Trinity Sunday
Prov 8:1-4, 22-31; Ps 8; Romans 5: 1-5; John 16: 12-15
The Rev’d Dr. Deborah Meister, ODM
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
(Wm. Butler Yeats)
It feels a bit like that these days, doesn’t it? Each day, it seems, war engulfs another corner of the earth; alliances fray; climate change continues unabated; the poor and the innocent suffer brutality; and those with the power or money to make a difference abjure their responsibility and compete to see who has the fastest spaceship or the largest parade. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, to retreat into our small lives, to cease to care about anything beyond our own family or friends. And yet…
— When Ukraine was invaded, strangers from around the world booked AirBnb’s they had no intention of using, just so they could get some money to Ukrainians who were having a tough time.
— In the States, millions of people took to the streets yesterday to protest the violence being directed against good, hardworking neighbors who do not have the correct immigration status, but who are valued members of their communities.
— Even as I speak, nearly eight hundred people are undertaking a forty-day fast to support the Palestinian people by drawing attention to the deliberately-induced famine in Gaza.
Against the rising tide of inhumanity, people of good will are doing whatever they can to reach out, to help others, even to help others they do not know and will likely never meet. It seems that there is something deep in the human soul which craves connection, community, kindness and mutual love.
The writer Zora Neal Hurston puts it like this: “When God had made [the human], he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Then after that some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks made them hunt for one another.” (Cited by Cole Arthur Riley, Black Liturgies)
What Hurston describes as our “lonesomeness,” the yearning which makes us seek one another, is what we Christians would see as the trace in our soul of the true Image of God: not one being, solitary and majestic, ruling the world in eternal isolation, but a holy community of persons, bound together in the giving and receiving of unblemished love, perfect freedom, and ecstatic, generative joy.
That holy community of God is what we call the Trinity, and it is what we celebrate each year on Trinity Sunday. The early theologians of the church liked to speak of perichoresis, the divine dance which united the Three in One; today, we are going to imagine what it might look like for us to enter into that dance, to move with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in steps of redeeming and transforming love.
Because that is the invitation we are given: not simply to live with moral excellence, but to enter into the divine outpouring of love at the heart of creation. Our prayers, however tepid and imperfect, are an outpouring of divine love for the world. Our gestures of kindness, even the smallest, embody that love for others. Our playfulness — those times when we set aside the burdens of should and mustand interact with other people and creatures for the sheer joy of it — is a participation in the delight that God takes in creation. And, yes, the Eucharist, the central sacrament of our altar, is a divine outpouring of redeeming love into our souls which lifts them from the mud and dust into “the love which moves the sun and the other stars.” (Dante)
Every life participates in that love; we are all sustained by it; but at times it can feel very far away. What happens to that beauty, that light and love, in a world that feels so deeply broken? Is it destroyed, hidden, beyond our reach?
It is not. Trinity Sunday reminds of a central truth: God’s holy and life-giving Self is beyond our capacity to mar or to change. We may harm one another and this earth, but God will always heal. We may hate, but God will still love. We may choose to divide ourselves from one another, cast other people out of our lives or keep them out of our countries, but everyone and everything is still held together in God.
From beginning to end, the Scriptures show us that God is not some far-off and indifferent spirit, but one who chooses to be deeply implicated in the pain and difficulties of our lives. The central sign of our faith, the Cross on which Christ died, reminds us that God is never far from the suffering of even the smallest creature. That is why times like these are so hard for people who are steeped in the love of God: we share Christ’s suffering love, just as he shared ours. That deep empathic suffering is not only a sign that something has gone wrong in the world, but that something is going right in our souls: the gift of the Holy Spirit, which opens our ears to the cries of the world, as well as to its wonder.
That divine mercy is, paradoxically, all there is, yet also not the end. It’s easy to imagine Christ crucified even in heaven, but the unbreakable purpose of Christ’s compassion is to bring creation to the point where compassion is no longer needed. The theologian Jurgen Moltmann writes, “God weeps with us so that we may one day laugh with him.” It’s easy to lose sight of that, to act and feel as if the suffering in this world were an albatross hanging around the neck of God, but in truth, all the suffering of all the peoples has but the weight of a mote of dust now that it has been redeemed by Christ. It matters to God, because we matter to God, but it has no lasting power. “The worst is not the last.” (John Claypool)
God’s reality is beyond our imagining. That gap — the gap between how we imagine God and how God really is — is the ground of our conversion, the dark and secret home of hope for this world. If we believe that what we can understand is all there is, then we will make our world smaller and smaller until we grind it into dust. But if we leave space for mystery, for reverence, for awe, then what is new and unexpected — even unhoped-for — may blossom. The poet Rumi urges us, “Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment.”
Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment — because our much-vaunted reason can take us only so far. At the end of all our striving to understand, we can know God only through love. In the words of The Cloud of Unknowing, “Though we cannot know him we can love him. By love he may be touched and embraced, never by thought. Of course, we do well at times to ponder God’s majesty or kindness for the insight these meditations may bring. But in the real contemplative work you must set all this aside… Then let your loving desire, gracious and devout, step bravely and joyfully beyond it and reach out to pierce the darkness.’
Zora Neal Hurston’s myth is a far cry from the creation story as we usually hear it, but it’s not far from the Zohar, the central text of Jewish mysticism, which taught that, at the moment of creation, the divine light of God shattered into a million tiny sparks, each of which became incarnate in one created thing. And the holy person, the person of wisdom, is the one who seeks that divine light in all things, gathering all the lost bits of light back into the shining reality of God. For beyond our darkness, binding the creation in one, is God’s unending joy — our first, last, and best home.