Trinity Sunday 2015

Trinity Sunday 2015 (John 3:1-17) “God so loved…”

God is love.

In a world that obsesses with the attributes of God - power (omnipotence), knowledge (omniscience), location (omnipresence) God himself reminds us that he is love.

On Trinity Sunday, the Church reminds us that the doctrine (teaching) of the Trinity is an experience we can participate in. The One God who is love is an eternal community of the three interpersonal relationships of love.

God the Father is the one who loves. God the Son is the one who is loved (the Beloved). God the Holy Spirit is the active dynamic presence of love.

The doctrine of the Trinity is the Great Mystery of the Infinite and Eternal. As a Great Mystery, the Trinity offers us a participatory experience in the very nature of God and the very essence of divinity. We can never reduce the meaning of the Trinity in thoughts or words. We can never exhaust our appreciation of or our participation in the reality of the Trinity.

Our Heavenly Father’s Plan of Creation is to form life, the universe and each of us according to the pattern of the Son by the continuing real and personal presence of the Holy Spirit. We have been created by an eternal community of love to live in an active dynamic and transforming set of relationships that are defined by love.

Our Heavenly Father’s Plan of Salvation is to restore to us what we walked away from. We walked away from that active dynamic and transforming set of personal relationships. We separated from God in order to seize the attributes of God. In that separation we are lost.

God the Father sent God the Son into the world to reunite what we chose (and continue to choose) to separate. Salvation is an organic reunification of humanity with divinity in Jesus Christ.

In reunification we surrender the defining qualities of separation. Those defining qualities are pain, sin and death. We express those qualities in the attitude of pride (that says I know what is best), self- will (the will to power that demands instant gratification) and fear (the reaction of the soul to a perceived universe devoid of meaning and purpose).

When we receive the gift of reunification with the Father, through the Son by the indwelling personal presence of the Holy Spirit we begin to rediscover our true selves. We become more of the unique individual and personal identity God created us to be. We become more not less.

Our Heavenly Father’s Plan of Transformation is a lifelong process of growing in grace. The Holy Spirit is the Helper who offers us knowledge, understanding, wisdom and good counsel to facilitate the Plan of Transformation. In this world that plan is called Sanctification. In the next world it is called Glorification.

Because the One God is an infinite and eternal personal community of love we will never exhaust the potential to grow and transform in that love. The vastness of the universe testifies to the inexhaustible creativity of the One God in Three Persons.

The world of the first century was desperate to hear Good News. It was a world of division, conflict and sorrow. The world of the 21^st Century is still desperate to hear Good News. The Good News of God in Christ is that God is real, God is personal, God is love, God is Jesus Christ.

The Great Mystery of God is that God just doesn’t have love God is love. God the Father sent the Son into the world to reunite what humanity broke apart. God the Son sends the Holy Spirit to Help us heal and restore the three prime relationships that define our species. Those three prime relationships are our relationship with God, with other people and with our true self.

We experience our relationship with God through worship, the highest form of love that defines the very essence of Deity.

We express our relationship with other people by sharing our abundance with them. We are our brother’s keeper. God designed us to help each other. We share our spiritual abundance by telling people about Jesus. We share our material abundance by feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, healing the sick, befriending the lonely and by welcoming the stranger.

We discover our true selves as we allow the Holy Spirit to transform the way we think, feel and make choices. The Holy Spirit is the creative artist who weaves the mistakes we have made and continue to make back into the original pattern of the Son.

As Jesus is the Good News of divine love so the Trinity is the Good News that the One God invites us into an active dynamic and transforming personal relationship with the Father, through the Son, by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Amen.