The Episcopal Church of the Epiphany

Trinity, May 31, 2009

Holy God, grant us the wisdom to know You as You are and feel Your presence in all of its aspects so that we may encounter You fully and embrace the transforming life You desire for us. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Today is Trinity Sunday. Trinity Sunday always comes after the Sunday of Pentecost when we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit. The Trinitarian cycle is complete.

In this liturgical year we've celebrated our Creator God who came to us in this human life in His Son, Jesus, and we've celebrated the gift of God always with us in Jesus' promised gift of the Holy Spirit.

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity, God being Three in One, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is best understood, not from an intellectual understanding or description, but rather from a full experience of God.

The doctrine of the Trinity developed from the experience of those first New Testament writers who wanted to express their understanding of God after all that had happened with the birth, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, and finally after they received the gift of the Holy Spirit.

The Apostle Paul began to use Trinitarian language from his experience of God in Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit that he received. Until Paul had some profound and amazing experiences of the living God his understanding had been very limited.

The Trinity gives us the fullest and most correct understanding of who God is. Many people, Christians in fact, tend to have a limited or partial understanding of God. Our God tends to be too small or too one-dimensional.

Faulty images of God develop for all sorts of reasons and from all sorts of sources. Who our parents were and how they related to us and we to them is a very typical way in which we form our understanding of God.

What we are taught by those who want to control our thinking and our behavior can determine what we believe about God and how we relate to God. Our religious upbringing can be one of those controlling forces. It was a controlling force for Paul.

These and other things can distort or limit our understanding of who God is. We need to experience something of all of the aspects of God.

God, the Creator of all that is seen and unseen, is beyond our comprehension and is so awesome in power that to be in the presence of this aspect of God is to fall on our knees and cover our faces and tremble in fear. Yes, tremble in fear.

That writer of Hebrew Scriptures, the prophets and writers of the Psalms, understood rightly how beyond comprehension and awesome God is. Most people don't like to think or experience God this way. We want a tame God. But consider out universe or universes. They are not tame!

Our God is not tame. Those writers of Hebrew Scripture understood correctly, to look upon the face of this aspect of God was dangerous. God is not like us. God's holiness is beyond anything we can know. We cannot in any way control God.

But why is it necessary to understand this aspect of God when we have Jesus to intercede? Why do we need to experience awe?

Because it is important in order to understand what holiness is and understand our proper place in the scheme of things. When we don't understand our proper place we become arrogant, and we try to take the place of God.

The prophet Isaiah understood this when he spoke these words God gave him: "Thus says the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy, 'I dwell in the high and holy place and also with the one who has a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble and to revive the heart of the contrite.'" Awe and humble sprits go together.

But with this we must understand that God loves His creation and above all values human beings. The writer of Psalm 8 expressed this aspect of God correctly and awe also comes through every word.

"When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars you have set in their courses, What is man that you should be mindful of him? The son of man that you should seek him out?

"You have made him but little lower than the angels; you adorn him with glory and honor."

God in Jesus, God coming to us in human form, demonstrates this extraordinary love God has for humanity. Love is at the center of all creation.

Without the experience and knowledge of this tender, radical uncompromising love of God, we would only be afraid of God and have no hope for forgiveness and redemption. God in Jesus reveals that God will do anything and everything to save us from ourselves. We need a Savior God.

Jesus also reveals God's deep desire for an intimate relationship with us and paradoxically of God's accessibility. We are told that when Jesus died, the curtain of the Temple was torn in two giving us direct access to God.

Jesus promised this access would always be available to us through the gift He would send, the gift of the Holy Spirit. Jesus promised we would never be left orphans.

Those who trust this promised gift, those who have experienced it can never be deists, believing God created the world but then left us to our own devices to sink or swim.

The experience of God as Trinity affirms the interconnectedness of all things in creation, because at the heart of God there is this profound interconnectedness.

At the heart of God there is this deep relationship, and out of that Trinitarian relationship of love flows God's relationship of love with all created things.

The very being of God is relational, and so this means the most important thing we are to learn is to be in right relationship, first with God and then with each other.

The gift of the Incarnation, the gift of the second Person of the Trinity was given in order to give us a clear, living, breathing example of how to be in right relationship, first with God and then with each other.

The relational qualities of God must be our model. The way the Trinity is in relationship is the goal of how we are to be in relationship. The whole purpose and meaning of our lives is to learn to love each other the way Jesus taught us to love, that is, the way He loves us.

At the heart of this way of the Triune relationship is truth. Love and truth are inseparable. There are no masks, no veils, nothing that hides any part of the Trinity from each other. Absolute truth is at the heart of the way God knows and is known.

Jesus said, "Know the truth and the truth shall set you free." We must see and be reconciled with all parts of ourselves and our lives before we can be reconciled in our relationships. The Holy Spirit will help us to do this with mercy, compassion and forgiveness.

We come to know who God is as we come to know who we are. Because, if we have the courage to trust God's mercy, the Triune God will help us uncover all the parts of ourselves we have tried to keep hidden, those things we are ashamed of or that have wounded us, and in so doing will bring great healing so we are able to love the way Jesus demonstrated.

The extraordinary gift of the Incarnation, God becoming one of us, is it gave humanity the capacity to see, in a way humanity never was able to see before, who we are and who we are meant to be, and who God is. Jesus said when we see Him we see the Father.

The awesome thing we come to learn from Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit, is being created in God's image, we have the capacity to become like Him. God became human in order that humanity might become like God.

To know God is to desire to become like Jesus, and this is the goal of our lives. This has always been the goal for humanity, and Jesus made it explicit when he gave us His commandment: "Love one another as I have loved you."

We know that this commandment is not easy. It is the most difficult goal to accomplish. It cannot happen without effort, struggle and yes, as Paul discovered, it may involve suffering.

But if we keep God at the center of our lives and our relationships, the power of the Holy Spirit will transform our limitations into a love that is very deep and life giving, and will begin to approximate the love that is at the heart of the Trinity.

This is what St. Paul came to understand from his experience of God. Let's hear again what he said to the church in Rome:

"Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.

"And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us." Amen.