Trinity Sunday

Presented to Warners Bay Uniting Church and Boolaroo Uniting Church, 15.6.2025 - also available on YouTube at https://youtu.be/0RccPegomk4

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Trinity Sunday is one of those Sundays where ministers will often draw straws as to who is to preach.

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How can you possibly give justice to such an intricate and beautiful doctrine of a church?

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This morning's Old Testament reading perhaps gives us a little bit of a way into it, but by and large to describe the Trinity Father, Son, Holy Spirit is something of a difficulty because we have the limitation of just our words.

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And it's through our words that we find expression, it's through our words that we declare our love, our faithfulness, and it's through our words that through the Old Testament reading today, we hear of God's grace breaking through and opening up Isaiah's declaration that he sees the mystery and the beauty of God and he seeks to know it more and to serve.

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We're probably familiar with the reading, the vision comes to Isaiah of the Lord sitting on a throne and the hem of his robe fills the temple

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It's a celestial scene, seraphs attend, singing a chorus of holy, holy, holy.

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We're told suddenly the ground shakes and the whole house is filled with smoke and Isaiah suddenly feels so incredibly inadequate and unworthy of this experience.

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Can you relate?

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And yet God does what God does best, God lifts him up and Isaiah speaks of himself as being lost, of being a man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips.

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He can declare boldly and with joy that “my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.”

We all have those kinds of moments from time to time, moments that come to us in big ways and in small ways that remind us that we're not alone.

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It could be on a mountain, it could be during worship, singing a hymn, it could be at the birth of our first child, it could be listening to a certain piece of music or being out in nature.

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One of my traditions to help me be reminded of God's presence in my life and in the world is to attend a retreat to help bring me back to centre.

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Now we can retreat anywhere, anytime, any place, but there is something to be said for setting aside intentional time to simply be in God's presence.

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Retreat houses have a way of doing just that, might be out in the country by a lake, a setting of serenity that takes us away from the hustle and bustle of the world that can provide us with an intentional setting of encounter with God. Ignatian spirituality (Ignatian spirituality is Catholic spirituality founded on the experiences of the 16th-century Spanish Saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order.) is all about recognizing the presence of God in every moment and as human beings we can often struggle to do that and for sometimes the good reason that it can be hard sometimes to see God's presence in every moment.

And yet there is something deeply profound when we simply sit in that awareness and find ourselves immersed in the presence of our God.

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We enter the threshold of transformation, we enter the threshold of new possibilities and beginnings and that's where Isaiah finds himself in this morning's reading. Ignatian spirituality is all about helping people discover just how incredibly close God is with us in every moment of every day. And so one of the things I love to do is to attend an Ignatian retreat to help remind me of this salient truth that God is with us in the difficult moments, in the challenging moments, in the joyful moments, in every moment.

It reminds me of the old story of going into a retreat house with four monks who decide to go into a silent retreat. And they started out well but after the first day one monk said, “I wonder if I locked the door of my room at the monastery before I left this morning without a bit of a pilgrimage out in the mountains. To which the second monk said, “you fool, you've broken your vow to be silent.” To which the third monk said, “what about you? You're just as bad as him.” To which the fourth, just shook his head and said,” thank God I'm the only one here that hasn't spoken yet.” I must admit, I was pretty good when I did silent retreats, although the first few times it was really difficult.

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And I remember one particular retreat where we were given about 30 minutes grace to say goodbye to some of our fellow retreatants before we went into silence. It was odd. It was odd eating in silence. It was odd being with other people in their presence in silence

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But after a while you actually forget about having those conversations because you are all concentrating on being intentional in God's presence and you go into an inner journey of sorts.

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This can also be true when we experience something in nature that literally takes our breath away.

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And there's nothing to do. There's nothing to say but be in awe and wonder. It's these kinds of moments that the Trinity invite us into. Silence and wonder can be incredibly precious gifts in a world that is so often bereft because they help provide space in our chaotic lives for God to speak. Or perhaps more accurately it provides space for us to notice God as we slow down from the whirlwind of our lives to simply be.

One of the things that I find really helpful when I retreat is spending an hour a day with a spiritual director where I can talk. And I remember one of the spiritual directors that I had. She would offer insights and provide me with a passage of scripture that would form the heart of my prayer and reflection over the next 24 hours.

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And silence was a big part of that process because I had to constantly be reminded to just shut up and listen. But when I do that, when I can get into that zone, it's incredibly powerful.

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We need those moments of wonder and awe. We need moments where we can go beyond words into the mystery that is God. And so I would go into the nights with a particular passage of scripture in the journal. And I would sip incredibly bad coffee and have conversations with God by the fireplace. Reflections that were not unlike that of Isaiah feeling inadequate, unworthy, yet with an unshakable conviction knowing that I too have seen an experience of the Lord in this place.

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It's significant that Isaiah feels unworthy in his experience of God. I think that it's highly relatable as human beings because the reality is we don't all have it together.

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One of the books on a retreat that I bought was from author David Benner and his book is called “The Gift of Being Yourself.” This is what he writes: “God's love for you has nothing to do with your behaviour. Neither your faithlessness nor your unfaithfulness alters divine love in the slightest degree. Like the father's love in the prodigal son, divine love is absolutely unconditional, unlimited and unimaginably extravagant.”

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Christians affirm a foundation of identity that is absolutely unique in the marketplace of spirituality. For whether we realize it or not, our being is grounded in the triune God's love.

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The generative love of God was our origin. The embracing love of God sustains our existence. The inextinguishable love of God is the only hope for fulfillment. Love is our identity and our calling for we are children of love and until we dare to believe that nothing can actually separate us from God's love, nothing we can do or fail to do nor anything that could be done by anyone else to us. We remain but in the elementary grade of the School of Christian Spiritual Transformation. In one of the most Trinitarian lines in all of scripture, the threefold God asked this question of Isaiah and to each one of us here today.

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“Whom shall I send and who will go for us?”

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However we define the Trinity, however we seek to put words around what is essentially mystery, I believe with all my heart that it is about relationship, it is about lived experience, it is about entering into those moments of wonder and awe with the spirit of humility and curiosity.

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This morning, Isaiah invites us to marvel at the presence of God in this place and in our lives.

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Isaiah's experience of God happened in a temple, one of mine happened in a retreat house, but of course it can happen to us anywhere if we are intentional, if we are open.

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This morning, we're invited into a renewed vital relationship with the triune God.

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We're invited to experience, as Isaiah did, a moment of wonder and awe.

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We are the love of God.

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And so as we go about leaving this space today, as we go into our league, we're invited to do so with the intention to nurture this reality deeper into our hearts and lives. Whether that means for you spending a bit more time with God to develop your relationship, whether it means creating a daily ritual of encounter through even 10 minutes of prayer, whatever that might be for you, that you too might find your form of world as Isaiah did, turn completely upside down and the love of God calling you into new ways, new hopes and new possibilities.

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When the only response that you can think to give is the same response that echoes throughout the generations. A response that reminds us all of the blessed trinities love for all of us, that persistent call and response that lives on in you and in me when we allow ourselves to be open to mystery and encounter. But when we do this, when we allow ourselves to occupy that space, we can do no other than respond, here I am, send me.

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 Amen.