of our Order, wrote: In our African…worldview, we have something called ubuntu. In Xhosa, we say, “Umntu ngumtu ngabantu.” This expression is very difficult to render in English, but we could translate it by saying, “A person is a person through other persons.” We need other human beings for us to learn how to be human, for none of us comes fully formed into the world. We would not know how to talk, to walk, to think, to eat as human beings unless we learned how to do these things from other human beings. For us, the solitary human being is a contradiction in terms.

Ubuntu is the essence of being human. It speaks of how my humanity is caught up and bound up inextricably with yours. It says, not as Descartes did, “I think, therefore I am” but rather, “I am because I belong.” I need other human beings in order to be human. The completely self-sufficient human being is subhuman. I can be me only if you are fully you. I am because we are, for we are made for togetherness, for family. We are made for complementarity. We are created for a delicate network of relationships, of interdependence with our fellow human beings, with the rest of creation.

I have gifts that you don’t have, and you have gifts that I don’t have. We are different in order to know our need of each other. To be human is to be dependent.”

On the Vow of Obedience in his Rule for the Order, Father Huntington wrote: “We are to die to our isolation and separateness as individuals, that we may live in the energies of a mystical body wherein the life is one, and that the life of Jesus, our Head. The community is thus our means of entrance into union with our ascended Lord.” For Father Huntington, monastic life is characterized by the interdependence of its members. That means that we support one another in times of need, encourage each other to flourish, and are even willing to challenge one another when necessary. Our common welfare depends on the spiritual health of each member. There is no room in a Spirit-led community for domination, manipulation, controlling others, competition, resentment, envy, or revenge. 

Living as related beings means that we seek out the voices in our midst that are not heard. It means we work through all of the barriers that seem to divide us, dismantling power systems based on hatred and domination. It means we treat the Earth, not as a reservoir of food and fuel, but as a dynamic and living organism to treasure and nurture. It means we learn to love the complexity within ourselves, having patience with the parts of ourselves that still need conversion. It means we give thanks for having been created as a part of a web of life and love that pours out of God’s own inner web of love, connectivity and relatedness.

In the midst of all manner of brokenness may we join the joyful dance of unknowing because where it comes to God no creed or doctrine will suffice. All that can really adequately be offered up is silence in the presence of the, One who is, was, and evermore shall be, in the words of Saint Augustine: Lover, Beloved and Love itself. May the Spirit of truth guide us until all will be revealed in the fullness of time. ¡Que así sea en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo! ~Amen+

Trinity Sunday, Year A - June 4, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC

Trinity Sunday A - Sunday, July 2, 2023

 

Genesis 1:1-2:4a

2 Corinthians 13:11-13

 Matthew 28:16-20

Click here for an audio of the sermon

.Love.

Today, the Feast of the Holy Trinity, is a celebration of the overflowing love at the heart of all life, of the love that is itself life and is, at the same time, the engine and fuel of life.

Over the last few weeks, during Ascensiontide and on to Pentecost, we have heard those exquisite passages from John’s gospel in which Jesus tells his disciples of the intimacy he shares with the Father, an intimacy the Spirit will draw them and us into. It is an intimacy both tender and expansive.

All that the Father has is mine, Jesus says. And when the Spirit comes, she will give all that I have to you.

It is of this intimacy, the indwelling of one with another, that Paul writes when he says that “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.”

It isn’t that we weren’t the children of God before Christ. But if we are made new in Christ, then we possess everything of God, for as the letter to the Colossians puts it in Christ are “hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” Take that in for a moment. In Christ you and I possess everything of God.

All that the Father has is mine, and in the Spirit, all that I have is yours. May they be one, Father, as you and I are one.

The Father pours herself into the Son, who again pours herself into the Spirit, who again pours herself into you and me and the River and the trees. One in another.

This self-emptying love of one for another neither overwhelms nor subsumes our identity. Instead, this self-emptying love completes our identity and confirms it.

When we surrender to this love, flowing into and through our lives, we become more fully who we are, not less. We become more distinctly ourselves, at the same time that we become more transparent.

Five years ago tomorrow I was ordained a priest in this very church (in the Monastery’s church just down the hill). As many of you know, I’m somewhat skeptical by nature, and I don’t have a very high clericalism. I honestly didn’t believe that I would be different after that liturgy. But I was wrong.

