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 the whole Godness of God, as someone once put it.
The
second half of the year, all those Sundays in Ordinary Time, tend to
focus on different aspects of our Christian life, and how what we
think we believe informs, or should inform, the way we live.
And
today is the fulcrum, the changeover day
the one day in the year
when we are expected to stop and think about God as Three and God as
One.
The concept of the Trinity isn't really found in the
Bible.
The bit about doing things in the name of the Father,
the Son and the Holy Spirit is as near as it gets.
It's really
the early church's efforts to put things into words that don't really
go.
They knew, as we know,
that the Father is not the Son
or the Spirit,
the Son is not the Father or the Spirit,
and
the Spirit is not the Father or the Son.
But the Father is God,
the Son is God
and the Holy Spirit is God.
And
yet we don't have three Gods, we only have one God.
That's
basically what it's about, but it's very confusing.
And the
trouble is, most illustrations simply don't give you more than a tiny
glimpse of it, if that.
You can, for instance, think of three
tins of soup –
maybe you have lentil soup, mushroom soup and
chicken soup, which are all different but all soup.
But that
doesn't really help, as soup is soup, whatever flavour you
drink.
Some people like to think of an egg –
the yolk,
the white and the shell.
Or an apple –
the core, the
flesh and the skin.
My own preferred illustration is of
water, ice and steam –
all H2O, but very different
from each other and used for different purposes.
Water is not
ice, and water is not steam;
ice is not water, and ice is not
steam;
steam is not water and steam is not ice.
But water
is H2O, ice is H2O and steam is H2O.
Water
is about drinking and washing;
ice is about skating and cooling
injuries.
Oh, and cooling drinks, too, of course.
And steam
is about clearing your head when you have a cold,
and showing
you that the kettle is boiling....
So it is quite a good
illustration.
But even that is merely a tiny glimpse of
what the Trinity is all about.
Maybe we shouldn't even try to
explain the Trinity –
it's what's called a mystery, meaning
that while we can get a good working image of what it's all about,
we know that it isn't more than an image
and our
conception may well change over time.
We'll never know exactly
what it's all about, because we are not God!
But, as St
Paul points out, we can think of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit!
That
makes it easier, I think.
We might not understand how we can
have three Persons, as the technical term has it, in one God,
but
we can understand a little about the Grace.
We will close this
service, as we close so many services, by wishing one another God's
grace in these very words.
I wonder, then, what we are
actually wishing each other.
Again, when you start to unpack it,
it isn't as easy as it looks.
After all, what, exactly, does
“Grace” mean?
We think we know –
we have a working
model of it –
but again, it's one of those concepts that
really doesn't go into words,
as so many of the things of God
don't.
Oh, we say glibly that it's “God's riches at Christ's
expense”,
and of course that is very much part of it, but
it's only part of it.
Grace is about all that Christ gives to us
in the package we call “salvation”.
We can't earn grace, we
can only accept it as a freebie.
It is everything that Christ
poured out for us on the Cross.
And it is that that we pray for
one another!
And then Love.
Again, how can we put
this into words?
We know what love means –
we think.
But
then, we love strawberries and we love our children and we love our
spouses or partners, and it's not the same sort of love, is it?
If
you want a general definition of love, one can say it is the
condition whereby the happiness and safety of the beloved is of
greater concern than your own.
The happiness and safety of the
beloved is of greater concern than your own.
That, of course,
can't apply to strawberries!
And I would have difficulty in
applying it to our love for God, I think, wouldn't you?
But
I have no difficulty whatsoever in applying it to God's love for
us.
God's love for us is quite beyond our imagination.
It
is constant, unremitting.
God loves each and every one of us as
though we were unique.
It doesn't matter who we are, or what we
have done, or whether we serve Him or not –
God loves us.
In
a way, our prayer ought to start with the love of God,
for it
is from that love that the rest stems.
If God didn't love us, he
would not have sent Jesus, nor the Holy Spirit.
Some of
us here this morning have children, maybe grandchildren.
Anybody
have great-grandchildren?
Well, I don't know about you, but I do
remember that when my daughter was born,
I began to have a
glimpse, just a tiny glimpse of what God's love for us is like.
That
was over 40 years ago, and I am a grandmother now,
but I still
remember it.
That realisation that this, this is
something a tiny bit like how God cares for me!
Amazing!
So,
the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
and the love of God,
and
then, of course, the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit.
The
Fellowship of the Holy Spirit.
Some translations say the
Communion of the Holy Spirit.
You notice it's “of” the Holy
Spirit, just as it is the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and
the love of God.
The
Holy Spirit sends, among other amazing things, fellowship,
communion.
Both with God and with one another.
Yes,
of course, we are friends.
And there are always going to be
people in the church we are more friendly with and less friendly
with, if that makes sense.
But by our very human nature, we're
going to like some people more than we like others.
That's
okay.
But we are given the gift of having fellowship with
everybody in the Church, whether we like them or whether we don't.
We
can sit beside them in worship,
we can study the Scriptures
with them,
we can pray for them and their concerns,
we can
lift them to the Throne of Grace.
And that is the gift of the
Holy Spirit here.
And we can also have fellowship with
God.
That sounds even more amazing, doesn't it?
Fellowship
with God himself, the Creator.
The Father –
Jesus said to
call God “Father”,
but
I know that isn't helpful to everybody, if they have had a poor
relationship with their own father, for instance.
You may
prefer a totally different name for God, and that's okay, too –
and
often, your preferred name for God changes as you travel along your
Christian journey.
We know the Old Testament was full of
different names,
from the plain basic “El” that meant “The
Lord” –
you still get this in names like “Michael” or
“Rachel” or “Gabriel”, or any of those Bible names that end
in “El”.
They all mean something about God –
Michael,
for instance, means “Who is like God?”,
which is a
rhetorical question, of course, because nobody is!
Gabriel means
“Strong man of God”, and so on.....
Anyway, names for God
–
the plain basic “El” that I mentioned, and then a lot of
other ones –
shepherd, judge, redeemer, king, rock.
Or
there is “El Shaddai”, which has several different possible
meanings, including God the Destroyer, or even God with breasts –
but
is mostly used to mean God Almighty.
And talking of God
with breasts, there are a few feminine names for God, which you may
or may not find helpful,
including Lady Love, and Lady
Wisdom.
Some people refer to the Holy Spirit as “She”,
on
the grounds that the Hebrew word, Ruach, is feminine.
There’s
that lovely hymn you may have sung last week – we did at Stockwell
– with the image of a female dove brooding on the water.
Do
so if you find it helpful, but if it irritates you or feels gimmicky,
then don't.
I seem to have wandered rather far from “The
fellowship of the Holy Spirit”.
But today isn't really a day
for understanding, you see.
It's much more of a day for
rejoicing.
I
said at the beginning that
it was a day to celebrate the whole Godness of God, and I rather like
that definition.
We will never even begin to understand who God
is, and that's okay.
We know that we have a loving Father in God
–
or whatever other title we wish to use.
We we know that
we have a Redeemer and a Brother in our Lord Jesus.
And we know
that we are filled with the Holy Spirit, who enables us to grow into
the person God created us to be, and who gives us all we need, and
more beside, to become that person.
And then, there is the
fact that it is a mystery.
That we can't understand or explain
it.
And that's great, too!
So let us rejoice, and give
thanks to God.
Amen.