On this Trinity Sunday, colleague and friend Kimberly Hope Belcher, one of our foremost sacramental-liturgical theologians, shared the following homily on facebook. Dr. Belcher currently serves on the Anglican-Roman Catholic Theological Consultation in the USA and previously on the United Methodist-Catholic Dialogue. With Kim’s permission, I present it here. – Bruce T. Morrill
Our wedding anniversary does not often fall on Trinity Sunday – one of my favorite liturgical feasts.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus asks that the disciples may be one as he and the Father are one – linked to one another, as he and the Father are linked, by the Holy Spirit, whom he calls the Advocate or Paraclete. The evangelist waxes poetic, pushing the limits of human language and comprehension:
… that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.
John 17: 21b-23
Of course, this passage is one of the foundation stones of our (and my) pursuit of Christian unity. But it also reveals how unity, whether it occurs in the created order, in redemption, or in the eschaton (the end of all things) is only possible because of how we are all grounded in a God who unites.
God’s unity does not only overcome differences, but makes them possible. The Father and the Son, scholastic theology says, are persons because of that relationship (father to son) that differentiates them from one another, and the same is true (in a way less analogous to human life) of the Holy Spirit. So their unity and their difference depend on one another. Whenever we see, in creation, a unity that permits the development of beautiful and unified diversity, we are seeing the mystery of God.
This is not a fact about married love: it’s a fact about creatures. Any love that allows for unity in difference, that allows different gifts to flourish and develop, that overcomes both physical and other kinds of distances, has a deep mystery that for Christians is a witness to the reality of the one God who always breaks the limits of what we can know. At its best (and it is not always at its best) love permits us to experience the unity that transforms separation into wholeness.
Matt and I chose our wedding rings as a reminder that the love of the Trinity is the one thing that can unite two lives while making each one more itself. That truth we saw in part so many years ago is something I understand much more fully now.
Oops, the pancakes got cold while I was writing. Thus ends the homily, friends.