I prostrated myself before the bishop and the altar as we sang the ancient hymn to the Holy Spirit: “O Come Creator Spirit Come, and make within our hearts your home.”

I found that I couldn’t sing the words of the hymn. I was too overcome with emotion, and I began to cry as intensely as I ever have. But by the third or fourth verse, I had dropped down below the emotion, into a place of total stillness.

As the bishop laid his hands on my head and prayed for God to make me a priest, I had the strongest sense that I was being given back a piece of myself that I hadn’t known was missing. And, at the same time, I was being given as a gift to the church and the world. Not that my ministry was being given, but that I, the substance of me, all of me was being given as a gift.

This is how love works in and through us. In God’s mercy, we are completed and filled, given first to ourselves as pure gift, and then poured out as a balm for the world.

The comingling of gift and self-offering, of fullness and emptiness, is the flow at the heart of divine love. It is how God first created all that is—by pouring out her substance into matter—“the prodigal, squandering herself” to paraphrase Karl Rahner. It is how Jesus redeemed the world, first being given the gift of himself at his baptism, and then consenting to the pouring out of his life in love on the Cross. And it is how the Spirit makes us children of God—by first returning us to ourselves and then enabling us to empty the Self of selves in service to the world.

Bruno Barnhart and Carl Jung both believed that three was an incomplete number and that it would be more accurate to speak of the Holy Quaternity than the Holy Trinity. The Godhead, three in one and one in three, is not complete without the Fourth: you and me.

The love that flows from and is God is not quite whole without us. And here’s the rub.

What would it mean to consent to full and total immersion in the heart of love? Who would we become if we fully consented to God’s living presence within us? What would it mean for there truly to be no separation between us and God? Fully heirs with Christ to everything that belongs to the Father, which is to say, to absolutely everything.

We would be like a house with the roof blown off so the stars could shine in her depths.

In one of her last poems, Denise Levertov explores the power of desire to draw us more deeply into God:

Augustine said his soul
was a house so cramped
God could barely squeeze in.
Knock down the mean partitions,
he prayed, so You may enter!
Raise the oppressive ceilings! […]

Nevertheless,
it’s clear desire
fulfilled itself in the asking, revealing prayer’s
dynamic action, that scoops out channels
like water on stone, or builds like layers
of grainy sediment steadily
forming sandstone. The walls, with each thought,
each feeling, each word he set down,
expanded, unnoticed; the roof
rose, and a skylight opened.

We really don’t know how to pray as we ought. We don’t know how to surrender our lives, to empty ourselves so that God can fill us full again. But we don’t have to know. It’s enough to want it, or to want to want it. It’s enough to throw our desire to wind, to open our arms wide in supplication. God knows that the deepest desire of our hearts is for God. And God wants us to know that her deepest desire is for us, too. We already have the one we love most fully. Though our lives often feel like a house too cramped, our souls dwell in vast meadows under a sky of stars. Sometimes, thank God, the Spirit clues us into this reality among and within us. And when the house of our soul begins to close in on us again, we can reach out with our love for God, push out the walls and the ceilings, and punch a hole to the sky once more. Because God is good, and that is everything.

Trinity Sunday - May 30, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Scott Borden, OHC

Trinity Sunday  - Sunday, May 30, 2021

Isaiah 6:1-8

Psalm 29

Romans 8:12-17

John 3:1-17

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

Trinity Sunday is unusual among Principal Feasts of the Church. Other feasts mark specific events in our historical tradition. Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, for example, all call us to remember, to relive specific events. This is not something that Christian Tradition developed on its own – it is part of our inheritance from Jewish Tradition. Jewish Holy Days like Passover are ways of remembering important events in the history of the Jewish People.  

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.  

Trinity Sunday - June 7, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC

Trinity Sunday - June 7, 2020

Genesis 1:1-2:4a
2 Corinthians 13:11-13
Matthew 28:16-20

Click here for an audio version of this sermon.

For the visually-oriented among us, the mention of the Trinity conjures the 15th-century Rublev icon. That depiction of the Trinity conveys a silent stillness surrounding the three figures. They are not looking at, but into each other with an unqualified dignity, respect, and loving gaze. The fourth side of the table is open signaling an invitation for us to enter. As members of Christ’s body through Baptism, we participate in the divine nature and dance of the Trinity. We are not merely invited to watch the dance, but to dance the dance. We’re tempted to analyze and explain the Trinity by our intellect, but mystery can only be encountered by the heart.

