In the calendar of the church year, the Sunday after Pentecost is Trinity Sunday. It is one of the doctrines of the church that I struggle with and I’m guessing we all struggle with. Three in one? How does that work? For the strictly rational and mathematically inclined it doesn’t work. St. Patrick tried with the idea of the shamrock – three leaves and yet one leaf. From the Song of Faith
With the Church through the ages,
we speak of God as one and triune:
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
We also speak of God as
Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer
God, Christ, and Spirit
Mother, Friend, and Comforter
Source of Life, Living Word, and Bond of Love,
and in other ways that speak faithfully of
the One on whom our hearts rely,
the fully shared life at the heart of the universe.
The preacher Nadia Bolz-Webber writes, “So let’s get right down to it, shall we? Here we go: God is three persons and one being. God is one and yet three. The father is not the son or the Spirit, the son is not the father or the Spirit, the spirit is not the Father or the Son. But the Father Son and Spirit all are God and God is one. … So to review. 1+1+1=1. That’s simple enough.” (https://sojo.net/articles/some-thoughts-holy-trinity#sthash.WnU2XuS2.dpuf)Richard Rhor writes, “Religious belief has made me comfortable with ambiguity. “Hints and guesses,” as T.S. Eliot would say. I often spend the season of Lent in a hermitage, where I live alone for the whole 40 days. The more I am alone with the Alone, the more I surrender to ambivalence, to happy contradictions and seeming inconsistencies in myself and almost everything else, including God. Paradoxes don’t scare me anymore.” https://onbeing.org/blog/richard-rohr-utterly-humbled-by-mystery/?fbclid=IwAR0S32QTPqTU3_rT4OA4WvaYmlb-P-XqUeoZqBq8929r4M02GJstfDAtX5s
The trinity is beautiful in its complexity as is our reading from Romans which sounds more complicated than it actually is. Our reading from Romans begins with Paul writing, “Therefore since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.” (Romans 5:1 – 2) We are justified by God sounds like we have to complete a series of skill testing questions to receive it. But the opposite is true. It means do nothing to earn God’s love. It is a gift offered to us daily.
Dr. David Lose in his blog “In the Meantime” writes, “…I am also struck by Paul’s insistence that it’s precisely because we have the peace of God through justification that we can endure almost anything, and not just endure but grow stronger and find hope. Justification is nothing less or more than the promise that God accepts you as you are not because of who you are or what you have done, not because of what you might become or do, not because of who you have promised to be or what you have pledged to do, but that God accepts you because that’s who God is and what God does – justify the ungodly in order that we might know peace and turn in love to extend the same grace, mercy, and acceptance to those around us.” (http://www.davidlose.net/2016/05/trinity-c-shh-dont-mention-the-trinity/)
And because we are justified (read loved and accepted) we can get through times of challenge and suffering. No magic wands. No instant cures. Through faith we are not alone. God is with us. In our most challenging times we are sustained by the prayers of our brothers and sisters in faith and by their acts of kindness and support. A friend of mine is going through a difficult time, he recently shared this, “If any of you wonder whether thoughts and prayers matters as you send messages our way, let me say YES. It creates a wonderful sense of warmth and comfort know that we are surrounded by a host of people who care, love and support.” Part of the reason for joining a community of faith is to be sustained by those prayers – and to sustain others in our prayers.
Paul says, “And not only that, but we also boast in our suffering, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” (Romans 5:3 – 5)
That is the good news on this day of weighty theological ideas of trinity and justification. We have a hope and because there is hope we can find our way through the most challenging times and we don’t do it alone. God is is with us loving us just as we are, we sustained by the Spirit we follow in Jesus’ way of love. On this amazing journey, we have brothers and sisters in faith. Sometimes we are held in prayer and other times we hold others in prayer.
Together we make our prayer, in the words of the hymn Three Things I Promise, “Revive and guide me living God, as day by day until my death, I bless your name, and cling to Christ and listen for the Spirit’s breath.” Amen.