Beautiful Trinity [Trinity C]

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Psalm 8

Beautiful Trinity

This week I drove a road – the road through the mountains. I drove that road and I most unexpectedly became a witness to the agony and ecstasy of creation – as if transported to the beginning, before there was time.

I saw the saw the mountains reach for the heavens with their violent thrusts, lifting their blankets of white to meet the white clouds.

I saw aged peaks rounded off by the gentle caress of the wind of God.

I saw two pronghorn antelopes kiss in the muted watercolors that stretch across the severe plains.

I saw streams cut the rocky ground, spilling crystal clear blood, life-giving waters.

I saw the agony and ecstasy of creation; I drove right through it – trying to keep my car on the road, trying to keep my breath.

I saw mountains, valleys, and plains. I saw streams and lakes. I saw snow caps and creatures.

I saw the love of this Triune God, poured out in this great creative expression. Spent, but never diminished.

I saw a gift. Pieces of the Divine life in every atom. Every atom a triune dance.

I saw it. It was all more than my mind could comprehend. But it was beautiful.

Every year on Trinity Sunday, I step into the pulpit with an impossible dilemma: God – One in Three; Three in One. The math never works. The words always fail. The mystery is never untangled.

And yet the evidence is everywhere, impossible to escape – in every moment, stamped on every thing, floating through every breath. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, “By virtue of creation, and still more the incarnation, nothing here is profane for those who know how to see.”¹ Sacred is all around us. God's creation – a pure expression of God's self-giving love. Sacred is all around us – spoken into being by the Word of God, given life by the breath of God, shaped and formed by the hands of God. As close as the air we breath, the bodies that carry us from place to place, as close as a lover's embrace. And yet a mystery. And yet we perceive a distance that was never there. What is this paradox we call the Trinity, we call God?

Paradox is uncomfortable for our brains that long to make sense and so we use words to try to solve the problem; we think and think and think, convinced that our minds can figure out something that only our souls can accept. Trying to find what we can only be lost in.

Even the biblical writers failed to find the words to describe the Trinity. And so we have mentions, and meditations, but no systematic theology, no explanations. The best we get today is the psalmist stumbling over himself, trying to say something true about God: “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars you have set in their courses, what is man that you should be mindful of him?” It is called being at a loss. It was more than his mind could understand. But it was beautiful – all of it – especially the unspoken truth of the inquiry: the God who created all things is not only mindful of us, the God who created all things is in us and around us, is moving through us with every breath we take.

And because words fail, it is not in words that we see the most profound truth about God; it is in the traces that God leaves all around – in all of those beautiful mysteries – those moments of agony and ecstasy – those moments in which God is still creating our reality. We are witnesses. The Trinity is telling us the story in sighs too deep for words.

But still there, waiting to be discovered.

I saw my baby come into the world.

I saw life enter into history where before there was no life.

I saw a new story begin – those first moments written into the world like ink on a blank page.

And I saw him whisper the name of God with his first breath. And I heard him cry out his first prayer – a primal scream to his Creator.

And I saw him gasp for God – desperate to be filled with the Holy Spirit. It was all so natural – creation longing for Creator.

I could only stand and stare in the presence of a profound mystery. I couldn't explain it. But it was beautiful. I saw the agony and ecstasy of creation in a hospital room. Glimpses of the Trinity.

And I saw a man die.

I entered the room because of the strife.

Wife and lover spewing hatred and anger.

I saw a family torn apart.

And I saw a man – dying but not yet dead from a shotgun blast, a suicide attempt.

And around his broken body I led this broken family in a prayer – a prayer at the time of death.

During that prayer, I saw his life trickle from his body.

I heard the monitor announce his final heartbeat.

I saw an anxious family, for at least a moment, enveloped in a peace that only God could grant in such devastation.

It felt holy. I don't understand why. But in my mind it is somehow beautiful.

Pain and death did not scare God away. God as infinite presence.

Creation and incarnation and nothing is profane.

We are always swimming in the Trinity, in God is Love; we just often don't remember.

And I saw a circle of bread rest in tiny, pudgy hands.

I saw the presence of Jesus cradled by one who sleeps in a cradle.

I saw God held by the image of God – faces looking into a mirror.

“Behold what you are; become what you receive.”²

I saw the Holy Trinity enter into the mouth of one filled with Holy Trinity – in her heart, in her soul, in every cell. God meeting God in this world. Creation and incarnation. It was a mystery – a holy mystery. And it was beautiful.

I saw and I learned more than words could ever say. We cannot see God because God is simply too close. It was never the distance that was the problem. It is the lack of distance. The Trinity is a vortex of self-giving love and we are caught up in the middle.

Today we celebrate our high school graduates. And we acknowledge that we are sending them into this world – a world in which there is both beauty and terror, a world in which scary things sometimes happen. That is true but it is not the truth. This world was created good by a good God whose nature is love. And they who walk in this world do not walk alone. The same God who created them lives in them, surrounds them. “By virtue of creation, and still more the incarnation, nothing here is profane for those who know how to see.”

We will never know the Trinity until we learn how to see – until we open our eyes and our hearts to the beauty in this world. God has filled this creation with clues. God has created every human being as a self-portrait. God lives in our hearts – impossibly close – and yet fills every space of this universe – impossibly present. That is the world in which we live and move and have our being. It is incomprehensible but it is beautiful. These are the words that fail me on this Trinity Sunday.

And so I'll end with these words by someone else, Rilke, from his poem entitled Go to the Limits of Your Longing:

God speaks to each of us as [God] makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.³

1The Divinisation of Our Activities, 66.

2St. Augustine's Sermon 272

3http://www.onbeing.org/program/wild-love-world/feature/go-limits-your-longing/1448