Trinity Sunday 2024

 

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
and, some years, the time when he was a teenager and stayed behind in the Temple rather than going home with his family.
Then we skip a few years and remember his ministry,
his arrest, death and resurrection,
and his ascension into heaven.
Then, as last week, 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 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.

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!

One picture I rather like is of H₂O –
dihydrogen monoxide.
Which, as you probably realise, can be a solid – ice,
a liquid – water,
or a gas – steam.
All of which look and behave totally differently,
and are used for totally different things, but they are all H₂O –
and life as we know it would be impossible without it!

There are many other pictures, of course.
I have heard people talk of an apple –
skin, flesh and core.
Or an egg –
shell, white and yolk.
Or perhaps three tins of soup –
lentil, tomato and mulligatawny –
all different, but all soup.
But none of these images, helpful as they might be,
is more than just the tiniest corner of a picture of what the Trinity is like.

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!

Of course, the terms “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” aren’t the only ones people use to refer to the Trinity.
I’ve heard people say “Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier”, or “God the Unknown, God the Known, God the Worker of Miracles”.
And there are plenty of other names for God used in the Bible:
the Good Shepherd,
the Rock,
Strength and Refuge,
Provider,
Emmanuel, which means “God with us”,
even Wisdom, a female personification.
And, of course, all those names do show us aspects, glimpses of Who God is –
we can never grasp all of God, and it wouldn’t be right to try.
Even Moses, you remember, was only allowed to see the merest glimpse of the shadow of God’s back,
and that was nearly too much for him.
But finding a name, an aspect of God, that you need right now,
can help enormously in one’s prayers, I find.
And that changes as we grow and change, and as our perception of God grows and changes, and as life happens.
This week, we might find it helpful to pray to the Good Shepherd;
perhaps yesterday we needed to pray to Lady Wisdom, or Lady Love;
maybe tomorrow we will need to meditate on the Rock, or the Shadow of a great Rock in a weary land.
The Bible never actually uses the word “Trinity” –
it’s a term that came later when they tried to put it into words.
Strikes me, it’s one of the things that we human beings like to do,
to try to put things into words that won’t actually go!
Understandable, really, but it doesn’t always help.
But the Bible does have the concept of the Trinity –
it speaks of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,
all as God, yet makes it very clear that God is One!
That lovely reading from Isaiah, that was our first reading this morning, about our Creator:

“Have you not known?
Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint,
and strengthens the powerless.
Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted;
but those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.”

Says it all, doesn’t it!
And today is not really a day for deep theological reflection, nor a day for self-examination to see where our lives don’t measure up to God’s standards.
It’s a day for enjoying God and praising him!

“Have you not known?
Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
Amen!”

The Treasurer

“Here is some water.
What is to keep me from being baptised?”

This is an odd little story, the one we heard from Acts, isn't it?
I wonder who these people were,
what they were doing,
and, above all, why it matters to us this morning.

Well, finding out who these people are is probably the least difficult part of it.
The man was, we are told, a eunuch who held a high post in the government of the Queen of Ethiopia.
Now, we do know a little about her
her official title was Candace, or Kandake, or even Kentake
nobody is really sure,
but if you know somebody called Candace,
that's where the name comes from.
Anyway, this one was called Amanitore, apparently,
and her royal palace of Jebel Barkal in the Sudan
is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Her tomb is also in the Sudan, in a place called Meroë.
Confusingly, the area that our Bibles call “Ethiopia” or “Kush” is actually in what is now Sudan,
and present-day Ethiopia was then the Kingdom of the Axumites!
Anyway, the Queen isn't important, except that you should understand that she was a ruler in her own right, not just a regent
Amanitore, for instance, was co-ruler with Natakamani,
who may have been her husband, but was more probably her son.
The Candaces were very powerful, and could order their sons to end their rule by committing suicide if necessary.
So a senior treasury official in her government would be a pretty high mucky-muck back then.