God’s mystery in the Trinity rests in mutuality: three perfectly handing over, emptying themselves, and then fully receiving what has been handed over. In the Trinity, God models relationship for us as Christians and monastics. The first reading from Genesis sets the tone for how we encounter God. God is one, yet God creates, sustains, orders, preserves, provides, and loves. God blesses all creation. God engages with all that exists. Trinity is a paradigm of what it means to be human and to relate humanely to others. To say that God is Triune is to mean that God is social in nature. It is also to say that those made in God’s image are likewise intrinsically social. If we believe in a Trinitarian God, then we must hold fast to the truth that God is community—a completely loving, mutually self-giving, endlessly generative relationship between equal partners. 

The Rublev Trinity Icon

Henri Nouwen called the Trinity a “House of Love”. He wrote that in that household there is no fear, no greed, no anger, no violence, no anxieties, no pain, even no words, only enduring love and deepening trust.¹ Could that description be any further from the truth of the outer and inner world in which we find ourselves today? In his book, Putting on the Mind of Christ, Jim Marion suggests that the Kingdom of Heaven is Jesus’ way of describing a state of transformed consciousness modeled in the Trinity. The Kingdom of Heaven is a metaphor and not a place you go to, but a place you come from.  It’s a new way of looking at the world, a transformed awareness that turns this world into a different place. The hallmark of this awareness is that it sees no separation—not between God and humans, not between humans and other humans. Jesus’ teaching to “Love your neighbor as yourself” is an admonition to love the other as a continuation of our very own being. It’s seeing that your neighbor is you. There are not two individuals, one seeking to better oneself at the expense of the other, or to extend charity to the other. Each is equally precious and necessary. This is the template for the sacred alchemy of the Trinity which is imprinted on our soul.²

In Chapter 54 of Dame Julian’s Showings, we find the best description of our union inside of the Trinity. Julian writes, “God makes no distinction in love between the blessed soul of Christ and the least soul that will be saved.”³ She is saying that God can only see Christ in us because we are the extended Body of Christ in space and time. Christ is what God sees and cannot not love and draw us back into the Divine Dance of Love. Julian continues: “And I saw no difference between God and our substance, but, as it were, all God; and still my understanding accepted that our substance is in God, that is to say that God is God, and our substance is a creature in God. For the almighty truth of the Trinity is our Father, for he made us and keeps us in him. And the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our Mother, in whom we are enclosed. And the high goodness of the Trinity is our Lord, and in him we are enclosed and he in us.”⁴ True union does not absorb distinctions, but actually intensifies them. The more one gives one’s self in creative union with another, the more one becomes one’s self. This is reflected in the Trinity, perfect giving and perfect receiving.

An African proverb states: “I am because we are.” Unlike Western society, it is not the individual but the community that is of critical importance. We’re seeing this value in action right now with so many  changing their habits, lives, and livelihoods at great personal cost for the sake of the global community.⁵ An extension of this understanding can be found in that of Ubuntu.  “A person with Ubuntu (full humanity) is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good...."⁶ What Ubuntu underscores is “‘the vital importance of mutual recognition and respect complemented by mutual care and sharing in the construction of human relations.’⁷ Ubuntu is manifested in self-giving and readiness to cooperate and communicate with others.”⁸ This reminder that “I am because you are,” seems particularly important for our times, especially in this country. Even before social distancing began, loneliness, and the anxiety and depression that often accompany it, had reached epidemic proportions and I imagine those numbers will only increase with so many people being isolated by our circumstances. 

Our Epistle reminds us that Paul was no stranger to the joys and challenges of community life. He had lived with the community in Corinth for a couple of years and corresponded with them by letter on at least five occasions. He ends this painful letter with an appeal to order, mutual agreement, and peace. He offers them and us a Trinitarian perspective regarding community life. Believers do not belong to themselves, but to Christ, and relations among believers must reflect the One to whom they belong. He reminds them and us that when we cease to belong to Christ we give ourselves to inappropriate anger, destructive hatred, and perhaps worst of all for monastics, the poison of self-absorption. We revert to living from a place of scarcity, invariably protecting and defending what little we think we have or are, projecting our problem on someone or something else, rather than dealing with it in ourselves. Having someone to hate or blame is a relief, because it takes away our inner shame and anxiety and provides a false sense of innocence. As long as the evil is outside of us, we can keep our focus on condemning or changing someone else, rather than ourselves, which gives us a false sense of moral superiority and outrage. We don’t have to grow up, let go, forgive, or surrender—we just have to accuse someone else of being worse than we are. 

