Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty!
Early in the morning my song shall rise to thee:
Holy, holy, holy! Merciful and mighty,
God in three Persons, blessed Trinity.
– Reginald Heber (1783 – 1826)
Folks all over Christendom may cringe as I reveal a fundamental truth about myself:
“Holy, Holy, Holy” IS my go-to hymn when I need to quickly find and express my relationship to God my Creator, God my Sustainer, and God my Life-giver. I can play it convincingly on the organ; I know the words by memory. The cadence of the tune rises in such a way that it lifts my heart, my mind and my spirit upward to God when I am in some pretty deep pits. It always has, it always will.
So, if it doesn’t make your “favorites” list, I apologize now, but we’re singing it Sunday, because in addition to being the first Sunday after Pentecost, the season that will stretch on into infamy, it is also Trinity Sunday, the day we honor this notion of the interpenetrating, interdependent God-head, three in one.
I grew up in a congregation called “Trinity,” and so Trinity Sunday always had and has special significance to me, because the place called Trinity, the little green church (and Church) on the corner of Second Ave. and Greenwood St. in Morgan City, LA, was a safe-haven and role-model of what life lived in relationship to a triune God really means. Our celebrations were always around our feast day, Trinity Sunday, and so things attached to Trinity hold special memory and meaning.
The doctrine of the Trinity is not one that is formally named and set out by God, but we humans’ explanation of how God, and Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are three, and yet one, and yet three. As monotheists, we can follow only ONE God, after all. And since human words ALWAYS fail to adequately describe our great God, they only begin to describe this intimate, intertwined, interdependent bond between the three. Our words fail, and yet we must continue to try, because there is new and fresh insightful revelation of God in each of our attempts to understand.
The reason Trinity tantalizes me so, and I love thinking about Trinity, and talking about Trinity, and preaching on Trinity, is that Trinity is our great human attempt to explain the unexplainable relationship of God to God’s self! How does this intimate, interdependent dance take place? If I/we can picture that, maybe we can figure out how we as humanity relate not only to God, and possibly more importantly, to each other!
And by golly, don’t we need that right now? What better way to honor the memory of George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, and Armaud Arbery, and Atatiana Jefferson (the list is painfully endless), than to take as our model of co-existence the intertwined interdependence of God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit? What happens to each of us DIRECTLY impacts each of the rest of us. When one suffers injustice, we all suffer injustice. It is long past time to enact change, significant, life-altering change that reflects lives lived in Trinity. For the sake of ourselves, our souls and bodies, and for the sakes of others.
Three-in-one, one-in-three. And so…
“Early in the morning hour, my song shall rise to thee!”
Fr. Christopher+
PS: I hope and pray you have a hymn that helps you access that very important God-space, and that you will tell me what it is someday!
