TRINITY SUNDAY
This weekend we celebrate Trinity Sunday, which is the celebration of the Father, Son and Holy spirit the three equal persons that make up the Holy Trinity. Today we seem to be celebrating a dogma of our faith., but we don’t come to church to celebrate dogmas. Today we celebrate the mystery of the Trinity and how the 3 divine Persons have influenced and continue to influence our lives. God is Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier named for us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, through our worship and prayer we are invited into the mystery of God. In the Holy Trinity the Father is equal to the Son and the Son is equal to the Spirit three in one and one in three and we hear this in the breastplate of St. Patrick. St Patrick, with a brilliance that the Irish justly celebrate found in the three leaf shamrock rising from the one stem an image of the Trinity which is still used today.
The feast of Holy Trinity goes back to 12th century England and St Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. Historians say the great Thomas celebrated a Liturgy in honor of the Trinity in his cathedral. In the 14th century, the feast came to be observed by the universal Church. The feast of the Holy Trinity invites us to contemplate the mystery of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Paul in the Letter to the Romans reminds us that the Spirit of God makes us God’s children, destined to share in the life of God, as Christ does. The gospel reading speaks of the power of presence and the power of the name. We believe that God is transcendent, beyond our experience. Yet, we are created in God’s image and likeness. The image and likeness of God is forever created in infinite variations and all of us are different. The sum total of everything we are fails to even portray in adequate fashion the complexity and utter immensity of God. Jesus came to save us from our ego-centric strivings.
The proof in all this if proof is needed is that Jesus was willing to die on the cross as a result of false, charges rather than reject the message of what God the father is for humanity! The love of God is our model, it is the path we take if we follow Jesus and what he teaches. Today we have to ask ourselves do we have the courage to recommit ourselves to that path that is the path of the Love of God and our neighbour. When the followers of Jesus saw the resurrected Lord and heard his command to go out to the whole world, they saw for themselves the Trinity in action. When we live as followers of Christ, we invite others to join us on the journey not because they see nice people living good lives. They, too, see the Trinity in action as God works through all of us. Trinity Sunday is the day when we stand back from the extraordinary sequence of events that we’ve been celebrating for the previous five months Advent, Christmas, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, Ascension and Pentecost . It is the day when we are asked to rub the sleep from our eyes and rediscover what the word ‘god’ actually means. Each Trinity Sunday, we only scratch the surface of this great mystery of our faith. In gratitude, let us begin and end every prayer with greater faith and reverence “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Fullerton T 