Our lessons today point out that encounters with God aren’t just once and done, but continue to meet us where we are, as we are, in order that we might come to realize that we are called into oneness with each other and all creation. Last Sunday, we celebrated Trinity Sunday, one of the major feasts of the Church. Yet today we find our first lesson reminding us of Abraham, our father-in-faith, who experienced the Trinity by the oaks of Mamre. Three millennia later that encounter was memorialized by the Russian iconographer Rublev, in his famous Trinity icon showing the “Three” enjoying the hospitality of Abraham and Sarah. And from that visit comes Isaac, the son of the promise, the second patriarch. God was not finished with the meeting.

Two Sundays ago, we celebrated the Christian Pentecost, what some have called “the birthday of the Church,” where the encounter with the Holy Spirit. Again our second lesson reminds us, as the apostle Paul tells the Romans, “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” The Spirit isn’t finished with us. Just wait and see.

In the gospel, we are reminded what encounters with the Divine are all about as we recognize our call to be laborers in the Beloved’s harvest. That image calls to my mind the Moabite Ruth’s gleaning on the edge of the fields (Ruth 2:15-17), gathering the left-overs, the marginalized. “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” May we never forget that it is new every day.