Dear Church,
This past Sunday was Trinity Sunday, the capstone to the gospel journey we started in Advent, and the hinge point in the church calendar that launches us into “Ordinary Time”, where focus on working out our salvation together, learning to live this new life together as the church.
Jon proclaimed the good news of the invitation into the “dance” that is participation in the life of the God revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
And that’s really what proclaiming the Trinity is all about. It’s not about intellectually comprehending the doctrine of the Trinity, it’s about the personal experience of allowing ourselves to be drawn into the life of the God the doctrine speaks of.
This is what we focus on now in Ordinary Time: growing more fully into the reality of this new life we have been immersed in, starting with our baptism. Here’s a quote from Anglican theologian Rowan Williams on the connection between our baptism and our discipleship to Jesus:
To be a disciple, to be with Jesus, is to be baptized: baptism is the way in which each person is made present to Jesus, crucified and alive, by a ritual act which places the person in the same process that Jesus described as ‘immersion’, the process of self-forgetting that leads to the cross. Forget you have a self to be shielded, reinforced, consoled and lied to: hear the bitter truth that the cross enunciates, and accept the pain and disorientation of that enlightenment, in the trust that you are not hated or abandoned; and come up from the flood with a new person, ‘alive to God’, living with your eyes set firmly on the ground and goal of hope which is Jesus.
So as we embark on the journey of Ordinary Time this week, beloved, remember your baptism! You need not justify yourself in any way, you are already part of God’s new creation, alive to God right here and now. Rest in this, breathe deeply, and open yourself to God’s life flowing through you this week.
In Christ,
Fr. Ben
Leave a Reply