What brings people together?
What drives us apart?
When do we lift one another up?
When do we beat one another down?
Over the past five years I have become very interested in those questions.
It has been interesting and disturbing watching the national leadership of our country and the leadership of our national church over the past five years as they have both driven people apart and beaten people down.
Both betraying their primary vocations.
What are the methods and habits of divisiveness and destruction?
What do we do with those who practice them willfully?
What are the methods and habits of communion and creation?
How do we emulate those who practice them intentionally?
These questions have preoccupied me.
I find myself growing more and more quiet, more and more still as I observe, as I study our ways, as I spy, on the hunt for something that eludes us, that eludes me.
Spying and hunting for that elusive gift, that miracle that brings about communion, that brings about creation, which builds up and brings together.
It is the nature of our fallen world to spin apart, the power of sin is always at work, always driving us apart, always wreaking destruction. Sin being what it is it is a miracle that we are here today at all.
There must be a grace at work in the world that is greater than this dividing force that wreaks such havoc in our lives.
The simple fact that we are here today is proof of this power being at work to redeem, restore and recreate what we have torn apart.
This is what I call optimistic realism, it takes the power of Sin seriously, but it takes the power of God’s grace more seriously still.
Today is Trinity Sunday.
For me it is the central mystery of life, it is where my spying and hunting have led me, the Trinity.
One in three, three in one, trinity of persons, unity of being, unity in diversity.
By the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit we are created, redeemed and sustained.
The miracle, the grace that brings communion and creation is all bound up in the mystery of the communion of three persons, out of whose super abundant overflowing love we are created and restored.
Somehow our lives are most alive when we live in that same communion making love. When we practice that love lives are brought together, communion is made, creation happens, something new happens that was not there before.
So what do we do when our quest comes to an end and we find the source that builds up and brings together, when we find that method and habit of communion and creation at work in the world?
What do we do when we hunt down and spy out that elusive force and what we find is a mystery, a paradox, glory, unapproachable light?
Perhaps we fall in love.
Perhaps we fall down in worship.
Perhaps we bind unto ourselves the strong name of the Trinity, and take on the methods and habits that make for communion, that make for creation.