Trinity

 

[Unpublished musings on the readings for Trinity Sunday.] Today, Proverbs talks of God making everything, all of Creation, before God made the Earth, or us, even. We have a lot to work out and not piles of time. Yet God, speaking through Wisdom, is here to show by example. We are even likened to a master worker, which is not the same as saying we are as gods. As elsewhere in Scripture, God’s relationship is one of delight. Just as God delights in Creation and in us, so we also delight and rejoice in God, in his inhabited world and in the human race. Proverbs is not talking in theories about God, but about relationship. From the very start we are necessarily in a relationship with God, one of delight and wonder, of listening and doing, yet also of mystery and learning. The Psalmist sings about this relationship which, as relationships go, is going through a testy period. We might be big in our own eyes, but the moon and stars put things in another perspective. “What are people that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” (Psalm 8:4) It’s by asking the question that an answer starts to be found. Our own existence is “a little lower” than what William Tyndale first called in translation “the Living God”, yet we are conscious of our own god-like power over the world, whether for good or ill. Our relationship with the God who made us, and all Creation, is established, yet how we understand the relationship is the matter of a lifetime. The Psalmist gives thanks even while dwelling in uncertainty. The Apostle Paul tells the Romans that it is through Jesus Christ that we have access to grace, to sharing in the glory of God. Not only that, we live in hope through the challenges of existence, through the love that God “poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” Once more, God is understood not as a definition worthy of our superior consideration, but as that which is acting, that is on the move, and that in the process frees us. God’s inter-relationship is one we may share in and grow in. It frees us up to live in the Spirit and find more. John in his Gospel explains how this God is one in whom we partake and find new recognition of God, in peace. God is not a set of words to learn by rote. Today, Jesus Christ says he still has “many things to say to you, but you cannot hear them now.” It is the Spirit of truth that will “guide you into all truth.” Given we are being given the truth, it is necessary to be ready and pay attention. God, through the Spirit, will “speak whatever he hears” and will “declare the things that are to come.” It is this spirit of relationship that comes to us, not alone or as some concept, but living in our lives. We have only to ask of God, though what we are given may not always be what exactly we had in mind at the time.