We know rather more about his employer, though, than we do about the treasury official himself.
He might not even have been a Kushite, which is the more proper term for Ethiopians back then –
the word “Ethiop” in Greek basically just means someone from sub-Saharan Africa.
He probably was a eunuch, though;
many people in positions of authority were, in those days, rather like in the Middle Ages in this country they were usually in holy orders of some kind.
Basically they were people who were celibate, for whatever reason, so as not to have divided loyalties between their job and their families –
with all the stuff one hears about work-life balance,
and the sort of hours people who work for American companies are expected to put in, maybe they had a point!
Although, of course, the people in the Middle Ages were voluntarily celibate, which our friend could not have been.
He was probably a slave, or at least born into slavery,
and brought up to eventually get this high and trustworthy position.
There is, of course, plenty of form for this –
look at Joseph, who was sold into slavery in Egypt but ended up as a hugely influential administrator in Pharoah's court.

And the same was true for this man.
We don't know his name, which is unfortunate as I don't like to keep referring to him as “The Eunuch” as though it were the most important thing about him, so let's call him “The Treasurer”.
He was probably born into slavery, maybe into a family who belonged to the Ethiopian court, and raised from an early age to serve the Royal Family.
I have no idea what sort of education he would have had,
but he obviously was an educated man;
he could read, which was not very usual in that day and age,
and what is more, he could read Greek or Hebrew, I am not sure which,
but neither could have been his first language.

And when we meet him, he has just been to Jerusalem to worship God.
Again, I have no idea how he became what's called a God-fearer, a non-Jew who worships God without converting to Judaism,
but he could not have been a convert, or proselyte as they were known, because he was a eunuch,
and the Old Testament forbids anybody mutilated in that way to enter the Temple.
And now he is on his way home –
he must have been a pretty high-up official to have been allowed to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, don't you think?

I wonder whether he bought his copy of the Book of Isaiah during his visit?
I don't know whether it was in the Greek translation known as the Septuagint, or whether he had been able to read Hebrew and buy one of the Hebrew versions.
Jewish men could all read, because they were expected to read the Scriptures in their services,
but elsewhere the skill was not that common long before printing was even thought of,
when all manuscripts had to be copied by hand.
So a copy of the book of Isaiah would have been very valuable.
And he had one, and was reading it during his journey, but not really understanding what he read, and doubtless wishing for someone to come and explain it to him.

That someone turned out to be Philip the Evangelist.
Now, this isn't the Apostle Philip, the one who tends to be partnered with Bartholomew in the lists of apostles;
he's a different Philip.
We first meet this one early in the Book of Acts,
when the gathering of believers is getting a bit large, and the Jewish and Greek believers are squabbling over the distribution of food.
Philip and seven other people were appointed deacons to sort it out for them.
Philip would have been Greek –
it's a Greek name –
but he might also have been Jewish,
since he was fairly obviously resident in Jerusalem around then.

He, incidentally, is the chap who ends up with four daughters who prophesy who entertains St Paul on his way back to Jerusalem later on in Acts.

But for now, he is wanted on the old road between Jerusalem and Gaza and, prompted by the Holy Spirit, he goes there and walks alongside the Treasurer in his carriage –
I expect the horse was only going at walking pace.
Back then, the concept of reading to yourself was, I believe, unknown, and everybody always read aloud, even if only under their breath,
so he would soon have known what the Treasurer was reading, and was intrigued:

“Do you understand what you're reading?”
This man, an obvious foreigner, someone who obviously wasn't Jewish, probably didn't know the traditions at all
what on earth was he finding in the book?

And the Treasurer admits that yes, actually, he is a bit lost.... and Philip explains it all, and explains about how the prophet was referring to Jesus, which of course meant explaining all about Jesus.
And so the Ethiopian challenges him:
“Okay, there's some water.
Any reason I shouldn't be baptised?”

