Happy Trinity Sunday.

Happy Trinity Sunday. This day is a gift. It is a day where we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the awe and wonder at the mystery of God who is three in one. It is a day to acknowledge we don’t have all the answers and to learn humility. It is a day to repent of our desire to explain and control God, and instead to have our minds blown by the omnipotence and awesomeness of God.

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”.

The doctrine of the Trinity was not developed as a tool to explain God. It was born out of the experience of women and men of deep faith who lived courageously in the face of persecution on the edges of their society, offering God’s compassion, generosity and justice. It was nurtured out of their ongoing pastoral desire for their fellow followers of the way of Christ as they struggled to hold hope and to trust God’s love. It is rooted in their ongoing reflection on the story of Jesus, who in his life, ministry and death and resurrection made God the Father known and showed us what it means to be truly human. This was enriched by the Hebrew scriptures and the growing collection of books we call the New Testament. It was shaped by their experience of the risen Christ still being among them, with the Holy Spirit working for change and pushing the church towards new horizons.

So on this gift of a day, with all the uncertainty in our world, we are invited to be drawn into the awe and mystery of our Triune God, and to reflect on how that might shape our response to God’s actions in our lives and in the world around us in the weeks and months ahead.