Archive for Trinity

By the numbers

 

The Lost Sheep, c.1898 Alfred Usher Soord

The Lost Sheep, c.1898
Alfred Usher Soord

 

The gospel reading for this day (Matthew 18: 10-20) begins with the parable of the lost sheep, followed by Jesus’ teaching about confronting someone who wrongs you. The words are very familiar, and at first pass their juxtaposition seemed odd. A beautiful story joined with rules of procedure? How did we get here? But then I saw the two sections as ideas held in balance.

The parable is a story of God’s great love for the individual, even from his mighty perspective of the whole:

What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? And if he finds it, truly, I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray.

The second lesson begins with individuals, then adds two or three witnesses, and finally the entire congregation. Jewish law required the testimony of two witnesses to establish truth (which, by the way, is why the Spirit bears witness with our spirit), and so the individual’s power over another individual is limited.

Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.

Jesus words, ““If he listens to you, you have gained your brother”  and “ if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector” are words of retrieval and loss.

It seems as if God’s love for the one does not make the individual the most important. There’s balance, not privilege. Perhaps this is a manifestation of the Trinity. The Lord is God, the Lord is One, and never without a witness.

 

Thoughts on Trinity Sunday

Holy Trinity, St. Denis, Paris

 

If your experience is anything like mine, there’s a pretty good chance that at some point in the sermon on Trinity Sunday you will hear the minister proclaim what a difficult concept the Trinity is. On this Sunday we may hear again how St. Patrick used the three-leaved shamrock to explain the idea to the people of Ireland, or we may consider the image of the egg (shell, white, and yolk), or perhaps, if our brains are to be stretched a bit, we’ll hear how in Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis used our understanding of the dimensions of space to explain this mystery. I suppose it’s a tough Sunday for preachers, but sometimes I wonder if we don’t back away from the idea of the Trinity more than we need to.

The Trinity is a Mystery, one of many holy mysteries, and why we should find it more difficult to comprehend than any of the other mysteries is beyond me.  Perhaps our difficulty comes when we try to turn that mystery into an explanation, or perhaps we overestimate our grasp of the other paradoxes of faith. Honestly, given our admittedly imperfect understanding of concrete phenomena such as the atom and the human brain, I don’t know why we should imagine that it would be any easier to comprehend the nature of God.  But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about it. Try to learn more.

At this point in my life, I have come to believe that the Trinity is a revelation about the nature of God and the universe. I don’t know how it works, but I sense that it is and that it is true. And what the Trinity reveals to me is relationship.

Our God does not even exist without being in relationship–it is his essence–it is his truth. And the essence of that relationship is unity and love.  The truth of the world is also relationship, and the work of the world is reconciliation.  Like God, we humans are always in relationship. We are born into families.  Our meta-cognition is as good as a friend: that voice inside our heads, the way we watch ourselves. And all our sense-making–all the meaning we derive out of our time in this world–is at its foundation an exploration of the connections between things. Even our mirror neurons (which fire both when we do a thing and when we see it done) connect us to the world and the people we share it with.  This is our nature, this is what we do.

Sadly, our relationships are not so unified as the Trinity, nor are they always grounded in love. We perceive our separation as often as we know our oneness.  Even the Body suffers.

But that’s the story, isn’t it?  The Fall, Salvation…we know where we are and what we have to do and what we cannot do on our own. I was struck this morning by this passage from Ephesians 4:

Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every joint with which it is supplied, when each part is working properly, makes bodily growth and upbuilds itself in love.

 

It’s always the joints that give us trouble: achy, inflexible joints. As the years pass, I understand this more and more too.

 

Trinity icon, Andrei Rubileve, 15th century

 

A blessing for your journey

God be with thee in every pass,
Jesus be with thee on every hill,
Spirit be with thee on every stream,
Headland and ridge and lawn;

Each sea and land, each moor and meadow,
Each lying down, each rising up,
In the trough of the waves, on the crest of the billows,
Each step of the journey thou goest.

– Carmina Gadelica, III