Trinity Is Reality
TRINITY SUNDAY
The Catholic Faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity, Neither confounding the Persons: nor dividing the Substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son: and another of the Holy Ghost.
For many of us, the liturgical calendar of the church is a new way of ordering and comprehending time. I'm likely safe in assuming that most Christians celebrate our Lord's incarnation on Christmas Day and his glorious resurrection on Easter morning. If you do, you've followed at least part of the liturgical calendar. Whether new to the Anglican way or not, you've realized that the liturgical year is marked by several seasons and feast days. An entirely different way of living out this Christian Life.
The Christian year divides into two principal sections. The first half corresponds to the Divine revelation of salvation for the world in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ. Since Advent, we have remembered the Love of each Person of the Trinity through separate high feasts of the church. Think of it as the Gospel playing out in real time. In the Incarnation, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension of our Lord, we have contemplated the Love of both the Father and the Son: the Father sent his Son into the world. Last week on Whitsunday (or The Feast of Pentecost), we acknowledged the Holy Spirit's extraordinary and marvelous work, the third Person of the Trinity sent forth by the Father and the Son.
This first part of the liturgical year progressively reveals the God of Scripture as Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Three distinct persons, yet without separation, unified as One God. And this is a great mystery which is the very center of the Christian Faith, into whose Triune Name we are baptized and blessed by whose Name we are. One cannot be a Christian without believing and confessing the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, three Persons, one God, as the foundational Christian dogma forever made clear and professed in the creed attributed to St. Athanasius.
Trinity Sunday is a day to acknowledge and recognize, with specific intent, that God’s salvific plan of loving goodness towards this fallen world is a Trinitarian movement. The writings of St. Paul and Peter tell us that it pleased God, in His goodness and wisdom, to reveal Himself and to make known the mystery of his will. God visited the prophets; he moved and spoke revelation to men His Divine will that everyone, everywhere and at every time, can return to the Father, through his Son Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, by the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit, and being caught up in this sweeping movement of love become partakers in the divine nature, regardless of any human distinction (all are lost apart from Christ) and “Christ came into the world to save sinners..." without exception.
The God, who dwells in unapproachable light, desires to communicate the divine Trinitarian life to all of humanity, whom he freely created in love, to adopt them as his sons and daughters in his only begotten Son. And he does so on his terms, in his time, revealing himself as He wishes. And He has revealed Himself to be One God in Three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. At the appointed time, He revealed himself in this way because, within the economy of time, the Lord chose to no longer obfuscate or hold back the fullest manifestation of himself: that he is Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity. What was understood partially, seen but not understood, has now been revealed by the incarnation of the Son and the giving of the Holy Spirit. Pentecost, therefore, is the final unveiling of the Holy One of Heaven, and he is Trinity: Father, Son, and Spirit.
Today, on Trinity Sunday, the first half of the Christian year has ended, and today we gather together all three Persons of the Trinity in our worship, witnessing to the glory of the eternal Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, as one God, who are equally concerned in our salvation. And with all the saints, we look upward into Heaven and triumphantly cry:
Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come... Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory, and honor, and power!
The triumph of the saints, which is the triumph of all who believe and are born again by the Holy Ghost, is theirs because life itself, God, has brought us into his life. You see, our liberation from sin births a newfound liberty of participating in the Life of God: the Divine Life. Yes, we have been born again, as Titus tells us in his epistle with “the washing of regeneration,” and there have been justified and made clean; an inheritance awaits us in that far and beautiful country. The very breath you breathe, all that you have been given, and every spiritual blessing you enjoy are but gifts possessed by any who are possessed of God. He is our Life. In him is our hope. In him is protection from the storms of this life and the judgment to come. He in us, and we in Him, not with Christ, in Christ. All of this is yours because the Trinitarian God has brought you back into Trinitarian fellowship.
The Trinity is more than a complicated and wonderful doctrine for the mind to dwell upon or food for theological rumination... instead, Trinity is Reality, the reality in which we move, and live, and have our being. You see, every single created thing exists within the construct of the Trinity because it was made by and indelibly marked by its Triune Creator. Some of us need to move beyond a systematic or philosophical approach to God as Trinity and awaken the soul to the Love of God, who has and does dwell within us as we partake of the Divine Life of the Almighty through His Word, in prayer, in the sacrament, and often through our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. We are partakers of the Divine Nature: we are in Him, and He is in us.