When we move away from the need to protect our own power, we mirror the Trinity where all power is shared, where there is no domination, threat, or coercion. Jesus took this difficult path to know the depths of suffering and yet to forgive reality for being what it is. Through great love or great suffering, the Spirit can teach us the paradox of conversion and transformation. Paul voices his assurance that we do not face this challenge alone, but with the love and grace of God, and the Holy Spirit’s power to create communion. Resurrection for us is not an isolated miracle as much as an enduring relationship. Death is not just the death of the physical body, but all the times we hit bottom and must let go of how we thought life should be, and surrender. We are going through many deaths these days. They are tipping points, opportunities to choose conversion. Death is final only for those who close ourselves to growth and new life.

Benedict insisted that we must learn to listen to what God is saying in our lives. The good zeal, the monastic zeal, commits us to human community, immerses us in Christ, and surrenders us to God, minute by minute, person by person, day after day. Benedict reminds us that sanctity is the stuff of community in Christ and that any other zeal is false. As we move forward, we need to not be afraid of darkness, of change, of uncertainty, of the things that look like they’re going in the wrong direction. Often what we face is the thing that needed to happen in order for there to be clarity. Jesus’ life and ministry reveals that God uses tragedy, suffering, pain, betrayal, and death itself, not to wound us, but to bring us to God. There are no dead ends. Everything can be transformed, and everything can be used. Trust that even when it seems that our world is moving backward—away from justice and peace. Even this tension can serve to move us in a new direction.  +Amen.

 

1 Henry Nouwen, Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons, (Ave Maria Press: 1987). p.19.

2 Jim Marion, Putting on the Mind of Christ, (Hampton Roads Publishing: 2000).

3 The Fourteenth Revelation, Ch. 59 (Long Text). See The Revelations of Divine Love of Julian of Norwich, trans. James Walsh (Harper and Brothers: 1961), 162.

4 The Sixteenth Revelation, Ch. 86 (Long Text), Colledge and Walsh, 342–343.

5 Laurenti Magesa, What Is Not Sacred?: African Spirituality (Orbis Books: 2013), 195. As cited by Hayes, p.45.

6 Desmond Mpilo Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (Doubleday: 1999), p.31.

7 Mogobe B. Ramose, “The Ethics of Ubuntu,” The African Philosophy Reader: A Text with Readings, eds. P. H. Coetzee and A. P. J. Roux, 2nd ed. (Routledge: 2003), p.329.

8 Magesa, What Is Not Sacred?, p.13.

 

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.

Trinity Sunday - Year B: May 27, 2018

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br.  Aidan Owen, OHC

Trinity Sunday- Sunday, May 27, 2018

To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

Love.


Today, the feast of the Holy Trinity, is a celebration of the overflowing love at the heart of all life, of the love that is itself life and is, at the same time, the engine and fuel of life.

Over the last few weeks, during Ascensiontide and on Pentecost, we heard those exquisite passages from John’s gospel in which Jesus tells his disciples of the intimacy he shares with the Father, an intimacy the Spirit will draw them and us into. It is an intimacy so tender that it’s almost painful.

All that the Father has is mine, he says. And when the Spirit comes, she will give all that I have to you.
 
It is of this intimacy, the indwelling of one with another, that Paul writes when he says that “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.”
 
It isn’t that we weren’t the children of God before Christ came. But if we are made new in Christ, then we possess everything of God. Take that in for a moment.
 
All that the Father has is mine, and in the Spirit, all that I have is yours. May they be one, Father, as you and I are one.
 
The Father pours herself into the Son, who again pours herself into the Spirit, who again pours herself into you and me and the River and the trees. One in another.
 
This self-emptying love of one for another neither overwhelms nor subsumes our identity. No, this self-emptying love completes our identity. Confirms it.
 
When we surrender to this love, flowing into and through our lives, we become more fully who we are, not less. More distinctly ourselves, at the same time that we become more transparent.
 
