This is the Sunday we celebrate the Mystery of the Trinity.
At the heart of the Christian Tradition is the affirmation that God is relational … that the very essence of God is loving relationship, that in God’s own being there is this dynamic of loving community.
We’re not talking a closed community … but an ever widening circle of love opening to us, to the whole creation.And the wonder that it is in the image of this One that we are created, such that we too, in our essence, are made for loving relationship. We too are made to participate in the dance of the Trinity!
This morning I find myself drawn to share with you several stories of Gregory Boyle’s experience of life with members of hard-core gangs in Los Angeles, “the gang capital of the world.” It’s there as a Jesuit priest that Gregory founded Homeboy and Homegirl Industries, a gang intervention program that through employment and, well the experience of being loved, creates the possibility of a whole new life.
On this Sunday in which we’re invited to contemplate the Triune nature of God which might easily take us into some heady exploration, these stories instead catch us up and draw us into an experience of the ever-widening loving relationship that is God.
But before we go to L.A., I want to say that we already know something of this experience of God right here within this community. Last Sunday when we gave ourselves that time to get in touch with our own sense of Love’s power at work in our lives personally and in and through this congregation, so much of what we articulated was this impetus for caring connection, the call to love more deeply yet. As I read through all the thoughts we gathered up last Sunday I would say we are sensing it is our God-given purpose to be a living expression of the Beloved Community, in which the welcome is wide, the receiving and giving of care is palpable, and through which the Love that meets and deepens and enlivens us, propels us outward in the service of life, in the sharing of Life.
So I invite you to receive the gift of these stories … and let them gather you up into the heart of God. [Stories read from "Tattos on the Heart - the power of boundless compassion" by Gregory Boyle, New York: Free Press, 2010]