Trinity Sunday also marks the beginning of the second half of the Church year, called Trinity-Tide. Now, some of you have come from traditions that call this season ‘Ordinary Time.’ Ordinary Time came into fashion after the 2nd Vatican Council; it’s about 5 minutes old in the history of the church and in my opinion, a very unfortunate innovation because when someone says ‘ordinary’, we think of something being plain, unimpressive, boring, unexciting! “Well, let’s sleep in, honey. It’s just plain old ordinary time; let’s wait till there’s a potluck or something!” Ordinary Time (though that’s not what the Vatican reforms were intending) is a terrible term. First of all, there’s nothing ordinary about the God of Time. In fact, liturgical time is real-time, its higher time; it is extraordinary because it exists in God, who is the creator and sustainer of time, and all time points to his Son and His glorious saving work!
The Gospel defines all of the days and weeks of the first half of the Liturgical Season, rehearsing and recapitulating the story of our redemption by the Divine Trinitarian economy of salvation; everything is done and given to us from the Father through the Son and by the Holy Spirit. And now, as we embark on the second of the liturgical year called Trinity-Tide, Holy Mother Church asks her children to respond to our salvation (rehearsed in the first half of the year) by emulating the Divine Life by walking out our salvation in the here and now.
In a sense, Trinity Sunday is a day in which we restart and rededicate ourselves to bearing the image within our families, friendships, and parish, reflecting the Divine Life to a confused, anxious, and hopeless world. The Gospel of the first part of the Christian Year is now to be lived with more intentionality through these many weeks of Trinity-Tide. The many weeks ahead are all about our growth in virtue and persevering in holiness, intending to shape our lives into the Divine Life. Jesus told Nicodemus, "Ye must be born again." And, in a sense, we all need a renewing of the Holy Spirit, every one of us to various degrees.
And how will we be shaped into the Divine image if not by the Holy Spirit? Who among us would discount their need for the Holy Spirit's grace to shape our imperfect souls? Surely we need patience in temptation, humility in all things, wisdom to pursue peace and reconciliation, the courage to seek justice for the oppressed and equal treatment of the poor, to take hold of the necessity of a faith that produces good works, the control of the tongue; the curbing of lusts; tolerance to guard against the danger of material riches; a hunger for the beauty and use of prayer; and above all grace towards all men.
God has always existed as one in a perfect community of three. An eternal dance of Love, deference, and giving. The Father loves the Son, the Son loves the Father, and the Holy Spirit processes the Love between the two. Perfect unity and harmony and yet, with distinction, for the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Father, and the Holy Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son. Rather, three distinct persons in one God. A distinction without separation. But we must receive this God on HIS TERMS, for the God of Holy Scripture has revealed himself as Holy Trinity, One God, in Three Persons.
And oddly enough, this modern secular age who killed the God of Scripture even pronouncing him dead, still for some strange reason, chooses to ‘resurrect Him’ whenever and however it suits their purposes, but always resurrecting a God according to their image, made in the likeness of men and his worldly imaginations. But this is not the God of Scripture who has manifested himself to the world whose preferred pronouns from before all time are “He/Him,” “Father/Son,” “Comforter/Advocate”: “I AM.” He is the Father who gives, the Sons who dies, and the Spirit of revivification. He is the head and source of your salvation, even the salvation of the world, the Creator and the ‘Orderer’ of all things, all is his, and the earth is his footstool: He is who He says He is, and He is good which means everything He has created, according to his design is GOOD
Foolish, foolish creatures, who are we to reimagine and remake all that which has been created by and in the Trinitarian image of the God of Holy Scripture? Who are we to remake ourselves in the image and vanity of the gods of our imaginings? To reconstruct our bodies, to redefine and reconstitute holy marriage and family, constructing societies, and cultivating cultures according to the patterns of this world, not the Trinitarian pattern, which is the reality of all that exists. No, the god which men fashion for themselves can never love but tyrannize, oppress, and destroy all who worship at the feet of such idols. No, the God of Holy Scripture, who is Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity, is the God of life, of health, healing, and in the end, salvation; the gods we construct cannot save; they kill.
Therefore beloved, in the words of St. Patrick, “let us bind unto ourselves this day the Strong Name of the Trinity,” and let the pattern of this glorious Divine community be ours as well. Celebrating our God-given individuality, our diversity, and our distinctions. Each with unique perspectives and experiences, a diversity of talents and abilities, passions, and callings. The very image of God enjoys distinction as man and woman, yet there is a common humanity. The Divine Life neither destroys distinction nor does it separate. Instead, it flourishes in unity. And it is by living your life within the Trinitarian reality that you are and will be made whole with a sound mind, stability of soul, and bodily health, a unified being yet beautifully, wonderfully, and distinctly made. May our participation in Him enable, bless, and guard not only the unity and distinction of our own lives but the common life we have been incorporated into: the Church. Amen+
