"Celebrating the Trinity"
by The Rev. Thomas Squiers
According to Emily Dickenson, you speak the truth best by telling it at a "slant." Now, she probably wasn't thinking about the Holy Trinity when she wrote that line. But it sure fits. Too often, on Trinity Sunday, preachers feel the need to explain the Holy Trinity. Men and women who normally wouldn't be caught dead with props in the pulpit suddenly show up on Trinity Sunday with all kinds of strange things. They show up with an egg - shell, white and yoke - or an apple to represent tree, fruit and seed. If the preacher has just finished seminary there may be a review of church councils and the development of the creeds. But as important as it is to have sound theology, sometimes trying to explain the Trinity just gets in the way.
Archbishop William Temple once said:
Archbishop William Temple once said:
Revelation is never a matter of doctrines about God - although such doctrines may be drawn up later on the basis of revelation. Revelation itself is always a direct knowledge of an experience of God.
The doctrine of the Trinity began as an experience. It began when some everyday people - fisher folk, tax collectors, even women of the evening - encountered a man named Jesus. Gradually they experienced Jesus as acting like God - teaching with authority, healing, raising the dead, changing people and transforming lives. Yet they heard him speaking to the One he called "Abba" - the one they had always known as the God of Israel. Finally, they experienced the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
It would take the church 400 years to hammer out the details of this experience, but it began with their relationship to Jesus. The truth of the Holy Trinity is a truth that every generation must finally experience for themselves, and like the first experience, it begins with Jesus.
Fr. Grant Gallup, a priest in Nicaragua, says that the symbol for the Trinity shouldn't be a triangle with one point higher than the others, but a circle. After all, tradition teaches that none of the three persons "is greater, or less than, another." Gallup pictures the Trinity as a circle - a community of Love that invites all of us to join in their dance. Paul starts his final blessing to the Corinthians, says Gallup, with "The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ," - because this is the place where the circle was broken so we could join in the dance.
How do we experience the Presence of the Trinity today? We experience God's Presence in creation - when we stand in awe before a mountain range, the graceful flight of birds or the face of a newborn child. We experience God's Presence as "Abba" when we are accepted just as we are and welcomed home from our prodigal ways. We experience God's Presence in Christ when our dead lives are resurrected - when we ourselves are so healed and transformed that we can only speak of having been "saved." We experience God's Presence as Holy Spirit when total strangers worship as one - united in love and filled with great joy. We experience God's Presence in the church when the work we are given to do is filled with a power greater than our own.
In the Gospel from Matthew tells us of the Great Commission. Jesus sends out the Eleven telling them to baptize in "the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." This is not just a formulaic saying. To the Hebrew mind someone's name stood for the entire person. As I was told in a healing class once, to pray in the name of Jesus means to pray in the person of Jesus - to pray as Jesus would pray, seeing things as Jesus does. It means to put on "that mind which is in Christ Jesus" and to pray with his authority, his love and his compassion. In the same way, to baptize in the name of the Father and in the name of the Son and in the name of the Holy Spirit means to baptize as they would with their love, authority and power.
It would take the church 400 years to hammer out the details of this experience, but it began with their relationship to Jesus. The truth of the Holy Trinity is a truth that every generation must finally experience for themselves, and like the first experience, it begins with Jesus.
Fr. Grant Gallup, a priest in Nicaragua, says that the symbol for the Trinity shouldn't be a triangle with one point higher than the others, but a circle. After all, tradition teaches that none of the three persons "is greater, or less than, another." Gallup pictures the Trinity as a circle - a community of Love that invites all of us to join in their dance. Paul starts his final blessing to the Corinthians, says Gallup, with "The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ," - because this is the place where the circle was broken so we could join in the dance.
How do we experience the Presence of the Trinity today? We experience God's Presence in creation - when we stand in awe before a mountain range, the graceful flight of birds or the face of a newborn child. We experience God's Presence as "Abba" when we are accepted just as we are and welcomed home from our prodigal ways. We experience God's Presence in Christ when our dead lives are resurrected - when we ourselves are so healed and transformed that we can only speak of having been "saved." We experience God's Presence as Holy Spirit when total strangers worship as one - united in love and filled with great joy. We experience God's Presence in the church when the work we are given to do is filled with a power greater than our own.
