“So that in all things, as is aforesaid, the Unity in Trinity and the Trinity in Unity is to be worshipped.” (Creed of Saint Athanasius, BCP 865)
This Sunday is Trinity Sunday. From the perspective of our Church year, it might be said that Trinity Sunday is a reflection point: an occasion to pause and evaluate or contemplate all that we, the Church, has come to know about God. The irony, of course, being that while we have come to know and experience so much the glorious nature of God and the love and hope that is ours through faith, God is always beyond our human knowing, beyond our definition, beyond our finite words and imaginations.
Or, as St. Augustine described: “God is higher than [our] highest and more inward than [our] innermost self.”
One God: begotten and born into this world as Jesus, who healed, served, and proclaimed God’s kingdom giving us a witness of our calling to love one another; who suffered and died for us then rose from death and the grave and ascended into heaven showing us the love that God bears for us and God’s salvation hope for us and all creation; and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost to fill us with the power and presence of God to complete God’s mission of salvation–the healing of humankind and all creation from the power of sin.
All of that in Unity. One God beyond our defining and beyond our knowing but for UNITY. Perhaps that is a lesson we can understand and take away from our celebration of Trinity Sunday: to know God, to seek God, has less to do with clever formulas or metaphors, and more to do with seeking UNITY in all things: unity in holy love, unity in self-giving care, and unity through reconciliation.
