You know me. I love the Church Year. The Church Year has a shape to it, and when we allow that shape of the Church Year to shape our lives, it can draw us closer to God. It can draw us into holiness.
There are so many beautiful things about the Church Year. Each season has a richness and meaning that can help form us. But the year is also beautiful in its larger overarching shape as we have been talking about the last few weeks. We have talked about how in the first half of the year, as we traveled from Advent through Easter, we go on a journey with Christ, we follow his life. Then on Pentecost, which we celebrated last week, we remember the Holy Spirit coming down, empowering the Disciples to go and do their ministry. I am not going to repeat all of that. You can listen to the sermons of the last two weeks again, but there is one thing that is important in today's sermon. And that is that one of the ways I like to think about the Church Year is the shape of the church. If you think of us as learning about Jesus's life in the first half of the year. And then the long season after Pentecost we take what we learned and now, empowered by the Holy Spirit, we start applying it to our lives today. Sometimes we call this time, this season, this second half of the Church Year Ordinary Time because we count by the ordinal numbers, week after week, the First Sunday after Pentecost, the Second Sunday after Pentecost, the Third Sunday after Pentecost, the Fourth, the Fifth, the Sixth, and so on and so forth until it all begins to feel rather silly by the time we get to late Fall.
But it is also sometimes called Ordinary Time because it is a time to focus on our ordinary lives, day after day, week after week, month after month, to find faith, to find holiness, to find God in the ordinariness of life in its routine and patterns, in rising and working and eating and laughing; to see God as you dig the trowel in the soil, or as you turn down the covers to go to bed; to see how it can be holy when you cook a meal, or shuffle paper at the office. That is what we will be doing for the next six months or so, to search for God in the ordinary.
Today is the First Sunday after Pentecost, and today is also Trinity Sunday. It's both. It is the beginning of this Ordinary Time, and yet we focus on this extraordinay thing of God being Trinity, Three in One, and One in Three. The Trinity has always been something of a confounding reality for us. Scripture points in this direction. You can see all the seeds of the concept of the Trinity in there, but it doesn't do the final work to gel it together and explain how it is possible. How can three equal one? So throughout generations, people have tried so hard to explain that "how". The way they do it is to take the categories of their day to try and make sense of it. The early theologians used Greek philosophical constructs to explain the Trinity. St. Patrick used folk wisdom, and today we find people using quantum mechanics. All these approaches are both valuable and limited. They teach us something, and they also miss the mark. But most important of all is that these approaches risk us missing the bigger picture. We can get so confounded by trying to explain the mystery that we can miss why it matters. We can miss what God is trying to tell us by revealing to us God's Triune self. God is Three and God is One. And in the one God's very being of these three persons, God is relational, and God's relationship with God's self, the relationship with each member of the Trinity to each other, is one of Love. A love that overflows into creation, spilling out in the act of creating and redeeming this world.
One of my favorite images of the Holy Trinity is a Russian icon by Andre Rublev. It visualizes the Trinity sitting together at a table gazing at one another in love. We, who are made in God's image, are asked to be in that loving relationship as well, a loving relationship with each other, and a loving relationship with God. We are invited into the relationship of the Triune God. In the Rublev icon there appears to be room for another at that table. And that other is you, the person looking at the icon. The Holy Trinity is inviting you to join in.
This pandemic has been hard for so many reasons, not the least of which is that many have found it a strain on their relationships. As we move forward to the next stage where it will be safe to be physically around each other again, we are all going to have to work on rebuilding those relationships. The danger is that the return will put further strains on our relationships as we discover differences and how we navigate this phase. Some of us think this is going too slow, and other of us think it is going too fast. While that danger of further strain exists, the return also offers the opportunity to deepen, to transform our relationships into something richer; to find that not only do we travel alongside each other through life, but that we belong to one another because that is how we are made, made in the image of a loving relational God.
As we move forward, day by day, week by week, month by month, through this Ordinary Time, hold this image of the Triune God before you. Pull up a chair and invite a friend or a stranger to the table and deepen your relationships with each other and with your God.
AMEN