In the Gospel from Matthew tells us of the Great Commission. Jesus sends out the Eleven telling them to baptize in "the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." This is not just a formulaic saying. To the Hebrew mind someone's name stood for the entire person. As I was told in a healing class once, to pray in the name of Jesus means to pray in the person of Jesus - to pray as Jesus would pray, seeing things as Jesus does. It means to put on "that mind which is in Christ Jesus" and to pray with his authority, his love and his compassion. In the same way, to baptize in the name of the Father and in the name of the Son and in the name of the Holy Spirit means to baptize as they would with their love, authority and power.
If we are called to baptize in the name of the Trinity, then we must know and experience that Trinity at the deepest level of our beings. Our own experience of the Trinity can be deepened through prayer. The prayers and spirituality of our Anglo and Western Catholic and Celtic Christian heritage can point the way.
Celtic spirituality is a corporate spirituality with a deep sense of connectedness to the earth, to the human family, even to generations of family stretching back in time. It speaks of harmony, unity, interrelationship, and interdependence. The God whom the Celtic peoples know is above all the Trinitarian God. Their prayers are to the God whose very essence is three persons bound in a unity of love. Theirs is not a remote, distant or inaccessible God, but a Trinity that is present and near.
The Welsh writer, Morgan Llwyd, put it well when he said:
Celtic spirituality is a corporate spirituality with a deep sense of connectedness to the earth, to the human family, even to generations of family stretching back in time. It speaks of harmony, unity, interrelationship, and interdependence. The God whom the Celtic peoples know is above all the Trinitarian God. Their prayers are to the God whose very essence is three persons bound in a unity of love. Theirs is not a remote, distant or inaccessible God, but a Trinity that is present and near.
The Welsh writer, Morgan Llwyd, put it well when he said:
The Trinity abides with us exactly the same as the ore in the earth, or a man in
his house, or a child in the womb, or a fire in a stove, or the sea in a
well or as the soul is in the eye, so is the Trinity in the godly.
The Celtic peoples filled their daily life and work with prayers to the Trinity. Prayers were said while milking a cow or laying a fire of peat. A typical blessing for a traveler went something like this:
Be the great God between thy two shoulders
To protect thee in thy going and in thy coming,
Be the son of Mary Virgin near thine heart,
And be the perfect Spirit upon thee pouring---
Oh, the perfect Spirit upon thee pouring.
We, too, can fill our daily lives with Trinitarian prayer. We can give thanks to God, the Creator, when we create by gardening, cooking, painting or writing. We can give thanks to God the Son when we give or receive the grace of a gift totally undeserved. We can commend to God the Holy Spirit relationships that need strengthening, works that need empowering, lives that need more joy.
Our God is both mystery and as close as our own breath. As we pray in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit may those words wrap themselves around our hearts. May they dwell, not only in our heads, but in our daily lives. May we know that Trinitarian Presence from personal experience. May we join in that circle - that dance, that perfect community of Love. And may "the grace of our lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit" be with us all.
Our God is both mystery and as close as our own breath. As we pray in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit may those words wrap themselves around our hearts. May they dwell, not only in our heads, but in our daily lives. May we know that Trinitarian Presence from personal experience. May we join in that circle - that dance, that perfect community of Love. And may "the grace of our lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit" be with us all.
Amen.
This Sunday's sermon is offered by The Rev. Thomas Squiers of Fort Worth, Texas. Father Squiers is the Vicar General of the Diocese of Texas and Co-director of Merton House in Bedford and operates an online prayer ministry "Let Us Pray!"
This Sunday's sermon is offered by The Rev. Thomas Squiers of Fort Worth, Texas. Father Squiers is the Vicar General of the Diocese of Texas and Co-director of Merton House in Bedford and operates an online prayer ministry "Let Us Pray!"
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