Today is Trinity Sunday but I’m not going to say much about the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit. Today, I’m more interested in the empty space. Are you familiar with the empty space in the Trinity? Let me show you what I’m talking about. 

This is Andrei Rublev’s icon of the Holy Trinity. It’s from the early 1400s. For six hundred years it’s been the Church’s portrayal of the Trinity. Do you see the empty space? It’s at the front of the icon between the two outer figures. 

Who might that empty space be for? 

It’s for you and me. We are the ones to fill that empty space. We are the ones to take our place in and complete the life of the Trinity.

As you know, this past Friday, May 24th, marked two years since the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School. And you probably know we had a service here Friday evening. Some of you were there. Out of town visitors attended. People from Uvalde who are not members of St. Philip’s attended. 

In my sermon on Friday I asked everyone to write on a slip of paper one thing they would do for the healing, well-being, and future of Uvalde. Adults and children wrote their one thing and then placed their slip of paper in an offering plate. They were filling the empty space in the Trinity. 

Here’s some of what they said they are doing or willing to do in order to fill the empty space in the Trinity:

• I will listen to what other people say and try to understand their need.
• Remain available for RJ and hold hope for healing.
• Be kind.
• Change my career to better directly serve our community.
• Be nice to other people because you never know what they are going through.
• Continue reaching out to family members I’ve built a relationship with, continue to be a support, and continue to ask what they need.
• Support others.
• Reach out to Arnie.
• Stand against gun violence. 
• Be more active, vocal, and intentional about doing something about gun violence. 
• Work for gun control.
• Seek out and visit people at the Veranda Nursing Home who don’t have many visitors.
• Improve engagement with the families in the community, provide services, help them heal.
• Seek out victim’s families, ask what they need, and follow through.
• Provide aide in developing a program or plan to identify troubled persons before they feel the need to commit horrible acts.
• Support the UCISD school board.
• Reach out to the families and be a peacemaker.
• Listen more, talk less.
• Attend public meetings and support people.
• Pour love back in.

How amazingly beautiful is that? Every one of those is someone filling the empty space. Do you feel their love? Their care and compassion? Do you see how they are reaching out and giving themselves to another? Do you see how they are opening themselves to receive another’s life? Do you feel the vulnerably and intimacy? Do you feel the hope and possibilities for healing and new life? Do you see the web of community being created and enlarged? That’s trinitarian life. 

The empty space in the Trinity is overflowing in Uvalde. And that’s not even half of the papers we received Friday evening.

What if the Trinity isn’t a doctrine but a love story? “For God so loved the world.”

What if the Trinity isn’t something to be explained and understood but something to be lived and experienced? For we so loved Uvalde. 

We know what it’s like to live in and experience emptiness. That’s been our life in Uvalde the last two years. We’ve known the emptiness of loss, grief, fear, loneliness, powerlessness, anger, conflict. But today is Trinity Sunday. It’s the invitation for you and me to fill the empty space. 

I wonder what that means and looks like in your life today? How will you fill the empty space in the Trinity?

That “God so loved the world” does not relieve us from so loving the world, from so loving Uvalde, from so loving each other. It is, rather, the model for our loving.  

I want us to fill that empty space. I want us to be a part of the trinitarian overflowing in Uvalde. I want us to be able to look at each other and say: 

• For Dennis so loved Uvalde,
• For Anna so loved Uvalde,
• For Millie so loved Uvalde,
• For Jennifer so loved Uvalde,
• For Clayton so loved Uvalde,
• For I so loved Uvalde.

Every one of us has something unique to offer and fill the empty space. What will you do today to fill the empty space in the Trinity? How will you so love Uvalde?

Imagine all of us offering ourselves to fill the empty space in the Holy Trinity and saying, “For we so loved Uvalde. For we so loved Uvalde.”