The Trinity: A Relationship

Homily for Sunday, May 31st    Graves Chapel

When the prophet Elijah runs away to the wilderness, afraid for his life, he finds a cave in which to hide on Mt. Horeb. It is there the Lord reveals his power to Elijah, first in a rock-splitting wind and then in an earthquake and then in a raging fire.  After the disasters, there is the sound of sheer silence and finally a still, small voice. We don’t know whether Elijah found that silence and the quiet voice the most terrifying of all; what we do know is that after the voice speaks, Elijah obeys the Lord.

Having the Lord speak to us directly sounds both terrifying and glorious.  I had an experience of hearing what I believe to have been the Lord’s voice when I was a teenager. I won’t share the entire story now, but the voice I heard was very clear, as if surrounded by silence and power, and the message was brief. It was a life-altering moment for me—and it happened in a noisy gym at a high school basketball game.

There is a long tradition, and maybe it begins with this Old Testament story, of thinking of the Lord as speaking to us, either directly or through an angel. In fact, I remember seeing cartoons that show a person with an angel on one shoulder, whispering in his ear, and the devil doing the same on the other shoulder.  In this kind of scenario, the human in the middle appears to be helpless while the Deity and the devil duke it out. Some of us may be old enough to remember comedian Flip Wilson saying, “The Devil made me do it.”  Flip, like the rest of us, had nothing to do with the choice he made, right?

How do we sort out the constant stream of thoughts, often competing for our attention, inside our heads?  Sometimes those thoughts are certainly things I’d never want to say out loud!  Careless thoughts can lead us down a path we should never follow. Often our thoughts define us. Seventeenth century French philosopher Rene Descartes famously said, “I think, therefore I am.”  In this faster than the speed of light 21^st century, when technology seems to drive all we do, do our thoughts really make us who we are?  These days it can be hard to focus on any one thing for any length of time.  In such chaos, where thoughts dart around like pinballs, how can we ever discern the Lord’s voice?

The short answer is with effort—and the Lord’s help. Dave is now part of a centering prayer group that meets on Tuesday mornings, and both of us practice contemplative prayer every day. Today’s theologians are returning to some of the oldest practices of prayer and meditation from the early church.  The University of Virginia now has a Contemplative Sciences Center. People are hungry for a quieter closeness to God. We hunger to hear and understand God’s voice.

Last Sunday was Pentecost, the celebration of the founding of the church. On Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descended in a rush of wind, and flames landed on each of the disciples. They began to speak in the tongues of all those gathered nearby, so that everyone who heard them could understand what they said. As the resurrected Jesus had promised them before he left them, the Holy Spirit appeared to them and entered them. Jesus said, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.” 

That same spirit inhabits us, as promised first in the Old Testament. The prophet Jeremiah wrote these words of the Lord about his people: “I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” Even so, like us, God’s people had a hard time listening. When Jesus sent the Spirit to inhabit and guide the disciples, did He formalize that part of ourselves that we modern disciples name “consciousness” or “conscience”? He called this spirit “the Advocate,” and an advocate is a guide, a guardian, a friend. Christ gave us a way to recognize and follow this voice of love and goodness, a way to discern the voice of God speaking within us. Now the ability to hear God’s voice is always available to us when we bring it to the forefront of our minds and don’t allow God to be crowded out by the myriad voices of our own self-centeredness. The Holy Spirit, God, dwells within us, but until Jesus made that powerfully clear to his disciples, we had no formal way of acknowledging the ever-present “still, small voice” among the clamor of other voices.

            In our first hymn today, we sang, “Holy, Holy, Holy, merciful and mighty, God in three persons, perfect Trinity.” Today is Trinity Sunday. How do we explain God as “three persons”?    Twelfth century monastic Richard of St. Victor wrote of the Trinity, “For God to be truth, God had to be one; for God to be love, God had to be two; and for God to be joy, God had to be three!”  Truth, love, joy—without someone with whom to share these things, do they have meaning? How do we share and experience truth, love, and joy in our own loves, except in our relationships with each other? 

The collect for today, also an ancient prayer, says, “Almighty and everlasting God, you have given to us your servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of your divine majesty, to worship the Unity.”  Unity. As Richard of St. Victor suggested, the Trinity shows us that God is a relationship. Isn’t it hard to imagine the amount of love that passes among the Father, the Son, and the Spirit?  Contemporary theologian Richard Rohr says, the Trinity is a “fountain overflowing with love.” As relationship, God is a community of three, and when we share bread at God’s table, when we gather together for worship or just for fun, when we share truth, love, and joy with one another, we join that community as God’s partners and make God visible in the world.   

 Paul says in today’s selection from his letter to the Romans, “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery, to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba, Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.”

The Trinity is a community and a family of many, joined together in the Unity of One!

Amen.