Over the last few months, and particularly over the last week, there’s been a little word that has been used more often than even we normally use it and that is the word communion. You might have heard it of course because we always refer to our beloved Anglican Church throughout the world as the Anglican Communion. And of course over the last few months I presume many of you will have seen things on T.V and newspapers talking about what’s been going on with us and the Anglican Church of Canada. There has been a great deal of discussion about the word communion usually pared up with other adjectives such as in communion or out of communion. I guess those aren’t adjectives but you know what I’m saying, or impaired communion or broken communion or full communion. I suppose you could do different colors of communion if you got creative which is only to say there are various words that we’ve put alongside that word communion.

It can get a little puzzling, especially when you recite the Apostles creed and you end up hearing about the communion of the Saints and then you come to church to find out you’re coming to Holy Communion. You might wonder what it means and wish that you had just been able to come and receive communion and do your own thing.

Unfortunately communion is such an important word that sometimes we need to stop and talk about it because it has so much bearing upon who we are as Christians. It’s a good day to talk about it today because today we celebrate the feast day of the Holy Trinity. Trinity Sunday as we call it in our church. When we celebrate the Trinity we celebrate something that is in fact truly profound. We aren’t celebrating an idea, thought or a construction of theological import; what we are celebrating is the Truth as we have received it in revelation from God. And more than that it is about the nature of God and who God is ? who God is and therefore to a certain degree who we are to be ? we who are made in God’s image.

Returning to the word communion, the word communion means of course many things to many people, you could say well communion is about sticking together, sort of like the Bob Marley song “Let’s Get Together and Feel Alright”. Sometimes you might be mistaken by thinking that’s what we mean in the Anglican Church but that is not what we mean. In fact the word communion comes from a Greek word that’s used in the New Testament and the word is koinoia and sometimes we translate it as fellowship, as in the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Love of God and the Koinoia of the Holy Spirit which we said at the beginning of the service this morning, - the fellowship of the Holy Spirit or the communion of the Holy Spirit. And as soon as you use that kind of language you understand that it’s something that’s much deeper when you start thinking about what the New Testament says about the Spirit’s operation in us.

We all have one Spirit and therefore are one in the Lord. It is the Holy Spirit that has poured God’s grace into our hearts, as we heard in the Romans (Romans 5, 1-5) reading today, communion, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit and this communion is more than just being together, it’s more than just being an institution or an organization, it’s about a fundamental bond, it’s about being united to one another. In fact in our Christian context communion get its ultimate meaning from the Trinity. Because what we’re saying in the Holy Trinity is God is Three; that God is fully present and known in God the source of all things in God the Father, in God the Son our Savior and Redeemer and in God the Holy Spirit. Yet, although the three are all fully God, they’re all but One.

There is only one God, so what we are saying is deeply profound and beyond our comprehension, so I will not ask you to imagine shamrocks, or ice water and steam, or any of those things because those are attempts to take what is a mystery beyond human comprehension and make it comprehensible, and that’s not what we’re about, we’re not about making it comprehensible, we’re about entering into the mystery and learning to love and worship God, who has revealed himself to us.

So what does it mean? It means that in the very nature of God, in God’s very being there is communion. It isn’t that God had communion when God created us. The very nature of God’s communion and being is love and love is always going out from self to other. God is at God’s heart love because God is always in loving relationship with God’s self. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are in a divine community, a divine dance of love that goes on through eternity. God’s very being is both one and communion and it is that which defines what it means for us to be in communion. The very love and unity between God the Father Son and Holy Spirit is the love and unity into which we’re called by Jesus, who throughout John’s Gospel and the great farewell discourses tells us that we may be one as he and the Father may be one. The very nature of God’s being as a communion is the model or the call, to which we are growing as human beings, as Christians who have come to receive and know the love of God.

Now there’s an interesting thing about communion, very often we do think of it as – well, it is about staying together through thick and thin – but you’ll notice that Jesus in today’s reading (John 16: 12 – 15) comes to it from a very different direction, Jesus doesn’t say “God I hope they’ll stick together through thick and thin”. What he says is “There are things that are too hard for you to bear, but the Holy Spirit will teach you, and the Spirit will lead you into all truth.” It is in understanding the truth of God’s nature and God’s will for humanity that we understand we are called into this deep communion one with each other.

To put it another way in a word or a church which likes to say there is unity over here and there is truth over here, Jesus is saying you can’t get them apart because they’re two sides of the same coin, they are two braids in the same rope. If it is not truth that we’re called to communion, then we don’t do it. But if we’re called to communion because that is what God desires of us then we are saying that is the truth that God has revealed to us through Jesus Christ. To say that we believe that communion is God’s call on our life is to acknowledge that God leads us and reveals to us God’s nature so that we may understand to know to what we are called. There is no communion without truth, but likewise truth is hindered without communion. If we failed to see the importance of God’s call on out lives to come together in love and to live this communion to which God is calling us, then in a certain sense we have also denied the word of truth that the Spirit is teaching us.

There’s probably lots that has been said- and I’ve been completely out of touch with the newspapers over the last week having been on the other side of the news and TV cameras and all that stuff which is going on- and I’m sure there will be lots of things that will be said over the next week or two, months or even the next three years until the next General Synod meets about the nature of communion, about impaired communion, about broken communion, and full communion and about all that kind of thing and all about what it means. At the heart of it all for us as Christians, is the recognition of this community of divine love – the communion at the heart of God – and the recognition of the fact that the only reason that we know it is that God reveals the truth to us as the Holy Spirit.

Today we celebrate this great feast day that is the Trinity. Of course we do that absolutely every Sunday, absolutely every Sunday is a feast of the Trinity. If it were not so we would have to say that on any given Sunday either we were not inviting Jesus, not inviting the Holy Spirit, or not inviting God the Father. I don’t know about you, but we prefer to have them here all the time, and we know they will be here even if we don’t invite them. Everyday we come to church, everyday that we pray we are in fact celebrating the life of the Trinity because God our creator God the Father is with us, Christ stands beside us and the Spirit moves within us, creating within us the communion – the divine love that leads us into truth and opens our hearts to one another.

That is at the heart of what it means for us to say we believe in the Holy Trinity It is at the heart of what is means to be a Christian, it is at the heart of God’s call in our lives this day. May God’s grace make it a reality in our lives together.
Amen.