Three strangers come walking up unexpected and are treated to a meal. Abraham’s hospitality welcomes them. He shares his table. The food is prepared. The meal is served. They drink deeply in their thirst. They enjoy the shade together.
In such simple things the mystery of the Universe and the nature of God are laid bare before us.
The strangers are not really men, but are angels, but they are not really angels they are really God. The table is set and God is welcomed, unknown as a stranger. The story is strange and disturbing, reality seams to bend as this three personed God walks up.
The icon behind the altar has two names. One name is “The Hospitality of Abraham”. The other name is “The Trinity”.
Today is Trinity Sunday, every year the fist Sunday after the feast of Pentecost, is the observance of the teaching of God as Trinity. Perhaps the most perplexing, confusing, and frustrating part of our faith.
I invite you to approach today differently than before.
I am not going to talk about how the Trinity is like the three phases of water: ice liquid and steam, or like an apple: core, flesh and skin, or like an egg: yolk, white and shell. Those are all ways of trying to make being three yet being one make sense. I think that is the wrong approach. The Trinity cannot be understood.
Reality bends as we approach the Trinity and the rules of what does and doesn’t make sense no longer really work.
If you feel like you don’t understand the Trinity, then you have the right answer.
The Trinity is not something that can be understood, it is rather a mystery to be worshipped. What we confess in the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed and today we also confess the seldom used Athanasian Creed is that the Trinity is a mystery and not a definition of how God works. It rather sets the boundaries of what is true and false as we approach what is revealed of God.
Scripture spills over with the language and images of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We know and experience God in these three ways, yet each way is distinctly God, unique and fully God. God is three, yet God is one. Both are true, to say less or more would be to say something that is less than true. It is the great paradox of all paradoxes. To try and understand it would be to fall away into falsehood.
The Creeds do not define God, to say so is to supremely misunderstand what the creeds are doing. They rather draw the boundaries of where our ways of knowing, thinking and communicating fail absolutely. Before this paradox, before this mystery we simply fail.
Rather than define God or figure God out we welcome the paradox at table, we serve the mystery as the stranger who is always a surprise, always unexpected, always more than they seem.
We worship, we don’t explain.
It is hard to relate how this is relevant and essential to our lives today.
It has to do with things like freedom and love, hospitality, community, communion and difference.
When we know God we know a communion, a community of sharing, that is God three times, that shares so freely with one another that they are all fully the same God, and yet that sharing is full of the sort of respect and freedom and love that each person stands apart and unique, none are diminished or reduced or made less by their relationship, rather they each are always becoming more and more unique and themselves.
The more distinct they each are the more fully they share who they are with each other, a divine feed back loop that literally overflows with life and vitality, from their fullness all creation pours forth.
So in the Trinity we see the great challenge in all our lives, in all our relationships and in this community, the challenge to love and share with one another in such a way that we don’t diminish one another or ourselves but rather build one another up into even greater uniqueness and distinction.
That is the human predicament and conundrum.
We are made for relationships, we are social creatures.
Yet we have such a hard time having relationships that bring out the best in one another rather than the worst, that build one another up rather than reducing one another.
The Trinity, the mystery of God, is the mystery of love, and the mystery of our own frail humanity.
Being in union with others yet being distinct.
Being in Communion yet being diverse.
Unity based not on likeness and similarity, but rather on difference and loving the difference. Viva la Difference! As they say.
The Trinity, it calls our attention to something important, relevant and essential.
In God we find the source that makes for all relationships to be right relationships, relationships of love rather than abuse.
It isn’t a puzzle to figure out.
It is a mystery to worship.
The mystics spoke of the “wound of love”. That to be exposed to the depths of God’s Love for us and for all, is to become very aware of all the possibilities of love that are not, that we miss out on, that we fall short of, that we waste.
Once we begin to know the triune love of God we are wounded by the desire that Trinitarian love be everywhere shared in, wounded by knowing that it is not yet as it should be or shall be, especially within our own selves.
To know absolute love is to become aware that we live lives of flawed and failing love, we can be so much more yet we just can’t do it.
Wounded by the knowledge, the wounds of Christ, and those wounds become our guiding star.
Trinity Sunday. To speak of the Trinity is to first speak of God as love, and to be wounded by that love.
With Abraham we keep company with that mystery.
With Abraham we serve that mystery that sits at table with us, enjoying the shade and the food.
There is something going on in our lives, there is more than we first see.
Three strangers come walking up unexpected and are treated to a meal.
In such simple things the mystery of the Universe, the nature of God, and the hope of our frail humanity are laid bare before us.