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What's the Trinity all about? Trinity : Sunday 22nd May 2005 Isaiah 40.12-17, 27-31 | 2 Corinthians 13.11-13 | Matthew 28.16-20 There was a professor who’s theory it was the more times you made love the happier you were. So he asked his audience who made love every night. A handful put their hands up with broad smiles across their faces. The prof. then asked about people who made love once a week. More people put up their hands: they were happy, but not as happy as the first group. The prof. then asked about people who made love once every couple of months. People put up their hands and they were scowling. The prof. then asked whether there was anybody who made e love once a year. One bloke at the back put up his hand and he was beaming from ear to ear. Crestfallen that his theory had been disproved the prof. asked why he was so happy.. “Because” said the man doing a little jig “tonight’s the night!!” Ten Brownies points and a bar of chocolate if you work out what that’s got to do with the Trinity before I tell you... Last week we said goodbye to the Easter season and this week we’ve moved into Ordinary Time - and the first Sunday in Ordinary Time is Trinity Sunday - a major celebration! The single-minded view... The reason it’s worked out like this in the Church’s year is quite a logical one. The apostles - and of course Jesus himself - were good Jewish boys and girls, and for them one of their foundational understandings was that there was but one God and God was One. Other nations may have worshipped many and various deities - perhaps associated with places (e.g. a particular mountain), things (e.g. the sun) or activities (e.g. fertility); but for the Jews Yahweh was their God - the God who created all that could be seen and experienced, the One who revealed himself to human beings and called the nation of Israel into existence to be his vehicle in the world. So there was no doubt that there was one God. And God certainly spoke through and used people: the prophets and seers both fore told and forth told the word and works of God; the kings and priests mediated between God and the people in various ways; and the scriptures promised and looked forward to a Messiah, and a time when God would dwell with his people... ..developed through Jesus So when the carpenter from Nazareth started his ministry and gathered the twelve around him, it was possible that here was the promised Messiah... but it doesn’t take a very careful reading of the gospels to see that the things Jesus did, the claims he made, the words Jesus spoke, the attitude and teaching he put forward, suggested that here was somebody who was more than just an ordinary human being... and then following his ignominious death came a glorious resurrection... the good Jewish disciples began to have their ideas challenged about what it meant to say that God was One... And then to cap that when Pentecost came and the Spirit of God came, the disciples experienced the presence of God in an empowering and enlivening way that they’d felt only fleetingly before... so again the on going experience of the disciples led them to reflect on these experiences of God in the person of Jesus, and God in the person of the life giving Holy Spirit of Pentecost... and perhaps needless to say it took quite a time to digest, assimilate and work out exactly how God could be One and still the only God. That is one reason why the doctrine of the Trinity which we have is not explicit in the pages of the NT - it’s there in embryonic form, but it’s one of those truths which Jesus promised the disciples would be led into by the Holy Spirit (Jn 16.13), and it was many years later that the developed doctrine we have now came to be articulated. So that’s a rather long winded explanation of why the next logical, liturgical step after Easter, Ascension and Pentecost, is Trinity Sunday! More theology than event... But Trinity Sunday is peculiar in that it celebrates not so much an event - like Pentecost, or Easter, or Ascension, or Christmas, but an idea, a theology, an understanding. The Trinity is a specifically Christian way of talking about God, and it touches on and summarises our salvation: we are saved by God, through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit...
On Thursday I was privileged to be invited to one of the Emmaus Groups, where they’d saved up 460 difficult questions to ask the Rector... And one of the things we ended up talking about was how our relationships functioned, and we thought about how the dynamic of love within the Trinity (Father Son & Holy Spirit), spilled out in Creation - Creation of the world in which we live and move and have our being... And we thought how our relationships with one another are a pale reflection of the love with which God loves us: we thought about how God won’t let go of us - God won’t divorce us; and how it is significant that when we are in a trusting relationship with somebody special we talk about “making love” - and that act of love is a creative act, and sometimes there is even the potential for the creation of a new life... The Trinity is about relationship if it’s about anything. So any illustration, any metaphor must have that element of relationship, or it is inadequate. What the Trinity means in 2005 Wracking my brains for different ways of thinking about the Trinity to top last year’s experience with the Neapolitan ice cream, the best I could manage this year was the Finish Dishwasher tablets which are three-in-one - until I discovered that the ones we’ve been using are FOUR-in-one...! (they’ve got a glass preservation element) , so that idea was rather scuppered... So I gave that tack and thought a bit more about what the Trinity might mean for us now, here, today. You see standing before you this morning the product of 6 years of residential full time theological study.. three years at the Church Army College, and three years at St Stephen’s House in Oxford... and if I may run the risk of a little over simplification, let me say that all the theology I learnt can be distilled into this: we do what we see God doing. We treat people the way we see God treating us. We love people the way we see God loving us... So when it comes to the Trinity in this understanding of God we have relationship and creativity and love intimately bound up together and intimately part of God. When we read in the very first bit of Genesis that God said “It is not good for man to be alone” (Gen 2.18) - it’s because God is a dynamic of relationship. We are made in the image of God, and part of that is our need for relationship: to give and receive love, to be part of a community, to be known and loved. Engaged in creativity... And when we think about how the creation of all we experience came from the over flowing love of the Trinity, we’re reminded that creativity itself is one way in which reflect the image of God. So wherever that creativity is found - in the arts, in music, in literature, in drama, in design, in dance and movement, in comedy, in problem solving, in logistics, in appreciation of any aspect of creativity - God is to be found... So when we are engaged in creativity, or when we appreciate it in others, we are doing what God does... what a thought! If I asked you what sort of things were - for want of a better phrase - “Godly activities”, I expect you might say things like praying, or reading the scriptures, or coming to church... all of which of course are true, but I wonder whether we also realise that loving, building relationships and creativity and three other vitally important “Godly activities”? We do what we see God doing... God is our role-model! And in the Trinity we see a very different God from a theoretical, cold, distant God we could analyse from arm’s length using a different starting point than the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity seeks to explain how God is; how God relates to us, and how we are to be... And it’s not narrow restrictive - boring! - categories with a list of dos and don’ts: it’s about relationships, love and creativity. If that’s how God is, that’s how we should be.
So let’s relax into and rejoice in
the understanding of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and let’s open our
eyes a little wider to see God at work in his world, and join him!
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