THE SERMON NO PRIEST WANTS TO DELIVER...

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On Trinity Sunday every incumbent in the land who has a curate or Reader heaves a sigh of relief and jiggles the preaching rota so that they will be off...

Which is sad because the Trinity is one of the most important of the Christian doctrines, and at one level it is inexplicable because it is in - in a theological sense - a mystery. So don’t expect me to explain it to you - but I do hope that by the end of this you’ll have a better idea of what we mean when we talk about The Trinity, and why it’s important for us to grapple with as Christian people.

If you turn in your BCPs to the section straight after Evening Prayer there follows a section called ”At Morning Prayer” - and the BCP instructs us to say the following three and half pages of rather dense Elizabethan English version if the Creed of St Athanasius. It starts “Whosoever will be saved before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholick Faith. Which faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. And the Catholick Faith is this: that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity...”

So it’s an important part of what it means to call yourself a Christian. Why? Partly because Trinity is an exclusively Christian way of talking about God, partly because in this present climate the Muslims in particular find it difficult to understand how we can hold that God is One, yet three persons in one God; and partly because the Trinity summarises our understanding of God and our salvation.

So we believe that God is one. One substance but three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We don’t believe in three gods, but one God in three equal persons: it’s not that Jesus and the Holy Spirit are demi-gods, or slightly less divine than the Father.

It’s the doctrine which summaries the Christian faith: we are saved by God, through Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit. In it’s strict sense it is a mystery because it can’t be known or deduced through human wisdom, but revealed by God, and neither can it be demonstrated by human logic once that revelation has been made. Believe in the Trinity is not irrational , but trans-rational!

In one sense it is an experience which must be lived. That’s one of the reasons people get so tied up in knots thinking and talking about it: it’s the same as love. Try defining that! It’s impossible to describe to somebody what it means to be in love - it’s an experience that you explore as you live it out. Fortunately it’s common enough currency for people to understand that they don’t understand - so poems are penned; songs are written; novels and stories and all sorts of literary creations are created to finds ways of expressing what love is all about. So it is with God.

The Trinity is a specifically CHRISTIAN way of thinking about God. Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson said “Trinitarian discourse is Christianity’s effort to identify the God who has claimed us.” So in other words the doctrine of the Trinity is our attempt to put the unspeakable into words... to try and find some parameters for talking about God which do justice to the revelation of God as we have experienced God in Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

The doctrine we hold today is largely based on the work of Athanasius - after the creed which bears his name. The scriptures form the basis for our understanding, and support the understanding of God as Trinity, but they are not explicit. In this morning’s gospel reading Jesus said that the Holy Spirit would lead the disciples into all truth; St Paul promised that the Church would have the mind of Christ - and so people thought and pondered their experiences of God in Christ and that’s how the doctrine came to be formulated: as a search to articulate the unspeakable - how God is, how God loves us, how we are made in that image and what that means.

So the early disciples experience was that, as good Jewish boys, they believed that God was one.

Yet in their experience of Jesus of Nazareth - his baptism, teaching, miracles, transfiguration, death, resurrection and ascension - they knew that they had experienced more than just a special human being - he had come from the Father; he was with the Father before the world was thought of; he went back to reign with the Father at his ascension; he allowed his disciples to worship him.... he must share divinity with the Father. Yet God was still one!

And their experience of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and afterwards as the Spirit brought new birth; boldness; the power and the presence of the risen Christ and made it possible for disciples to live the resurrection life; bestowed gifts; produced fruit which makes the disciple more and more Christ-like; and led to the earthing of this experience of Jesus in the Church - all this led them to conclude that the Holy Spirit was indeed one who shared divinity with the Father and the Son. Yet God was still one!

The Trinity is all about RELATIONSHIP - the relationship between the Father the Son & The Holy Spirit. We love because we are made in the image of God - and God is in a relationship of love within the Godhead. So our loving is reflective of God

So any illustration, any understanding of the Trinity that we come to that does not have this relationship at the heart is flawed. And the Christian claim is not just that we can know about God, but that we can know God: relationship is pivotal to the understanding of Trinity - that God reveals himself to us and invites us and draws us into a relationship. God is dancing, Father Son and Holy Spirit, and he stretches out his hand for us to join in...

Many people have tried to find analogies metaphors ILLUSTRATIONS and parallels to try and explain the Trinity. One of the most famous illustration is St Patrick and the shamrock: based on the Early church father Tertullian who talked of a growing plant being the root, shoot and fruit: one plant, but three expressions of being...

Others pointed to the sun, it’s ray and the point where the ray touched the earth; or the dance of three (the steps, the music, the movement - make up a dance)

But at the end of the day these can only ever be illustrations or metaphors - some more helpful than others.

In the end the Trinity is a MYSTERY! By which we mean that the Trinity is not a problem to be solved or an enigma to crack - it’s a mystery to be lived. It’s a mystery to be entered into, wrestled with, and lived.

Mystery involves holding together some apparent opposites: God is transcendent (above and beyond us); yet God is immanent (he has crept in beside us). The new scripture related collect for Trinity Sunday puts it like this: O God, your name is veiled in mystery, yet we dare to call you Father; your Son was begotten before all ages, yet born among us in time; your Holy Spirit fills the whole creation, yet is poured forth now into our hearts.

Leonard Hodgson (1889 - 1969 Regius Professor of Divinity, University of Oxford) wrote this: “The formula for the Christian life is seeking, finding and doing the Father’s will in the Father’s world with the companionship of the Son by the guidance and strength of the Holy Spirit.”

So as we approach with awe the God who loves us and reaches out to us - to beckon us into the dance that is the Trinity, may God bless us as we engage with his mystery, Father Son & Holy Spirit!

Fr Andrew Perry
Rector, St John the Evangelist, Pevensey Rd, St Leonards on Sea