I always look toward Trinity Sunday as an opportunity to do more reading and reflection on God as Trinity. I fear that it looks like  payment for doing new prayers and something fun and different in the Pentecost liturgy. Serene Jones speaks of the Trinity in terms of love, of constant giving and receiving of love within god. Out of this love is born Creation-The popular novel, the Shack, is an exercise in Trinitarian models. Even as it  has a sense of three the book lacks a good sense of their intertwined, triple helix existence.

Wisdom-logos-connected to Jesus God is always open toward creation.

 

Right away in this section of Proverbs an element of God's work in Creation is attributed to a facet of God's life, Wisdom, here personified as a female. Here creation is a result of the planning worthy of an architect and the thrill of moving from plans to actuality. Within God's own life, distinctions can exist within someone without ripping that identity apart-better to speak of relationships dynamics that generate opportunities for self-giving. These relations encompass (perichoresis) both. In God, unity in diversity is at work a communion of love. It may well be a form of idolatry to say that we can know God fully and well, but that is the risk of speaking of God at all.

 

Brown discusses this and 6 other OT passages on creation in his new book. Listen to some of the science that he brings into play with our passage this morning. The laws of physics are omnipresent...the cosmos is suffused with Wisdom in a cosmos that is comprehensible-and that itself is a wonder (169) In Greek Separated objects can act as if they are bound together as one (170).He finds both playfulness and stability in our universe (171). The ancients spoke of a the music of the spheres and modern astronomers speak of the dance of stars and galaxies. Wisdom helps bind the world together. This takes Brown into the mysterious realm of the subatomic, and he notes how connected life and all the world is. God's life can be glimpsed in God's acts. In creation and in Jesus God shows a remarkable generosity of spirit. God demonstrates profound love by making room for us to breathe and grow. I do want to lift up the point about delight at the end of the poem in Proverbs. God finds delight in the planning and work of creation. Even though it has some much pain in it, God revels in all the life of creation. Some even detect an element of play embedded in this passage.

 

Augustine used the human analogy of the mind as memory, reason, and. We could use a simpler point: mind, heat,body. We do not know one without the presence of the other two sections, but we can distinguish them easily. My point is that the Trinity is about the wholeness inherent in God's own self and the work God does. In similar fashion, the human being, made in the image and likeness of God, should have its elements working together in harmony. Disharmony in the elements of our lives could be termed as sin. Personal discernment would require an open, candid look inside to see how the pieces of our lives fit together, not just as separate compartments. Every facet of revealed divine life revels in the life of creation. God wants to share life and redeem its flaws. Indeed the Incarnation gives the radical notion that the Creator shared creaturely life, fully in Jesus. God chooses to walk among us, exemplifying love always for the good of the other (146-7). Last week, we participated in sacrament of Communion for Pentecost, a living tableau of the Incarnation. It is also a way into the very life of God and this world.