In November I was ordained a deacon. As many of you know, I’m somewhat skeptical by nature, and I don’t have a very high clericalism. I honestly didn’t believe that I would be different after that liturgy. But I was wrong.
 
I knelt before the bishop as the assembly sang the ancient hymn to the Holy Spirit: “O Come Creator Spirit Come, and make within our hearts your home. Come to create, renew, inspire…”
 
I found that I couldn’t sing the words of the hymn. I was too overcome with emotion, and I began to cry as intensely as I ever have. By the third or fourth verse, I had dropped down below the emotion, into a place of utter stillness and peace.
 
As the bishop laid his hands on my head and prayed for God to make me a deacon in her church, I had the strongest sense that I was being given back a piece of myself I hadn’t known was missing. And, at the same time, that I was being given as a gift to the church and the world. Not that my ministry was being given, but that I, the substance of me, all of me was being given as a gift.
 
This is how love works in and through us. In God’s mercy, we are completed and filled, given first to ourselves as pure gift, and then poured out as a balm for the world.
 
The comingling of gift and self-offering, of fullness and emptiness, is the flow at the heart of divine love. It is how God first created all that is—by pouring out her substance into matter—“the prodigal, squandering herself” to paraphrase Karl Rahner. It is how Jesus redeemed the world, first being given the gift of himself at his baptism, and then consenting to the pouring out of his life in love on the Cross. And it is how the Spirit makes us children of God—by first returning us to ourselves and then enabling us to empty the Self of selves in service to the world.
 
Bruno Barnhart and Carl Jung both believed that three was an incomplete number and that it would be more accurate to speak of the Holy Quaternity than the Holy Trinity. The Godhead, three in one and one in three, is not complete without the Fourth: you and me.
 
The love that flows from and is God is not quite whole without us. And here’s the rub. This invitation to the heart of love terrifies us. What would it mean to consent to full and total immersion in the heart of love? Who would we become? What would it mean for there truly to be no separation between us and God? Fully heirs with Christ to everything that belongs to the Father, which is to say, to absolutely everything.
 
We are like the narrator of George Herbert’s great poem:
 

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back Guilty of dust and sin.But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in,Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,If I lacked any thing.

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:Love said, You shall be he.I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,I cannot look on thee.Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shameGo where it doth deserve.And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?My dear, then I will serve.You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:So I did sit and eat.
(George Herbert, “Love III”)

 
The table is laid, every moment the feast of Love calls to us. Fearful, skeptical, tired as we often are, if are ever to be whole, we must sit down and taste Love’s meat. We must sit and eat.
 
 

Trinity Sunday- Year A- June 11

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC

Trinity Sunday- Year A  - Sunday June 11,2017

Robert James Magliula 

God’s mystery in the Trinity rests in mutuality: three perfectly handing over, emptying themselves out, and then fully receiving what has been handed over. In the Trinity, God models relationship for us as Christians and monastics. The first reading from Genesis sets the tone for how we encounter God. God is one, yet God creates, sustains, orders, preserves, provides, and loves. God blesses all creation. God engages with all that exists. We’re tempted to analyze and explain the Trinity by our intellect, but mystery can only be encountered by the heart. Trinity is a paradigm of what it means to be human and to relate humanely to others. 

To say that God is Triune is to mean that God is social in nature. It is also to say that those made in God’s image are likewise intrinsically social.Consider the visual depiction of the Trinity in the icon Peter has written at the entrance to the Church. A vast silence surrounds the three figures. They are looking into each other with an unqualified dignity, respect, and loving gaze. The fourth side of the table is open signaling an invitation for us to enter. As members of Christ’s body, we participate in the divine nature and dance of the Trinity. We are not merely invited to watch the dance, but to dance the dance. In our Gospel Jesus tells his followers to re-enact his story in the baptism of new disciples, enfolding them in the life of the Trinitarian God.

Henri Nouwen called the Trinity a “House of Love”. He wrote that in that household “there is no fear, no greed, no anger, no violence, no anxieties, no pain, even no words, only enduring love and deepening trust.” The template for this sacred alchemy is imprinted on our soul. Cynthia Bourgeault ties the dynamic outpouring of Trinity to Jesus’ path of self-emptying. As a wisdom teacher, he was concerned with the transformation of human consciousness. This is the path that he walked, taught, and calls us to follow.

