THE TRINITY

John 16:12-15

Father Son and Holy Spirit. God as Three Persons. These are the tenets of our faith which we recite every time we say the Nicene Creed.  For many these words have been said for a lifetime and offer a great sense of comfort and familiarity. The idea of a paternal love is for some the greatest path to communion with God. It is how Jesus spoke to his heavenly Father with the gentle tender word Abba. And I think for some of us who experienced a difficult relationship with our earthly father the idea of a Father God who offers unconditional love is soul healing.  And still for some of us name Father for God feels limiting.

   Trinity Sunday falls on Father’s Day this year. Maybe it is an opportunity to examine our understanding of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit and possibly to think outside the box a little. Could anyone here benefit from a bit of freshness in our God imagery? For some of our brothers and sisters who have left church these words for the Divine have lost meaning. Is it possible that our language and maybe even our concepts for the Divine have become stale for some?

   At Community of Divine Love, the monastery that Brother Dennis and I co-created, we decided years ago to explore new ways to imagine and address God. As all monastics do, we pray together multiple times a day with a focus on the psalms. First, we decided to switch out the pronouns in the psalms. Dennis said, “We have been saying He for long enough, it’s time for us to embrace the feminine nature of God.” For example, a taste of Psalm 23:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.   She makes me lie down in green pastures;she leads me beside still waters;

   She restores my soul.

   Some wise Episcopalians are currently working on a new edition of our beloved Book of Common Prayer with the intention of integrating more feminine imagery and mystical language for the Divine. I cannot wait to see what they come up with.

   Let’s look at the Holy Trinity, this beautiful dance of three unique expressions of the Divine.

   Through the story of Jesus, we see what compassion in action looks like as a radical love for those who suffer outside the mainstream, living on the margins. Jesus disrupted the status quo by turning things upside down, teaching us to value meekness and the least, not power and greed. He called out hypocrisy and stood up to oppression. And we know by the crucifixion that we are not promised a world without injustice but that our mission in God’s plan is to work toward bringing the kingdom of God into the world through love.

   Jesus came into being to enlighten us; He is the logos – that is the emanation or light of Divine Love.  Scripture tells us that Christ Consciousness has always existed and always will and that it permeates throughout time and has the power to reach into our hearts and minds. This is an echo of the Proverbs reading on Wisdom who God created at the beginning and who waits for us at the portal. Scripture instructs us to have the mind of Christ, who is the incarnation of God in human form.

   It is our work to evolve our own consciousness toward this image of God that lived among us. It is up to us collectively to become the body of Christ – to be transformed and a transforming presence. Jesus encourages us to realize the kingdom of Heaven within us and radiate this love into the world.

   Jesus then gives us the gift of the Holy Spirit which is the indwelling of Divine Love. Just as it says in the reading today from Romans: “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” The Holy Spirit is the very vibration or current of love, it is the actual medium of love. This is God giving himself to us as love. We then manifest the fruits of the Spirit in our lives by living: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

   And then there is God the source of all that is. What do we call the great mystery of God? The theologian Paul Tillich wrote this about God, “the inexhaustible ground of being in which everything has its origin… and this being-itself is love.”  God as the ground of all being. We will all understand someday this great mystery when we join our ancestors on the other side. In fact, our future is God.

   The Trinity – God, the Source of all that is, Son the incarnation of the Divine, and the Holy Spirit, our gift of Divine Love.

   On Saturday, there were over 2100 protests with millions of people expressing their distress with the current leadership in America. We are in a time in our history where greed and domination are in charge and there is little valuing of kindness and compassion. Many in our country now worship or bow down to power, and the wealthy few dictate to the many. This is not unlike the time Jesus walked on earth. The domination systems of his day were the Jewish authorities and the Roman Empire.  Yet Jesus walked through his life in peace, he stood up to the power systems of his time and modeled a fearless way of love.  Followers of Jesus are obliged to walk this way in mutual love with everyone and everything, as he modeled utter compassion and asked us to love everyone, even our enemies.

   I believe as I am sure you do that; we need the peace of Christ now more than ever. We need to immerse ourselves in Divine Love and channel that into the world. We need to be fortified through our awareness of God’s presence in our lives and even in our bodies as we walk through this time of turmoil. We need to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit into ourselves and evolve our awareness seeing the sacred in all people certainly not othering anyone. Then we can be the agents of Divine Love in the world.

   I know that I could not have spent the last 17 years in jails and prisons without my daily prayer life at Community of Divine Love. Only by saturating myself in Divine Love have I been able to walk these many years into environments of trauma and suffering. Now those same skills are what are called for to sustain us during the challenges of America in 2025.  We can become the second coming of Christ in the world. We can open our hearts to the Holy Spirit and be filled with Divine Love. We can co-create the kingdom of God on earth by loving and including everyone, not excluding anyone. There can be no us and them anymore, only us.

   I invite us all to breathe in the love of God. Let us take into ourselves the Holy Spirit and breathe out Christ’s peace. Let us all participate in the Divine Nature by living love into the world.

   I would like to end by acknowledging the fathers both here and not here. May all dads everywhere open their hearts to the love of God and know the peace of Christ. May they raise children who know how precious they are and that they are worthy and beloved. Amen.

Sister Greta