Sunday, June 15, 2014 (TRINITY SUNDAY)

Sunday, June 15, 2014 (TRINITY SUNDAY)

Revelation 19:4-16

I’m not sure if the daily office lectionary we use for selecting our readings is designed to reflect the special feast days and commemorations that we occasionally celebrate. Today we have a reading from Revelation, with some amazing imagery. If you continue through to the end of chapter 19, though, it gets quite bloody, and the triumphant Word of God, riding on horseback, is hard to reconcile with the wandering teacher and wonderworker Jesus. It is perhaps understandable as a document written to encourage believers enduring persecution in the early years of the Church, finding cosmic significance in their way of life, and ultimately, a victory over the powers of darkness.

How to connect today’s reading to the doctrine of the Trinity (God’s mysterious Three in One-ness)? Karl Rahner’s saying that the ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity, and the ‘immanent’ Trinity is the ‘economic’ Trinity comes to mind. By ‘economic’ we are referring to the Trinity as known in our experience, our stories; the saving acts of God throughout history. The ‘immanent’ Trinity is God in God’s Self. To come to a greater understanding of the immanent Trinity we use philosophy, analogy, metaphor. But they’re basically our best guesses. God, existing in eternity, is so far beyond our imagination. 

It is often the case that theologians separate the economic and the immanent, in a similar way to how we might separate Jesus the wandering teacher from the risen, triumphant, returning Christ of today's passage. Rahner challenges us to remember that the God who saves us, the Christ who walked among us, and the Spirit whom we might feel near to us, is the same God who lives and reigns, enthroned in Heaven (whatever and wherever — if it is a ‘where’ —Heaven is). That loving communion of the Father, Son, and Spirit is the Divine life into which we are invited. That seemingly endless distance to God is bridged by the very same God, who brings us into communion with God’s Self. 

Many writings and sermons on the Trinity are full of words like substance, being, Person, ousia, hypostasis, and so on. The Trinity is a mystery, but the doctrine is not. It’s tough, but with study, one can come to a working understanding of it and its vocabulary. But it is not through study, but through love of our God and of our neighbour that we can come to an intimate knowledge of the Trinity, as community, as mutual indwelling, as unity in diversity. As we are made in the image of God, our vocation is to model the self-giving love of the Trinity in our lives, as human beings in relationship with others, and as a Church, comprised of many members, but one Body.

- Matthew Kieswetter