RCL Trinity B
26 May 2024
Church of the Epiphany
Surrey BC
In the summer of 1980 I left Nashotah House, my theological college near Milwaukee, to drive to my parish internship at Trinity Episcopal Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a six-hour drive. Now in those days we relied upon letters and long-distance telephone calls to keep in touch with one another. Long-distance telephone calls weren’t cheap, so most of us depended upon sending letters. A letter from Fort Wayne to Nashotah usually took three days.
So, as I drove my car out of the college grounds, the postal truck arrived to deliver the mail. Among the letters was one from the Rector of Trinity asking me to preach that Sunday, Trinity Sunday as it happened to be that year. I blissfully drove to Fort Wayne and arrived on the Friday afternoon. I was unaware of the invitation and the Rector made no mention of it.
As we were lining up in the narthex for the Sunday eucharist, he turned to me and said, ‘I am really looking forward to your sermon.’ Before I could say anything, the opening hymn began, and we were off down the aisle. As we were processing, I checked the bulletin. Sure enough, there in the bulletin I read, “We welcome our Seminary Intern Richard Leggett who will be our preacher this Sunday.”
I listened very carefully to the readings as I sat in the sanctuary. As I was listening, I gave thanks to God that I had been a member of my high school’s speech team with a speciality in extemporaneous speech. When the moment came, I entered the pulpit and offered what was probably the shortest sermon ever preached on the Trinity in that parish.
Because of that experience, I have always had a special interest in how we Christians talk about God, the One-in-Three, the Three-in-One, the holy and undivided Trinity. I made a promise to myself that I would never be caught off-guard again if I were put on the spot to talk about this mystery of our faith.
At the heart of the mystery of our faith in God and our experience of God is that God is not an idea to be debated. God is a mystery to be explored. By mystery I do not mean that God is something we can solve like some crime drama. The mystery of God is, as C. S. Lewis once said, ‘like an onion which, as you peel away the layers, gets bigger not smaller’. To believe in God as Christians speak about God is to enter into a life-long personal relationship with the One through whom all that exists came into being and in whom we live and move and have our being.
We sometimes forget the difference between the words ‘individual’ and ‘personal’. An ‘individual’ is a quantity. A ‘person’ is a someone who lives in relationship with others. It is our personhood that reveals the you and I have been made in God’s image. Our relationships with other persons creates an interlocking web of connections that the Anglican poet John Donne described in one of his most famous poems.
No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were.
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
Each one of us has such a web of relationships. I, for example, am a son, a brother, a spouse, a father, an uncle, a friend, a priest and probably several more relationships that I cannot recall now. No one of those relationships define who I am. The whole of who I am is more than the sum of those relationships. No one ‘knows’ me fully nor, for that matter, do we know anyone else fully. I never cease to be amazed at how people I have known and loved for decades can surprise me with a new revelation. And I never cease to be amazed at how I can surprise myself when I discover something new about myself as a result of all these relationships in which I participate.
When Christians speak of God as a Trinity of Persons, what we are trying to describe is a God who also lives in a network of relationships. The influential early church theologian, Augustine of Hippo, spoke of God as the Love, the Beloved and the Love. We know God as the Lover who made room for others in the act of creation. We know God as the Beloved who reveals God the Lover in our time and space. We know God as the Love that binds the God the Lover and God the Beloved in such unity that to speak of One is to speak of Three, to speak of the Three is to speak of the One.
We show ourselves to be faithful witnesses to the triune God when we nurture our relationships with friends and families. We show ourselves to be faithful witnesses to the triune God when we reach beyond ourselves to establish relationships with the ‘other’, whomever that ‘other’ might be. We show ourselves to be faithful witnesses to the triune God when we tend the relationships that help us take care of our neighbourhoods.
Our confession of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as Lover, Beloved and Love, is desperately relevant to our world today. You perhaps have heard the saying that a tree farm is not a forest. A true forest exists through the inter-dependence of each and every species. This inter-dependence creates an eco-system that is robust and resilient. In contrast an entire tree farm can be destroyed by the intrusion of a single virus or destructive insect.
We dare to believe that diversity is not a threat to unity but absolutely necessary for genuine unity. Unity depends upon the network of relationships in which the gifts and distinctiveness of each and every participant contribute to the weaving of the tapestry of creation in all its varied beauty.
Let us pray.
God of delight,
your Wisdom sings your Word
at the crossroads where humanity and divinity meet.
Invite us into your joyful being
where you know and are known
in each beginning,
in all sustenance,
in every redemption,
so that we may manifest your unity
in the diverse ministries you entrust to us,
truly reflecting your triune majesty,
in faith that acts,
in the hope that does not disappoint,
and in the love that endures. Amen.
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