Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Psalm 8 or Canticle 2 or 13
Romans 5:1-5
John 16:12-15
Homily be Fr R Christopher Heying
Blessed
be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
And blessed be God’s kingdom, now and forever. Amen.
Today is Trinity Sunday. It is often said that more heresy is preached this Sunday than any other, but I confess that I have always enjoyed preaching on this Sunday. I trust that such is the case not because of a heretical bent nor even because I think the dogma fascinating, as it is revealed in scripture and discerned and, to a degree defined, over the first four centuries of the church’s life.
Intellectual speculation on a dogma however interesting is of course nothing compared to the actual encounter of the living God, engagement with the immortal, invisible God only wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes, yet the very same God who reveals God’s self to us that we might share God’s life.
That revelation comes in many ways of course, in creation, in scripture, the giving of the Law, prophetic voices, in Jesus Christ in whose face we see the love of God and in the coming of the Holy Spirit who leads us into all truth. Revelation of God comes even from within ourselves, for we are created in the image and likeness of God, who is Father, Son, and Spirit, a Trinity of Persons in Unity of Being.
God as Trinity is a mystery, and it is helpful to remember that the church uses “mystery” not to refer to an altogether impossible riddle but to a reality that can be examined and explored yet never fully comprehended and certainly not to the degree we understand it and are able to pack it away, safely in a box where it can make no further claim on us.
The church uses “mystery” for that for which the more we know about it, the more there is to know and we shall never know the full of it, for God is ever able ever to bring out treasures of darkness, riches hidden in secret places (Is 45.3), to bring forth good even from evil and life from death.
Indeed the more we know about God, the more we enter (to borrow the title of a fourteenth-century work on mysticism) a Cloud of Unknowing.
While we cannot know the whole of it, we can know something, for God reveals it to us:
in creation charged with the grandeur of God (Hopkins);
in scripture with its many genres, its dazzling array of metaphors;
in the Father who loves the world so much that he gives his Son that everyone who believes should not die but live;
in this Son who gives his life for the life of the world;
in the Spirit who pours the love of God into our hearts so we have adoption as sons and daughters and can cry, “Abba! Father!” sometimes with sighs too deep for words.
In God’s image we are created. By God we are re-created, reborn to participate in the life of the Father by being in the Son by the Spirit.
This Trinity Sunday we are not asked to explain a trinity of persons in unity of being; we are not asked to make analogies, to give depictions, or even to confess creeds; we are certainly not asked to worship a dogma.
This Trinity Sunday—like each Sunday, each day, each moment—we are invited not to explain but to live, to live ever more fully into
the Father who created us and never gives up on us, the Son who comes that we might have life and that more abundantly, the Spirit who pours that life into our hearts.
Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And blessed be God’s kingdom, now and forever. Amen.