Daily Reading for June 7 • Trinity Sunday
How did the early Christians begin to make sense of the Trinity? They saw that this new encounter with God was not the same as meeting God in three different roles or activities, just as I can be the celebrant of the eucharist, the coffee hour host, and an exasperated parent all on the same Sunday morning. For them the Trinity was not a divine game of peek-a-boo in which a playful deity peeps out at them from behind different masks (now the ancient fellow with the beard, now the infant, now the bird, and so on) until God tires of the whole charade. No, when these Christians met God they were swept up into God’s own inner life of mutual relationships. The Word who becomes incarnate and the Spirit who moves over the chaos of human hearts are not temporary patch-up efforts on the part of a bumbling deity who had not quite counted on human recalcitrance. Instead, Word and Spirit are eternally enacting the communion who is God, and into this communion Christians are drawn.
From Mysteries of Faith by Mark McIntosh, Volume 8 of The New Church’s Teaching Series (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 2000).