embracing trinity

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Embracing Trinity
Trinity Sunday – June 12, 2022
Rev. Patricia Wagner
 
In a few minutes we are going to baptize Eleanor.
initiate this beautiful child into this ancient faith.
 
This is Trinity Sunday, the day when the Christian church
Meditates on the meaning of this foundational
Understand of God. 
Its completely humbling to try to preach on,
because we know we can’t approximate it
Its unfathomable, but that shouldn’t stop us. It only means that we will never get to the end of it.
We can spend out whole lives discovering it!
 
So, I’ll I begin with tears I shed
watching the last episode of a series called Grace and Frankie
The series begins as
Grace and Frankie’s husbands announce
that they were in love with each other
and wantto marry.
                          And so  Frankie and Grace,
who never really cared for one another,
find themselves unhappily sharing a home.
 
Over the course of the seven years,
lots happens, and they
develop a bond stronger
than any other love in their life
           
I wept at that embrace
For I  have known the power of friendship
 
In our deepest friendships, and they can come in any relationship,
we are understood beyond words, as Richard Rohr says,
We release ourselves to the trust and shelter
Of another person’s soul.
Who receives our sacred and special identity
As we  receive theirs
        A holy bond
 
Deep connection, bonds are in our bones.
Scientists  look through microscopes
and see how the elements
         the very substance of our cells,
                   respond to each other’s presence,
 
Enormous energy is found,
not in the elections and neutrons and protons themselves,
but in the bond that holds them together with such force,
                  we create nuclear power by separating them. 
                 
And on a cosmic level,
The energy of the universe is not the planets themselves
                    The earth is a rock, it has no power in itself
Yet it moves around the sun and the moon around us,
All creation moves as in a dance. 
Cosmic energy is in what is between
the planets and the stars
 
So if relationality
    Is the power of the universe.
From our cells to the cosmos
       And love is the bond that binds us as human being.
How could Divine Reality, the source of all that is.  
Not be relational in its very essence. 
 
Not some separate and on high,
Some God on Mt. Olympus
Or a distance creator
That started everything with a bang
And then left.
But something that was, in the beginning,
         Relational. 
           
Let us create humans in Our image,
        And that image is of a loving being
 
That power, that bonding, that energy
       That we know in our relationships,
            And in our cells and the cosmos.
That which draws us together
       And unites us with God’s own self
               Is God’s being
 
Everything that is or was or will be flows from this love.
 
The Christ,  the expression of love,
Which flowed into Jesus  showed us that. 
 
Jesus, for it would take one of us to teach us
the nature of things:
 
And said:
Let the children come to me, do not stop them, and,
 
the greatest thing one can do is it give one’s life for one’s friends,
           
          And do not even stop love flowing to your enemies. 
 
          And forgive them for they know not what they do. 
 
There were no boundaries, no place
            No person that holy love could be separated. 
 
I am in the father and the father is in me, says Jesus in John.
              And now you, by the holy spirit, dwell in me
                             In the Christ that has always been
 
\Because, then says Paul,
God’s love
           Has flowed into our hearts
                     Through the Holy Spirit. 
 
Love is the presence of God within you,
           moving in you prompting you
                    To pray, to care, to heal, to give, to serve, to love. 
 
And so when we are drawn to love
        To give, to respect, to honor, to sacrifice for another
                    How can it not be of God? 
                            Regardless of whom it is between.
 
Indeed, how dare we seek to prohibit it,
         To judge, to outlaw it,
                  In a universe that is alive by the bonds
                           Between our cells, our stars and us,
                                    Why would we want to halt love’s flow?
 
 
Love is not something God does,  says Fr. Rohr.
Love is what God is.
“Everything you have ever seen with your eyes
 is the self-emptying of God into
multitudinous physical and visible forms “
 
and that pouring out is God, in three persons,
 it is creator, is the Christ, made known in Jesus
it is the spirit that flows into you.
 
Into you,
    Love is not something you do
           love is someone you are.
                       It is your True Self
 
   Love is
         where you came from , we say to Eleanor in baptism,
                and love is where you’re going.
 
And love is where you came from,
            and where you are going.
                       
This is an icon of the Trinity,
painted by the Russian artist, Rublev
In the 1400’s 
 
    Do you feel the gentleness here
       the deep peace
          and respect between them
             as they all share from a common bowl?
 
And note the hand of the Spirit
          pointing toward the open and fourth place at the table!
                  Is the Holy Spirit inviting someone to join them
                          Who?
                                Whom else but you? 
                                       They are all turned to see you! 
 
C.S. Lewis, the Christian author describes
                     An ordinary woman,
Standing, praying
 
She has been moved, by an inner prompting to pray. 
To pray to be whom God longs within her to be,.
And meanwhile she is standing with Jesus in prayer. 
In the company of the body of Christ,
 
The holy trinity of love is circulating within her very being. 
And as with her, so with you.   
God the creator,
It is what you are praying for,
God, the Spirit,
It is the prompting within you to pray,
 
God in Jesus, the Christ.
It is your beloved companion along the way. 
 
So, let us know bring this beloved child, Eleanor, into the faith,
         Faith in the Loving Creator, into Jesus, the Christ and into the
         Holy Spirit
 
Even with all that we do not know,
         Trusting that the love of God is with us, and with her
                  Now and forever. 
                           Amen. 
 
Rev. Patricia Wagner