Sunday, May 22, 2016

God brings us to share the glory of love – John 16:12-15, Prov 8:22-31, Rom 5:1-15 (Trinity)

Trinity Sunday, Year C -- Notre Dame (Basilica of the Sacred Heart)

Before I entered seminary, I was a math teacher, which makes me wonder if that’s why they asked me to preach here on Trinity Sunday.  But, no amount of mathematical trickery can magically make ‘sense’ of the 3-in-1, because the Trinity is not a puzzle to be solved, but someone to adore.  We’re not here to ‘make sense’ of the Trinity, because sense is fundamentally the wrong thing to try to make out of Love.  Love is the thing to make out of Love: wonder, love, awe, praise and adoration.  When we confess God as Trinity, we are confessing the simple, delightful, death-dying truth that God is Love, and to do so grateful to theologians who have loved this God, drawn close to this God in prayer, and given us words to help us approach the awesome mystery.


For if God is Love, then Love is more fundamental than anything that else that is.  And maybe my mathematical training can help us unpack that a little bit.  There’s a short novel, now a movie, popular among mathematicians called Flatland, an exploration of what life would be like if space only had two dimensions, not three: everything’s flat.  It’s a fun exercise (at least as fun as anything mathematicians do, which might be a low bar), to think about life without one of our spatial dimensions.  Unsurprisingly, love is part of this world.  What’s much harder to imagine is a universe without time.  I don’t know how to even go about doing that, but we confess that love is more basic to existence than time.

Love pre-exists even time, because ‘before’ (and I know ‘before’ makes no sense without time, but our language always fails when we attempt God talk)…. ‘before’ there was time, love loved.  Love is active; love loves.  Love is the most basic, primordial (pre-ordial!) way of being.  And that’s what we confess when we claim God to be Trinity.  That love is not created, finite, limited, subject to failure, like us.  Love is God, and we only know that because God is for us.  Because the love God is didn’t remain hermetically sealed, curved up in itself; no, it was poured out.  Keeping good news secret is notoriously difficult, and maybe the reason it’s so difficult for us is that God never tried.  God didn’t keep the secret of His own love, and telling of it, the singing of it, was creation.

We heard of that creative act in our reading from Proverbs, a reading which beautifully not just lays out but celebrates how the earthly order enfleshes the divine love from which it flows.  We heard of the mutual delight between God and Wisdom, described as God’s craftsman in our translation which does its best with a very rare Hebrew word (אָמוֹן) which might also be an unusual word for ‘child.’  From this mutual delight, expressed in loving play, comes forth the world and all its creatures.  Love sings of itself, and creation is what we end up with.  And in that creation, most especially delightful to wisdom who first and foremost delights in God, is us: humanity.

God is eternally the beautiful bonds of love that link Father, Son and Spirit.  And that love overflows, and love loves us, and longs to reveal that love God is fully to us and draw us into it.  For love does not stand aloof.  A lonely clock-maker God might get bored of us and leave us to our own devices, but a God who is Love and who told of His love in creation, and delighted in humanity is never aloof.  God is for us.

I said, a little earlier, that as love is more basic than time, it should be easier to imagine a world without time than without love.  But, I don’t think it is, not for most of us; and that’s what’s wrong with the world.  That we don’t live as the love-based communion of persons God created us to be.  Pope Francis has spoken with sadness of the ‘new Paganism of self-centeredness’ he observes in the world, this age’s manifestation of all the violence, prejudice, selfishness, mistrust, individualism, laziness, sin and Evil that makes it all too easy to imagine a world without love.  We lament the affliction St. Paul wrote of that oppresses our world so.  We lament that the world created afire with love has grown cold, and dark, and scary.

The world does not live up to its created splendor, and so God loves it.  And the love of God is made manifest in action, in sending the beloved Son.  Jesus told his disciples in that Upper Room the night before his death, in words we heard in our gospel, that there are truths they cannot bear to hear before they’ve witnessed the glory of Easter.  There are truths we cannot bear to hear until we have seen what Love looks like on a cross, until we’ve seen resurrection, until we’ve seen that Love is so powerful that not even death, death at our hands, could keep Jesus from being with us.  Until we’ve seen what Love looks like by seeing the Son return to dwell at His Father’s side (I wonder if, like Wisdom, he is “playing before Him all the while!”).  Until we’ve felt what Love feels like by receiving the gift of the Spirit in whom the Love of God is made palpable in our hearts, bringing hope out of suffering, guiding us out of slavery into the glory of Love, sharing, holding all in common with us like a friend, like a lover.  And this amazing gift, of the Spirit dwelling intimately within us, St. Paul writes elsewhere, is a mere down payment on the glory to which we are summoned!


This is what we mean when we talk of Trinity: that God is Love; and Love loves, and Love loves us, and Love will draw us into the glory of that Love.

No comments:

Post a Comment