Saturday, June 20, 2015

Trinity June 1 2015

Trinity
June 1 2015      
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar

Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the Name of
the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit
                                                                       .                  
+ In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity

It is customary to observe that Trinity Sunday is the only, Prayerbook feast dedicated to a doctrine instead of a Biblical event or person.  While this is strictly true, it could also be argued that the Feast of the Holy Trinity celebrates the ongoing fulfillment of our Lord’s biblical promise to send the Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth.  The event it commemorates is a process.
Jesus commanded us to baptize all peoples in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  We noticed that the Creation story in Genesis told of God, God’s Spirit, and God’s Word.  Pondering all this, the Church eventually arrived at an open-ended and partial understanding of God, which we expressed in the philosophical terms of the time (the Fourth century), not without enormous controversy.  One of the greatest minds participating was Hilary of Poitiers, who wrote:
We are compelled to attempt what is unattainable, to climb where we cannot reach, to speak what we cannot utter.  Instead of the bare adoration of faith we are compelled to entrust the deep things of religion to the perils of human expression.
Trinity Sunday celebrates the historical event of the Church’s experience of this compulsion by the Holy Spirit. 
To say anything at all ran the risk of error.  To say nothing was impossible, because of the Holy Spirit.  As on the First Pentecost, when the Apostles could not keep silent, but found they had to speak in many languages, so their successors were "compelled to entrust the deep things of religion to the perils of human expression."  The dogma of the Most Holy and Life-giving Trinity was the result.  This Festival celebrates not only the dogma itself, but the event of its development.
    Hilary spoke of    the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as "and the infinity of endless being, the perfect reflection of the divine image, and the mutual enjoyment of the gift."  He also insisted that the Three Persons were really distinct, but only in their origin.  Each person participates completely in the other two: a total permeation of each one by the others, so that they differ only by the relationship of origin: the Father has really generated the Son without losing anything of His Nature.  The Son and the Spirit have received and contain in Themselves everything of the Father, equal to Him in every way.  The Life of the three Divine Persons is a "dancing within one another," as St. John of Damascus would say 400 years later.
    The gradual revelation of the inner Life of God, though ultimately incomprehensible, is far from meaningless.  The dogma glorifies God as Infinite Community, in which the Persons are united in Infinite Love.  This could be what the Apostle meant when he said "God is Love."  Since it is also a matter of dogma that human beings are made in the image of God, it is suggested that our life as God’s image means communal life, what one modern Greek theologian called "being as Communion."  All humanity — and through us all creation — are called to be one as Jesus and the Father are One, that is, neither losing our distinct identities nor separating from one another in any way.
Today we celebrate the Divine Unity in Trinity; next week, we celebrate the incorporation of all creation into that “Infinity of endless Being” in the Feast of the Body of Christ.
HOLY! HOLY! HOLY! IS THE LORD OF HOSTS,

WHO WAS AND IS AND IS TO COME

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