He couldn't be accepted in the Temple as a Jew –
would these followers of the Way –
they were barely called “Christians” yet –
would they accept the likes of him, or was this going to be another disappointment?
I can hear a challenge in his voice, can't you?
The Authorised version, which some of you may still like to read, claims he made a profession of faith,
but apparently that's not in the earliest manuscripts available and has been left out of more recent translations.

“Why can't I be baptised?”
Well, there was no good reason.
Jesus loved him and died for him, and Philip knew that, so he baptised him.
And then left the new young Christian to cope as best he could, while the Holy Spirit took Philip off to the next thing.

It is a strange story, and I know I've spent rather a long time on it, but it intrigues me.
You can't help comparing it with the story of Cornelius,
a couple of chapters later.
Cornelius, too, is an outsider, a member of the Army of Occupation, a Gentile
but he, too, loves God and wants to know more.
And Peter is sent to help him, although Jewish Peter needed a lot more persuading than Greek Philip to go and help.
And again, it is clear that God approves, and Cornelius and his household are baptised.

The thing is, this was an age when the Church was gaining new converts every day –
three thousand in one day, we're told, after Pentecost.
How come these two are picked out as special?

I think it's because they are special.
These are the outsiders, the misfits.
They aren't your average Jewish person in the Holy Land of those days.
Cornelius is a member of the hated Roman army;
but at least he lives in Caesarea and might have been expected to pick up one or two ideas about local culture and so on.
But the Treasurer?
He is not only a Gentile, but of a completely different race, and a different sexuality.
A total and utter outsider, in fact.

But he is accepted!
That's the whole point, isn't it?
There was nothing to stop him being baptised.
The Holy Spirit made it quite clear to Philip that this man was loved, accepted and forgiven and could be baptised with the contents of his water-flask!

How difficult we make it, sometimes.
We agonise over who is a Christian and who isn't.
We wonder what behaviour might put people right away from God.
And sometimes we cut ourselves off from God by persisting in behaviour, or patterns of thought, that we know God doesn't like, and we aren't comfortable in God's company.
And yet God makes it so simple:
“Here is some water.
What is to keep me from being baptised?”
And the answer, so far as God is concerned, is “Nothing”.
Anybody, anybody at all, who stretches out a tentative hand, even a tentative finger, to God is gathered up and welcomed into his Kingdom.
I don't know what happens when it's people like Professor Alice Roberts or David Attenborough who really don't want God to exist –
I suppose that when people say “No, thank you!” to God,
God respects their wishes, even if that means He is deprived of their company, which He so wanted and longed for.

The Treasurer, the Ethiopian Eunuch, was the most complete outsider, from the point of view of the first Christians, that it was possible to imagine.
And yet God accepted him and welcomed him, and he went on his way rejoicing.
We aren't told what happened to him.
Was he able to meet up with other Christians?
Was he able to keep in touch with the early Christian communities and learn more about early Christian thinking?
We don't know.
We aren't told anything more about him –
but then, I don't suppose Philip ever heard any more.
Our Gospel reading minded us that unless you abide in Jesus you wither away
or perhaps more properly that your faith does –
and perhaps that happened to him.
We will never know.
But perhaps he did abide in Jesus.
Perhaps, even without fellowship and teaching and the Sacrament and the other Means of Grace we find so important,
perhaps he still went on following Jesus as best he knew how.
I hope he did.
Maybe his relationship with God would have been purer and stronger than ours is, because there wouldn't have been anybody to tell him that he was doing it all wrong.

“Here is some water.
What is to keep me from being baptised?”
We have, I think, all been baptised;
possibly as babies or perhaps when we were older –
but what keeps us from entering into the full relationship with God that this implies?
My friends, if there is something between you and God, put it down now,
come back to God and rest and rejoice in Him.
There are no outsiders in God's kingdom –
everybody is welcome, and that includes you, and that includes me!
Amen.

And as soon as we started the next hymn I realised what I should have said, so said it before the notices - because God loves and accepts absolutely anybody, we need to love and accept them, too. I didn't have time to unpack this, but if I preach this sermon again, I'll be sure to work it in!