Each year on the Sunday after Pentecost we celebrate the Solemnity of the Trinity. It’s a good time to recall what’s most essential about our faith as Christians.
Aside from elementary religious education lessons involving clover leafs, apples, and water in its three states, whenever I try to visualize the Trinity, one of the first images that come to mind is a medieval Russian icon called “The Hospitality of Abraham.” It depicts three pretty much identical looking angels sitting down to the dinner prepared for them by the patriarch. This image has come to be known as the “Trinity Icon.” The icon has its appeal because it expresses a basic truth about our Christian faith. Everything that we know about God comes to us by way of Jesus. He is the concrete expression within history of that which is infinite and which our minds and senses cannot grasp. Regardless of the angle from which we look, what we see of God comes to us by way of Jesus.
The doctrine of the Trinity, implied in scripture and taught explicitly by the Church, has come to be the traditional measure of orthodoxy for almost all who claim to be Christian. It has come to stand for what is normative in our beliefs. Because of this, Trinity Sunday provides us a good opportunity to consider what should be normative in the way that we live our faith, in the way that we follow Jesus who reveals God to us.
So we might ask what it is as believers we ought to present to the world. What best reveals Jesus?
For starters the Christian faith ought to be a force that makes positive changes in the world in which we live. After all, isn’t transformation the promise of the Resurrection? Did God not transform death into life? Therefore our faith should be about sharing positive confidence that there is something that has the power to make life really worth living.
As Christians we are to offer hope to the world, and we ought to do it securely and without fear. The reading from the book of Romans tells us that we did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear. The real basis for hope in the world lies in our willingness to form relationships. It’s pretty typical to hear something about relationships on Trinity Sunday—relationship is one the ways that we’re taught to try and grasp this difficult concept. Yet with the focus on Jesus the difficulty disappears and we try to show the world the face of God he showed us.
For Christians relationship is normative, but it has to challenge us or we've failed to get the idea really. Relationship is Christian when it causes us to embrace our neighbor who is different from us. It best reflects Jesus when we reach out with genuine affection to the weak and vulnerable, to those whom we encounter who put us in tolerance mode, and to those who we might consider to be our enemies.
What’s normative in Christianity is that which compels us to do the unexpected. In acting in such a way we reveal the transformation that witnesses to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and the presence of the risen Lord. To do the unexpected means to turn away from selfish acts and consider the needs of our neighbors first. It demands that we act in a selfless manner when it comes to relating to our neighbor. It asks us to reach out across cultural, linguistic, religious, political and economic lines, and to embrace others. In this way we begin to establish lasting peace in the world: we give the world something truly unexpected.
The Lord commanded his disciples to go out and baptize. It’s by our baptism that we receive the call and the grace to live in a way that transforms the world. By baptism we are empowered and we strive to live the Trinitarian life. For us this is a call to be mindful that we are to live in such a way that regardless of what angle the world sees us, that in us and through our actions, they see the face of Jesus. Our call is to be a Trinity icon by revealing God in how we live and in how we relate to all others.
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