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Trinity Church has been worshipping God and serving in the village of Port Credit since 1867.   It started as a small, modest, wooden mission church.   After significant building projects, this tiny church was transformed into the Trinity that we know and love today.   But more than the building has changed; the community has changed.   The people coming through the doors each Sunday have changed.   Many no longer rely on their feet to get here, but drive from much further away.   The Village of Port Credit is now part of the city of Mississauga, and what was once quiet and idyllic countryside has been transformed into tall buildings, busy highways and bustling businesses.

In our ever-widening world, we have a greater need for community and connection than ever before.   In an age where communication happens instantaneously by phone or email we are more connected, and yet, ironically, more isolated from each other than ever.   We need our families and our church more than ever – and the communities in which we live have a greater need for love and connection as well.

In our distrusting age, we tend to be apprehensive when it comes to reaching out and touching the lives of others.   It can leave us feeling vulnerable, and yet, it is precisely when we are at our most vulnerable, with our arms out-stretched, that the greatest opportunities for Christ's work are presented.   It was something that the Trinity of Yesterday did with courage and charisma – they saw the need in Port Credit, and they built a church.

As a church, reaching out and loving our community as Christ loves us is what we are called to do.   We are called to identify and minister to the needs of the world, and the community in which we live.   We are the disciples of Jesus Christ, sent out into the world to proclaim his message of love and salvation – and 140 years ago we were sent to Port Credit to do just that.

     


           FATHER STEVEN'S ADVENT  MESSAGE



A picture paints a thousand words.   However, an icon is more than a mere collection of colours imprisoned in the two dimensions that meet the viewer's gaze.

The truths that an icon imparts are meant to transcend dimension.   For an icon is a window into eternity, a view into the panoramic mystery of God's relationship with us that the writer (for one does not paint an icon, one writes it!) seeks to convey through the medium of painted images.

The icon that serves as the focus of this reflection is that of the Trinity.   Now icons of the Holy Trinity are legion, and have been depicted in various ways:   three thrones upon which sit representations of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit being the most common.

However, this icon conceived and written in the year 1410 by Andrei Rublev - a Russian iconographic artist - captures the true spirit of iconic art; for by inviting us to ponder the mystery of God's relationship with God's self, Rublev is challenging us to examine our preconceived notions of God's relationship with us, and our relationship with one another.

What immediately draws the viewers' attention is that the three persons of the Trinity are represented, only slightly ambiguously, as females.   This was certainly a radical and challenging notion of the Trinity for its time, if not so much in our day.   However, what is truly remarkable and challenging about this image of the Trinity is found, not in who the persons are, but in what they are doing.

Unlike numerous icons of the Trinity that depict the three personed-unity of God's self enthroned side by side in benevolent detachment, this icon represents the Trinity as a fellowship of persons gathered together around a common table, gazing upon, and presumably in the midst of sharing, a common cup.

Apart from its obvious allusions to the Eucharist, a crucial message is conveyed through this rich use of symbolism.   The message is that the core of our understanding of God is that ours is a God of relationships, characterized by mutual sharing.

In this representation of the Trinity, one is visually reinforced of the notion that the Godhead itself is a community of companions whose very nature is to exist in a relationship of reciprocal self-giving.

So what does that mean for us?   Where does the Rublev hit the road?   Where does the truth that this icon conveys climb out of the picture and into our lives?

Obviously we try to live the reality of the Triune God in our own journeys, striving for relationships of mutual sharing, gathered around a common table.   We profess in the Doxology that the Eucharist, God's "power working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine."   But these words remain mere abstractions until they find concrete expression in the ordinariness of our lives.

It is perhaps no coincidence, therefore, that the season of Easter has drawn to a close and we have entered ordinary time, the time between Trinity Sunday and the Reign of Christ.  This would seem to imply that the Easter season is somehow extraordinary, which of course it is.

From the Sunday of the Resurrection to the Sunday of Pentecost we celebrate God's gift of new life to us.   In trying to emphasize Easter as a season - rather than just a day - liturgists challenge us to imagine Easter as an extended celebratory day.   We are invited to think of the Easter Season as the Sunday of the whole year, thus implying that the rest of the year is our regular Monday to Saturday grind - in short, ordinary time.

And so it is.   But that is not to say that we do not experience the presence of God in ordinary liturgical time - or in the ordinariness of our lives, for that matter.

For another aspect of the mystery of Trinity that the icon communicates is this: it is in the ordinary, the mundane, and the seemly trivial, that we encounter the presence of the Triune God. It is in such common acts as sitting around a common table and sharing a common meal that the fellowship of the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Holy Spirit is communicated.

In the end, these truths come to us, not so much from gazing at a pretty picture, regardless of how many words it paints.   Rather, the perfect love and unity of God's very self is written on the canvas of our common life.