Three ways the Trinity matters

Sermon for 18 June 2000, 11:15 Matins, Trinity Sunday, St Mary Magdalen, Sheet, published on www.trikeshed.com

Bible reading: John 3:1-17

One Saturday, at the age of about eight, I was faced with a choice – trials for the Cubs’ football team or singing at three weddings on one Saturday, for nine shillings. The weddings got my vote, I’ve played very little football since, and the decision set the seal on regular attendance at Church and choir, which (by the way) gave me my love of the services of Matins and Evensong. I particularly remember the unfolding of the Church year, from Advent to Christmas, Epiphany, those funny named Sundays Septuagesima and Sexagesima (choirboy snigger), Lent, Easter, Ascension, Whitsunday. And then those interminable Sundays after Trinity! Thank God for the summer holidays at least.

What a strange festival to name all those Sundays after! It occurs to me that Trinity Sunday is the only major Christian festival that isn’t named after an event or a person. There’s no story of the Trinity. The word doesn’t even appear once in the Bible. No, we are celebrating today a doctrine – what a dry-sounding word. If this were a family service and I was looking for a visual aid, I’d find it a tough task. Actually, I did try once, I put up a tent in church. The Trinity was the poles, the pegs and the guy-ropes, all three necessary to keep the tent up!

It certainly has been important in the history of the Church, right from that early greeting of Paul "may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, .." and the practice of baptism in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The doctrine took some time to develop – first, the idea of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit occupying different periods; then the Holy Spirit as a kind of glue to stick the Father and the Son together. Deep theological questions – is the Son subordinate to the Father? Did the Father produce the Son and the Son the Spirit? Or is it more that God really is three, right at the foundations as it were – this is the view that Augustine developed and which by and large is what the Church teaches and believes now. But then when you think of all the arguments, the East-West debate over whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father or from the Father and the Son, one does begin to ask – does it matter? You have after all a whole and very noble branch of the Church, Unitarians, founded on denying the whole idea.

Well I would like to share with you three ways it does matter. Why it’s important to have a Trinity Sunday and why it beats giving Dad a few golf balls or whatever it is you do for Father’s Day [also today].

First it reminds us that the God we worship is not reducible to one point or thing. If God were as it were monolithic, however powerful and mighty he may be, there would always be the danger that we would feel that we had somehow encompassed him in our understanding – comprehended him. But to remember that God is Father, God is Jesus, God is Holy Spirit, is to admit that we can’t pin him down. He’s over there, but he’s over here. From time to time in the history of the Church there has been a special emphasis on one of the three persons of the Trinity, but that emphasis has never been allowed to last too long. If you think of the last century for example, you begin with Victorian paternalism, God the Father, with the demands he makes on us. Later a completely different movement very much centred on the historical Christ, Jesus the revolutionary, Liberation theology. Then in the last quarter of the century, the charismatic movement, wonderful rediscovering of the power of the Holy Spirit. What richness comes from our fundamental belief that God is three – what a good way to dissuade us from being complacent in our belief.

A second way that the Trinity matters to us is that it reminds us of the paradox of our faith. As a choirboy, the phrase "Three in One" reminded me of the little can of oil we kept in our garage. But it’s quite a hard concept – a sign of the poverty of our language. He is one God, he is three persons. They are all the same, yet distinct. A good Sri Lankan Buddhist friend told me that as a Christian I worshipped three Gods. No, I said, one God. So Jesus was not God. Oh, Jesus is God I said. So God died on the cross, leaving the world unprotected? And so on. No easy answers, especially for the scientific mind? Or perhaps not any more. Because the exciting thing about science in the last century is that it has revealed just as many paradoxes – quantum physics; we can no longer say something is here or it weighs this much or is moving this fast – there is always uncertainty. Time can go backwards. Is light particles or waves? Science has finally caught up with the idea that you have to keep truths in tension, and I think the Three in One and One in Three is a wonderful example of this.

But the third way that the Trinity matters is perhaps more profound and more likely to affect our lives. Because the Trinity gives us the great truth that right at the heart of our worship is certainly not a thing, not even just a person, but a relationship. The great love for the world that God has which is described so beautifully in our Gospel reading (John 3:16) is not just a quality that God possesses and doles out to us, but is actually part of God, part of this Trinity. When you think of any great duo of performers, actors or comedians say, you can celebrate their individual gifts but also you see that the way they work together gives them what is almost a personality, which goes beyond both of them In an incredibly unsatisfactory but just slightly true way, that illustrates something about the Trinity. The great love between Father and Son is, if you like, the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit of love between them – a love that is so deep and intimate that it is no longer a thing or a quality but a third person. That is why the phrase God is Love, which rolls almost too easily off the tongue, is such an immensely profound phrase.

If I may be permitted a slight indulgence to finish, let me put a little vision to you. It is the hope that the love between us, as couples, as fathers and sons and daughters and mothers, as families and friends, will be as deep and intimate that the world is filled with little Trinities. The love that we share is not just something God wants us to do and shows as how to do, but it makes us truly part of God’s being. I pray that today, and for the next nineteen Sundays "after Trinity" and beyond, we may live out the richness, and the paradox, and the love that is the one Holy Trinity of three, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen

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