Trinity Sunday - how do we respond?

Trinity Sunday is a day where we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the awe, wonder and mystery of God who is three in one.  St. Augustine of Hippo offers this helpful description of the Trinity as “the lover, the beloved and the love between them”. But in the end God is beyond us.

And yet we are told repeatedly by the gospel writers that God the Trinity is with us. Archbishop Phillip suggests that “(h)owever difficult it might be, to speak of God as Trinity is to speak a wonderful truth, for the Trinity speaks to us of a God who is no distant, remote, isolate monad, but rather proclaims an experience of God who in essence is relational.  God as Trinity is God in communion, three in one. Inter-dependence, mutuality, loving in communion are all expressions which flow from our knowledge of God as three in one.

To speak of God as Trinity also takes us to the heart of our understanding of the Church. For we cannot begin to describe what the Church is, or what it is for, aside from our understanding of God and the purposes of God…We bear witness to the God who continually reaches out to us, entering into the very stuff of human existence, even to that point of abandonment and sacrifice which is the cross ~ a love willing to suffer that all might have life and wholeness.”

Today we celebrate with Graham and Ataraira Cameron as they are confirmed. Confirmation is a public and personal response to God’s reaching out and a profession of their desire to live in this love that all might have life and wholeness, with the episcopal laying on of hands for a new reception of the Holy Spirit for this life. As they make this response we are invited to reflect on our ongoing response.