Holy, Holy, Holy
TRINITY SUNDAY
Isaiah 6:1-8 • Psalm 29 • Romans 8:12-17 • John 3:1-17
Once a month I meet with my spiritual director. Usually we sit in a comfortable church parlor, but this past Monday, for some reason, the doors were locked. The weather was nice enough that we didn’t mind sitting outside, so we sat closer than we normally would on a concrete bench under the shade of a large oak tree. The wind blew persistently, an ever-present companion, reminding us that we had just celebrated the feast of Pentecost and that the Spirit still stirs among us.
Leading up to this Trinity Sunday, I have let myself more deeply ponder what it means to have a trinitarian belief. It is easier to think of one divine God and leave it alone. God is One. But God in Three Persons? How does this belief in the triune nature of God affect the way we live our lives and bring hope in this present moment?
One of the reasons I love Richard Rohr’s book The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation is because he writes like I perceive him to be: personable, approachable. Essentially, believing in God in Three Persons does affect how we live our lives. It’s this practical implication of our belief in the Trinity that I hope reminds us of how we are called to be in the world. Because I want you to engage bodily in this line of thinking for the next few minutes, I invite you to a practice that many take for granted or are a bit suspicious of: making the sign of the cross. Usually when we make the sign of the cross we invoke the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost or Spirit, giving acknowledgement to the Trinity (even when it’s not Trinity Sunday).
We begin making the sign of the cross—or blessing ourselves—at our forehead. I invite you to touch your forehead and hold there a moment. Speak, whisper, or think, “In the name of the Father.” How are you touching your forehead? Which hand do you use? Which finger or fingers? Are you gently touching or pressing intently? In the name of the Father. (You can put your hand down, if you like.) At this highest point of our body, at the place where we think of as our mind, the container of our knowledge, it’s at this point we begin. And it’s at this point that our blessing is not of our own being nor in our own power: it begins “in the name of the Father.” “Father” because Jesus calls God “Father.” “Father” also brings together the unity of Creation in one family and recalls our adoption into the holy family through our baptism. Unfortunately, our familial relations and oppression under patriarchy can create blocks to the experience of God as Father, and so we might use other names: Mother, Creator, Sovereign . . . whatever helps you connect with the Divine One of many names. Ultimately, we offer ourselves to God, Creator of all, into whose presence we come willingly, surrendering to that which we know and can’t know. This means we’re going to live with some uncertainty and a life of discernment, making our choices as best we can to align with God’s will. The will of God is always calling us into union.
Returning to our sign of the cross, we move from our forehead (pick back up with me) to our diaphragm or stomach. Here at the center of our being we say, “And of the Son.” Rochard Rohr notes that we cross over own heart, “certainly blessing our own enfleshment and incarnation as the body of Christ.”[1] If you rest your hand here, does it remind you of times when you may have said something like “knowing in my gut” or “gut-feeling”? Our humanity, our vulnerability is at the center of our person. Likewise, God’s dwelling on this earth took on our greatest vulnerability and prevailed to show us, as Michael Curry would say, that this present nightmare is not God’s dream for us. Because Jesus died we know that there is no suffering he doesn’t know. Because Jesus rose from the dead and ascended to heaven, we know that Jesus the Christ is not bound to one place, that we, too, bear the image of God, the presence of Christ here and now, in this being that we call upon God to bless. With humility, we bless ourselves and seek to nourish ourselves in this life in the fellowship of one another, continuing in the way Jesus has taught us and that we promise to follow.
We conclude our sign of the cross moving from the stomach, to touch from one shoulder to the other, again moving across our heart, saying “And of the Holy Spirit.” Rohr draws attention to “the sweep, the movement, and the fullness of both vertical and horizontal” nature of our gesture. Rohr sometimes refers to the Holy Spirit as “the flow,” so naturally our movement reflects this active, all-encompassing person of the divinity. As the Spirit moved over Creation in the beginning and descended like a dove at Jesus’s baptism, so the Holy Spirit intercedes and flows among us. When we are most attuned to the Spirit, I believe that flow carries us toward and along God’s will, toward and into communion.
Rohr writes that crossing ourselves “is a way for the body itself to know holy things, to honor itself as the temple and container of the Mystery, and to live with a newly-conscious and self-declared dignity.”[2] I hope that’s what we can have in making the sign of the cross! Most often for me, making the sign of the cross is its own blessing as a reminder of whose I am as a baptized believer and a sign of what I hope to be, who I hope to live into, as a child of God in the fullness of being, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, holy, holy, holy.
Making the sign of the cross similar to what we know today was not practiced until the fourth century, the same century our doctrine of the Trinity came about. When Nicodemus visited Jesus that night, there was no such practice or doctrine, but in that encounter, we see Nicodemus’s struggle and the gift of hope that we have now.
Nicodemus had heard and seen things about Jesus that did not jive with what he knew, about the Almighty. In his uncertainty, he did not want to put his discernment on display and risk any consequences. Jesus tells Nicodemus that he has to be born again, to wake up in a completely differently-oriented world where God can be manifest in the Son and in the Spirit, too, be saved through love. Not yet had Jesus been crucified. Not yet had the resurrection and ascension taken place. Not yet had the Advocate, Comforter, Holy Spirit come in the rush of wind. But standing before Nicodemus was the Word made flesh, who is one with the Creator and the Spirit. Nicodemus didn’t understand, didn’t know. While Nicodemus doesn’t understand, neither does he completely turn away from Jesus, not then nor at the trial nor at the burial. Could we have shown even that much courage?
May it not be lightly that we claim the authority to call upon God’s blessing over ourselves and others. Living as we do on this side of the resurrection, may we embody as hopefully and faithfully as we can what it means to be baptized in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, sealed by the Holy Spirit, and marked as Christ’s own forever.
[1] Richard Rohr with Mike Morrell, The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation. Whitaker House: New Kensington, PA. 2016. p. 200.
[2] Rohr, p. 201.
© 2024 The Rev. Sara Milford
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas