Patrick Comerford
Easter is a 50-day season, beginning on Easter Day (20 April 2025) and continuing until the Day of Pentecost (8 June 2025), or Whit Sunday. This week began with the Sixth Sunday of Easter (Easter VI, 25 May 2025), and tomorrow is Ascension Day (29 May 2025).
The calendar of the Church of England in Common Worship today remembers Lanfranc (1089), Prior of Le Bec, Archbishop of Canterbury and Scholar. Later this evening, There are no choir rehearsals in Saint Mary and Saint Giles Church, Stony Stratford, this evening. Before today begins, I am taking some quiet time this morning to give thanks, to reflect, to pray and to read in these ways:
1, reading today’s Gospel reading;
2, a short reflection;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary;
4, the Collects and Post-Communion prayer of the day.
John 16: 12-15 (NRSVA):
[Jesus said:] 12 ‘I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. 13 When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. 14 He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. 15 All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.’
Today’s Reflection:
The Gospel reading provided in the Lectionary today (John 16: 12-15) continues our readings from the ‘Farewell Discourse’ at the Last Supper in Saint John’s Gospel ((John 14: 1 to 17: 26), where Christ continues to prepare his followers for his departure, and reminds them of his promise of the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost: ‘When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth’ (verse 13).
Today’s reading is also the Gospel reading provided this year for Trinity Sunday (15 June 2025).
Allow me to introduce us this morning to some ways of thinking of God as the Trinity.
If I were to introduce you to my world, to my story, I might invite you to visit the places that have shaped and made me.
I might invite you to imagine what it was like for a small boy to lay awake in his grandmother’s farmhouse in west Waterford, it was so bright outside on a balmy summer’s evening. Downstairs, I can hear the old clock chiming out the time: it’s ten, and a hush descends on the house as the adults settle down in their chairs to listen to the news on the wireless. I hear the old black kettle boiling over the open fire as someone prepares to make a pot of tea. Outside, a pigeon is still cooing in the thatch, I imagine I can hear the abbey bells ringing out the time across the fields, and I know I am safe and loved in this world.
Twenty or so years later, once again it’s late at night, in the top storey of a tall house in a narrow street in Wexford town.
It’s comforting to hear the clock of Rowe Street church count out the hours. Is that a late train I hear trundling along the quays? A lone voice in the Theatre Royal braving a late rehearsal for one of next week’s operas? And I am so looking forward to the Festival Service in Saint Iberius’s Church.
Let us move forward another two decades or so. I can’t sleep in the suburban house in south Dublin. But I can hear my children snoring contentedly in their own rooms. Outside, the unseasonable rain is pelting down, the wind is rustling through the cherry tree outside, and I wonder whether all the cherry blossom will be shaken down and washed onto the grass below by the time morning dawns. An apposite memory this morning as I realise the coincidence that both Trinity Sunday and Father’s Day are going to fall on the same day this year.
We can use words not only to tell our stories, but to paint pictures, to invite others into our communities, into our families, and into our lives. Now that you have heard and seen what has shaped me, where I have been formed, what made me feel loved and secure, now that you have been invited into my story, my family` and know me, we are ready to sing the same songs, to sit together at the same table. Why, we might even dance.
The Trinity is an image of God, a perfect community, a community of God that invites us to share God’s story, to sit at table with God, to sing songs with God, … all the things we’re doing at this Festal Eucharist. Why, as Karen Baker-Fletcher says in her book, the Trinity could be God’s invitation for us to dance with God. [Karen Baker-Fletcher, Dancing With God: A Womanist Perspective on the Trinity (St Louis: Chalice Press, 2006; 2007)]
Two of the great Early Fathers of the Church, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus and Saint John of Damascus, use the term perichoresis, an image of going around, enveloping, to describe the mysterious union of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Clark Pinnock writes: ‘The metaphor suggests moving around, making room, relating to one another without losing identity.’ [Clark Pinnock, Flame of Love, A theology of the Holy Spirit (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1996)].
There is a play on words – a pun on the Greek origins of the word – that allows us to think of creative choreography, to imagine a dance of reciprocal love. This divine unity is expressed in the relationship of the three as one, for relationship is at the heart of the unity of the three-in-one. It is a relationship that is mutual and reciprocal. The Trinity tells us that shared life is basic to the nature of God: God is perfect social relationship, perfect mutuality, perfect reciprocity, perfect peace, perfect love.
‘As a circle of loving relationships, God is dynamically alive.’ The three persons of the Trinity are caught up in an eternal dance of reciprocity, so intertwined that at times it may appear difficult to tell who is who. They move with choreographed harmony. The love emanating from within cannot help but create, for it is the nature of love not to harbour and to hoard but to expand and to create.
God has, from the beginning, been wooing creation to dance. The community of God desires community with us. You and I are being courted, God wants to dance with you, and with me. The love that created us and our world is the same love that longs to be in fellowship with us.
When we worship in spirit and in truth, do others, does the world see us united as one, bound by love, dancing in harmony and flinging out new creation from within our midst? And do we call others to dance with us?
The Russian icon writer Andrei Rublev tried to create the same picture in a different way. In his famous icon of ‘The Visitation of Abraham’ – a modern interpretation of which you can see in this cathedral – he depicts three visitors who arrive at Abraham’s door. The guests become the hosts, the host becomes the guest, and Abraham is invited to a meal that is past, present and future. It is every domestic meal, it is a foretaste of the Eucharist, it is a foretaste of the heavenly banquet. In welcoming strangers, he is entertaining angels; but in entertaining angels, he is invited into communion with God as Trinity.
It is a moment in the past, a moment in the present and a moment in the future, when we shall all be restored to being in the image and likeness of God our Creator. God, in creating us, creates out of love, making our destiny eternal life with him. We are created to experience life within the Trinitarian communion of persons.
For there are three things we all encounter in our lives: we all need to be cared for; we all encounter suffering; we all need company. God the Father creates us and cares for us; God in Christ identifies with our suffering, takes on and takes away our suffering; God the Holy Spirit enlivens our communities, gives us that divine measure. God has, in a very real way, entered into the mystery of our humanity, so that we may enter into the mystery that is his communio personarum.
‘This deifying union has, nevertheless, to be fulfilled ever more and more even in this present life, through the transformation of our human nature and by its adaptation to eternal life.’ [Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood, NY: Saint Vladimir’s Press, 2002), p 196.]
The Communion reflection in the notices leaflet last Sunday in Saint Mary and Saint Giles Church, Stony Stratford, included a ‘Meditation on the Holy Icon of Rublev’ by Saint Evdokimos of Vatopedi Monastery, Mount Athos:
‘Tell me, did you ever feel inhabited? Can you not feel life palpitating in your depths? Yes, the three are there, in all their mystery. Yes, you are inhabited! “If only you knew what God is offering.” “If anyone me, my father will love him, and we will come to him, and live with him.” Yes, you live in the Trinity, who lives in you; you are his guest, and he is your guest. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit; because the tears of the Spirit are in us. He will never impose himself. He will never violence your freedom. Let your three guests love each other within you, praise each other in you, and sing of each other, let them dance for joy in your tent. Your secret is the secret that God is in you. Become aware of that in the land of silence!’
God invites us in creation, in Christ, in the Church, in the Word, and in the Sacrament, to be in union with God, to share God’s story, to sit down and dine with God, to sing and dance with God, to find our inner dwelling with God, and to be at one with God. And that is the purpose and the fulfilment of Christian life.
Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!
Today’s Prayers (Wednesday 28 May 2025):
The Feast of the Ascension is tomorrow (29 May 2025) and provides the theme for this week in ‘Pray With the World Church’, the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel). This theme was introduced on Sunday with reflections from Dr Paulo Ueti, Theological Advisor and Regional Manager for Latin America and the Caribbean, USPG.
The USPG Prayer Diary today (Wednesday 28 May 2025) invites us to pray:
God of land, sea, and sky, you have entrusted us with your creation. Forgive us the ways we have failed in our stewardship. As we rejoice in the Ascension, guide us to renew our commitment to care for the earth and all its creatures.
The Collect:
God our redeemer,
you have delivered us from the power of darkness
and brought us into the kingdom of your Son:
grant, that as by his death he has recalled us to life,
so by his continual presence in us he may raise us
to eternal joy;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Post-Communion Prayer:
God our Father,
whose Son Jesus Christ gives the water of eternal life:
may we thirst for you,
the spring of life and source of goodness,
through him who is alive and reigns, now and for ever.
Additional Collect:
Risen Christ,
by the lakeside you renewed your call to your disciples:
help your Church to obey your command
and draw the nations to the fire of your love,
to the glory of God the Father.
Collect on the Eve of Ascension Day:
Grant, we pray, almighty God,
that as we believe your only–begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ
to have ascended into the heavens,
so we in heart and mind may also ascend
and with him continually dwell;
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Yesterday’s Reflections
Continued Tomorrow
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org
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