The Gift of Trinity Sunday

Today is Trinity Sunday. Please keep reading. The temptation is to try to explain the Trinity, often using some of the common metaphors. For example, the “Trinity is like water, which is also ice and steam” which is modalism – and condemned as a heresy; or the famous 3 leafed clover of St. Patrick – also seen as not quite getting it.

The other temptation is to ask, “so what if I don’t get how the Trinity works” and to ignore it all together. I suspect lots of us do that.

I want to suggest that Trinity Sunday is a gift. It is a day where we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed and shaped by the awe, wonder and mystery of God who is three in one.  A few years ago Archbishop Phillip wrote 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. St. Augustine of Hippo described the Trinity as “the lover, the beloved and the love between them”.

So on this gift of a day, as we look ahead to the possibility of regathering at St. Georges, we are drawn into the awe and mystery of our Triune God, and are invited to reflect on how that has shaped our response to God’s actions during the last few months, and will shape our response to God’s actions in our lives, in the world around us, and in all creation in the weeks and months ahead.