In his book, Putting on the Mind of Christ, Jim Marion suggests that the Kingdom of Heaven is Jesus’ way of describing that state of transformed consciousness. It’s a metaphor and not a place you go to, but a place you come from.  It’s a new way of looking at the world, a transformed awareness that turns this world into a different place. The hallmark of this awareness is that it sees no separation—not between God and humans, not between humans and other humans. Jesus’ teaching to  “Love your neighbor as yourself” is an admonition to love the other as a continuation of our very own being. It’s seeing that your neighbor is you. There are not two individuals, one seeking to better oneself at the expense of the other, or to extend charity to the other. Each is equally precious and necessary.

True union does not absorb distinctions, but actually intensifies them. The more one gives one’s self in creative union with another, the more one becomes one’s self. This is reflected in the Trinity, perfect giving and perfect receiving. The more one becomes one’s true Self, the more capable one is of not overprotecting the boundaries of one’s false self. You have nothing to protect and that’s the freedom and happiness we see in converted people.

Our Epistle reminds us that Paul was no stranger to the joys and challenges of community life. He had lived with the community in Corinth for a couple of years and corresponded with them by letter on at least five occasions. He ends this painful letter with an appeal to order, mutual agreement, and peace. Like a good mother he demonstrated a protective instinct to ensure the survival of the community that he had birthed. He offers them and us a Christological perspective regarding community life. Believers do not belong to themselves, but to Christ, and relations among believers must reflect the One to whom they belong. He reminds them and us that when we cease to belong to Christ we give ourselves to inappropriate anger, destructive hatred, and perhaps worst of all, for us as monastics, the poison of self-absorption. He also voices his assurance that we do not face this challenge alone, but with the love and grace of God, and the Holy Spirit’s power to create communion.

By observing ourselves, we become aware of what blocks us from entering the divine dance. We especially feel it in our body, when we are tight, constricted, and withholding. When closed we live from a place of scarcity, invariably protecting and defending what little we think we have or are. When we are petty, blaming, angry, playing the victim, we’re tempted to project our problem on someone or something else, rather than dealing with it in ourselves.

Having someone to hate or blame is a relief, because it takes away our inner shame and anxiety and provides a false sense of innocence. As long as the evil is outside of us we can keep our focus on changing someone else. In playing the victim our pain becomes our personal ticket to power because it gives us a false sense of moral superiority and outrage. We don’t have to grow up, let go, forgive, or surrender—we just have to accuse someone else of being worse than we are. We refuse to live in the real world of shadow and paradox.

When open, we move away from any need to protect our own power, we mirror the Trinity where all power is shared, where there is no domination, threat, or coercion. Jesus took this difficult path to know the depths of suffering and sin and yet to forgive reality for being what it is. Only the Spirit can teach us the paradox of growth, conversion, and transformation. Great love, great suffering, and some form of contemplative practice are the usual paths that keep us alert and receptive so we can get our small, false self out of the way, and become an open conduit for the abundant life that God is and that the believer becomes.

Resurrection for us is not an isolated miracle as much as an enduring relationship. Death is not just the death of the physical body, but all the times we hit bottom and must let go of how we thought life should be and surrender. We go through many deaths in our lifetime. These deaths to the small self are tipping points, opportunities to choose conversion. Death is death only for those who close down to growth and new life.

Benedictine spirituality is demanding. It ‘s about caring for the people you live with, and loving the people you don’t, and loving God more than yourself. It depends on listening for the voice of God everywhere in life, especially in one another.  Benedict insisted that we must learn to listen to what God is saying in our simple, sometimes crazy, and always uncertain daily lives. The good zeal, the monastic zeal, commits us to human community, immerses us in Christ, and surrenders us to God, minute by minute, person by person, day after day. Benedict reminds us that sanctity is the stuff of community in Christ and that any other zeal is false.

As we move forward from this Chapter, we need to not be afraid of darkness, of the things that look like they’re going in the wrong direction. So often the difficulty we face is exactly the thing that needed to happen in order for there to be clarity. Jesus’ life and ministry reveals that God uses tragedy, suffering, pain, betrayal, and death itself, not to wound us, but to bring us to God. There are no dead ends. Everything can be transformed and everything can be used. Trust that even when it seems our world is moving backward—away from justice and peace—this friction too can serve, to move us in a brand new direction.  +Amen.