This sermon is very like that of three years ago, but a few differences.
Today is Trinity Sunday,
the day on which we celebrate all the different
aspects of God.
It’s actually a very difficult day to preach on,
since it’s very easy to get bogged down in the
sort of theology which none of us understands,
and which we can very easily get wrong.
The trouble is, of course, that the concept of the
Trinity is trying to explain something that simply won’t go into
words.
We are accustomed to thinking of God as Father,
Son and Holy Spirit,
and most of the time we don’t really stop and
think about it.
Trinity Sunday is the day we are expected to stop
and think!
The thing is, the first half of the Christian
year,
which begins way back before Christmas,
is the time when we think about Jesus.
We prepare for the coming of the King, in Advent,
and then we remember his birth,
his being shown to the Gentiles,
his presentation in the Temple as a baby.
Then we skip a few years and remember his
ministry,
his arrest, death and resurrection, and his
ascension into heaven.
Then we remember the coming of the promised Holy
Spirit,
and today we celebrate God in all his Godness, as
someone once put it.
The second half of the year, all those Sundays
after Trinity,
tend to focus on different aspects of our
Christian life.
And today is the one day in the year when we are
expected to stop and think about God as Three and God as One.
And it is difficult.
It’s a concept that doesn’t really go into
words,
and so whatever we say about it is going to be in
some way flawed.
It took the early Church a good 400 years to work
out what it wanted to say about it, and even that is very obscure:
“That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity
in Unity:
Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the
substance.
For there is one person of the Father,
another of the Son,
and another of the Holy Spirit.
But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of
the Holy Spirit is all one,
the glory equal, the majesty coeternal.
Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such
is the Holy Spirit.
The Father uncreated, the Son uncreated, and the
Holy Spirit uncreated.
The Father incomprehensible, the Son
incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible.”
The whole thing incomprehensible, if you ask me!
St Paul said it better, in our first reading.
‘We have peace with
God through our Lord Jesus Christ,’ and a little later in the same
paragraph, ‘God’s love has been poured into our hearts through
the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.’
St Paul may not have known the expression ‘The
Holy Trinity’, but he certainly was aware of the concept!
There are all sort of illustrations you can use to
try to get a mental image of what it’s all about.
Look, for instance, at what happens when you join
two hydrogen atoms to one oxygen one –
you get H2O.
Di-hydrogen monoxide!
Which, I am sure you realise, can be ice –
a solid, good for cooling drinks or injuries, for
preserving food, or for skating on.
Or it can be water –
a liquid, making up most of our bodies, good for
drinking, sustaining all life.
Or it can be steam –
a gas, good for removing creases from our clothes
or for cooking vegetables. Ice, water, steam, all very different
from each other, but all, still, H2O.
It’s an illustration.
It happens to be my favourite one, but there are
plenty of others.
D, on the same subject, once brought in three tins
of soup –
lentil, mushroom and tomato –
well, it might not have been exactly those, but
something like that –
all tasting very different but all soup.
Some people like thinking of an egg,
which has the shell, the white, and the yolk....
They are all sort-of pictures, but only sort-of.
Nobody really understands it.
And, of course, that is as it should be.
If we could understand it,
if we knew all the ins and outs and ramifications
of it,
then we would be equal to God.
And it’s very good for us to know that there are
things about God we don’t really understand!
It’s called, in the jargon, a “mystery”.
That means something that we are never going to
understand,
even after a lifetime of study.
Lots of things to do with God are mysteries, in
that sense.
Holy Communion, for one –
we know what we mean when we take Communion,
but we also know that it may very well mean
something quite different, but equally valid, to the person standing
next to us.
Or even the Atonement –
none of us really understands exactly what
happened when Jesus died on the Cross, only that some sort of change
took place in the moral nature of the Universe.
Nevertheless, for all practical purposes,
we live very happily with not understanding.
We synthesise some form of understanding that
suits us,
and, provided we know it is not the whole story,
that’s fine.
And the same applies to the Trinity.
It doesn’t matter if we don’t really
understand how God can be Three and One at the same time:
what matters is that we love and trust him,
whatever!
And in our Gospel reading, Jesus talks of Himself,
the Father and the Spirit as equal:
“All that belongs to the
Father is mine.
That is why I said the Spirit will
take from what is mine and make it known to you.”
Like St Paul, He doesn’t have the
word “Trinity”, but it is the kind of thing He means.
And in the reading from Proverbs,
which I chose not to use, we are reminded of Wisdom.
“The LORD brought me forth as
the first of his works,
before his deeds of old:
I was appointed from eternity,
from the beginning, before the world began.
When there were no oceans, I was given birth,
when there were no springs abounding
with water;”
and so on and so forth.
Wisdom, here, is personified as
female.
The Greek word for Wisdom is Sophia.
And some commentators equate Sophia,
here, and in other passages, with the Holy Spirit.
Incidentally, some people find the
image of God as Sophia, Lady Wisdom, helpful and different.
It’s one of the many images of God
we have, up there alongside the Shepherd, the Rock, the Strong Tower
and so on.
If you don’t find it helpful, then
don’t use it, but if it is something that appeals, then do.
But that is beside the point.
Seeing God as Lady Wisdom is a very old
tradition,
but the real point is that even in
the Old Testament we get glimpses of God as having more than One
Person.
The Trinity might not be a Bible
expression, but it is a Bible concept.
But really, the thing about today is
that, no matter how much we don’t understand God as Three but still
One,
today is a day for praising God in
all his Godness.
It is not really a day for deep
theological reflection, nor for self-examination, but a day for
praise and wonder and love and adoration.
So I’m going to be quiet now, and
let’s spend a few moments in silent worship before we sing our next
hymn.
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