The Sending, Seeking God
The Trinity and its traces | Trinity Sunday, Year B
Along the street in front of my house I’ve been planting a make shift meadow. There are grasses and sedges, forbs and flowers. It is not perfect and I’m not particularly good at gardening, but I keep it up as a practice, an activity that makes be bend down, get close to the earth and pay attention. In this way it is not far from prayer.
Most of the plants in this garden are perennials, an assortment I’ve been collecting over several seasons of visiting the annual Audubon Delta native plant sale. For some reason, this spring the garden has sprung into its own, each plant growing with the bright color and strong vigor that shows they are becoming established in the soil. When I weed the garden, pulling up the rhizomes of Bermuda grass, I think I see some of the reason why.
For many years I’ve mulched this bed with wood chips, mostly the ramial sort that come from small cut branches. Mycorrhizal fungi feed on the carbon of this mulch, running their white filaments through the soil, tapping into the roots of plants. The fungi feed plants with the minerals of the earth and the plants offer them sugars made from the sun in return, and exchange of gifts that circulate and connect the plants into a larger community of life. This is what is happening in my street-side garden bed. It has reached a point in which the relationships of the life of this place have reached a maturity in which the varied members are thriving into their fullness.
This Sunday is Trinity Sunday, a celebration of an understanding of God that stretches our language and our concepts. This limit will invite metaphors, some helpful, some verging on heresy. Sticking close to the scripture readings is a better starting place, a surer way into the meaning of the mystery. What is important about the Trinity is not its mechanics, the how of three in one and one in three, but rather its action—a reaching out, a relationship at the heart of all creation.
Isaiah encounters a God whose three-fold holy glory is not satisfied in a self-contained existence at a remove from all others. The God veiled in terrifying otherness is the one whose longing is echoed in the heavenly question: “who will go for us?” God is reaching out in relationship, longing for those who will go and connect.
In Romans, Paul bears witness to God’s Spirit empowering a new form of family, a deep community of love in which God becomes not only our father, but our Abba—the familiar “daddy” of care and comfort. To enter into this relationship, the Spirit works to transform us, drawing our life into God’s life, adopted children who forget our orphaned days when we were beyond belonging.
It is this new birth, the deeper belonging, that is at the center of our Gospel reading. There Jesus works to open Nicodemus to the depths of God’s transforming work, one in which it isn’t just old promises that will be fulfilled, but the whole cosmos that will be saturated in the glory and glow of God’s love. Here again, God is sending. This time it is not a prophet, like Isaiah, but God’s own Son, Jesus Christ, who will make it possible for human life to be joined in the community of God.
These passages all point to a God who seeks to be in relationship, transformational connection with creation. It is through that relationship that we encounter the Trinity, not as an idea but as an acting reality. Without God’s Spirit we would not find our lives renewed and transformed, without God’s son we would not find a new possibility for human life joined to the divine life. Without this seeking, longing, relating God who sends, we would find only the god of the philosophers winding clocks blindly in the sky. Instead, we find an Abba, a “God who so loves.”
Creation is full of traces and signs of this God who seeks connection, for all creation is made of relationship, all flourishing comes from community seeking wholeness not in the loss of individual selves, but in their joining. When I tend my garden and see mycorrhyzal fungi seeking plant roots, connecting the whole beneath the surface, I do not find a metaphor for the Trinity, a simile for the Divine life of community. Instead, I discover a sign, a pattern echoed like a fractal—there is a common longing for a final belonging bound in love.
How often we forget - or more accurately, default to our taught beliefs - that God so longs to be with us. He is not remote, not “other than” but in and through and with and all around us. This is beautifully written, thank you.
I too have been gardening. I have been working on a “wild flower” hill for a few years now. Several of the plants that have been in since the beginning but didn’t really seem to be thriving, came up roaring this year. Just like myself, after getting settled in and rooted they are growing and spreading. I hope to have less “weeds” once it fills in - just like my heart. Thank you for you message. this one really hit home with me.