Trinity Sunday
Thought for the week
Does the Trinity mean anything for us today? I think it does. Here are some ideas.
Trinity and intimate relationships and family life
Since God is Love and God’s very being is relationship, the Love relationships we see in the Trinity are precisely the sort of relationships that we are to experience with each other. The Trinity is The Model of how we are to conduct are partnerships, our sexuality, our marriages and our families. What does it mean in practical terms? It means we love each other with self emptying love.
Church
Trinity says that God is community—three ‘Persons’ loving each other so much that they are one. God is community. But humankind is also community. God’s desire is that these two communities should be one. In other words God’s inner life is a model for our human life.
The church is meant to be the place where we see the unity between God and humans taking shape, where we see the process of self emptying love. People are supposed to see what it means to live in the Trinity by looking at us.
Society
Society too should be structured along the lines of self-emptying love. Society should mirror this inner life of God called the Trinity. In Australia we see some of this taking shape in our care for the vulnerable in the policies that are in place to include differently-abled children at school and in our protection of the welfare of the elderly. At the same time we realise how we fail in our residual racism that we prefer to deny and not own up to. If we take Trinity seriously this will be the basis on which we reflect on our policies as a nation: the deportation of refugees, the protection of the environment through carbon pricing and our care of animals who with the cosmos are invited to share in the divine life of God.
In other words we are to oppose that which works again sharing, mutuality, belonging and service which we see modelled in God.
Picturing God
Because God is Relationship – Trinity – we never, never picture God as Powerful, Violent, Angry, Almighty. Almightiness and Violence doesn’t seem to cope with relationship or with love. Someone once said that Jesus was God’s answer to a bad reputation. Of course God the Creator is not violent. It is we who are violent and the violence we have repressed in ourselves we have projected onto our images of God. For much of human history our images of God were toxic. Since Jesus is all that can be known of God the Creator in a human life, Jesus helps us understand the gentleness and compassion of God in how he described God, in how he welcomed people and in the stories he told.
Our view of salvation
A damaging effect of
individualism in the west is its impact on our view of salvation. Salvation is NOT about an individual having their sins forgiven and then going to heaven as if heaven were a destination and a reward. No. To be saved means to be part of a community – a community of Source, Jesus and Spirit and neighbours.
When we reach out to the poor the lonely and the oppressed we are enabling them to experience something of God’s own love, something of God’s own inner life. The love that we offer each other is no different from the love that God offers God in the Trinity.