Trinity Sunday
Sermon
Trinity Sunday
26 May 2024
The Reverend Caroline Brownlie
From the Council of Chalcedon: “it is salutary to recall that in ‘spinning out’ some of the most elaborate speculation on the doctrine of the Trinity, Augustine explained that “I have done this, not to presume to describe this mystery, as though I were speaking the mind of God, but so as not to be altogether silent; and I begged forgiveness when my speculation had gone too far!”
I echo Augustine’s words with wry thanks this morning; I’m going to ‘park’ the 3+C’s of speculation which led first to the assertion of Jesus’ divinity with God in 325 and then in 381 the inclusion of the Spirit’s divinity at the Council of Constantinople …isn’t the 56 year gap intriguing, partly explained by lingering hesitation, difficulty (with the less definable action of the Spirit; which makes Him more difficult to pin down in human terms; have we sometimes found this hesitation in ourselves at one stage? We have undeniable evidence of a Creator, and in Jesus the human experience of God known as His Father; did the largely male theologians find that the Spirit couldn’t be defined in the same factual way, so took that extra time to decide with the distinct quality of evidence in Paul’s 8th Ch of the Letter to the Romans, that the Spirit could no longer be excluded from faith in a triune God.
So recalling Augustine’s understandable desire to stay silent, let’s think about what we together and as individuals can and want to say with conviction, about this ultimate divine mystery, but which took so long to humanly articulate, and we still use as our foundation in the creed.
We can agree that it was from Scripture that the first inchoate images began to emerge which would so much later be defined as the Trinitarian doctrine. “and the Spirit of God moved upon the waters” could not be any earlier on in Biblical witness to God as the Source of all creation and humankind. (Count the refs. in concordance for OT). In Isaiah’s prophetic wisdom we have the whole archetypal figure of the Suffering Servant, bearing our sins and carrying our sorrows, despised and rejected of men. Without the 000’s of references to the Spirit of God, we have the paternal image of God choosing his people, saving them and bringing them to the Promised Land, shepherding them and leading them forever, through Exodus and Exile and retaining a Remnant right up to the door of the New Testament. One of the reasons for the delay in according the Spirit divinity, was the powerful witness of John’s Gospel to the unity and oneness of the relationship between Father and Son which Jesus lived in and out; other theologians drew equal attention to Jesus’ identity between Himself and the Holy Spirit, especially in the gift of His universal presence potentially and actually within the world when his time of human identity had been taken up to His father; to which was added, John’s understanding of the always eternal existence of the Word with God, which was gradually integrated with the early churches experience of the human Jesus. The classical understanding in debates about the Trinity, belief in God as divine, was accompanied by the obvious revelation of God’s actions in the world, Creation Incarnation and Pentecost, which they called His ‘economy’ and were recognised as the distinct work and actions of the three Persons within one God.
Our readings this morning coherently express; Isaiah’s vision of God, in terms of God’s glory and our humanity placed in His presence for a purpose. We have John’s In-spired, i.e. breathed-in Spirit, in decades of long reflection on the significance of Jesus humanity; we are witness to Nicodemus’ experience of Jesus’ authority in explaining the radical new life the Holy Spirit gives, as Jesus describes Himself as descending from God and ascending again as the Son of Man, God’s representative of all humanity as John understood it. Scripture coherently, consistently and repeatedly witnesses to this, which we all rely on and have to make authentically our own from our own history, personality and gifts. How many times in our Eucharistic liturgy do we re-iterate the three-fold invocation more or less consciously; in our Evening prayers we constantly refer to the Persons of the Trinity when we thank God for Creation, for our hard-won Salvation, and His continuing guiding love daily in the Spirit. Trinity is the In-Spired name of what is actually in the Christian DNA, aspects of our actual experience of relationship with God, of living in the world which He created; of believing that Jesus in three human years, less than the blink of an eye, revealed God to us and that we could call Him Father, and then promised that none of us in the Past, the Present and the Future, would ever be alone with that faith. In the NT the Spirit can always be identified as the actual but invisible presence of the same Person, lest anyone should try and disconnect Him from their human experience of the Son. We see interwoven relationships between Persons, a simple chronologica development, common identity, and yet distinct activity in each Person, which culminated in the 4thC doctrine which we shall soon assert.
God is Spirit, and you must worship Him in Spirit and in Truth, says Jesus to the woman at the well; in comparison with the age of the Universe and our earth, 13 billion+ the world has experienced God as invisible Spirit for all but three human years ….. this is His mysterious and sometimes frustrating way for us while we’re here, which could be why Jesus commends all of us “who have not seen yet believe” …. and why our human understanding must always be humble and provisional, whatever we are attempting to comprehend God. We rightly pin a great deal on those 3 years, but how reassuring to realise just how miniscule they were, that it is by God’s Spirit that the Universe has been sustained; when we realise how vitally important those years were for the Church and humanity, it gives us a mathematical ratio of the degree to which our relationship with Jesus is vital to our life within the world by His ongoing presence in us which never ends and carries us through and beyond death.
Scriptural foundation, credal conviction, our lived experiences. We live in the world as it is now, so I think there is ample encouragement from many of the discoveries of later centuries, not least the emergence of understanding just how patriarchal the Biblical model is, for us to ask, as many contemporary theologians and feminist thinkers are doing; what does the Spirit leading us into all truth mean; what does there are many things I cannot tell you now, mean? What does it mean for us to assert new understanding and aspects of the Truth embedded in canonically orthodox Scripture, when we can’t add to the book of Revelation? In the Ordinal we hear that we must interpret the Truth, ‘truth freshly revealed in each age’ …. We might ask what authority, theologies which are evolving, will be given, particularly in relation to the source and understanding of the feminine in God; theologies which could redress the balance between that and embedded patriarchy in Scripture which allow a renewed and prayerful thinking about the Trinity, without letting go of our foundations; Jesus reminded us himself “God is not God of the dead but of the living” and we know His Creation continues to be revealed all around us, in new discoveries in all human fields of exploration.
Celebrating this faith, three possibilities for our prayer both corporate and personal … for Alertness and Appreciation of the influence of the Trinity both in liturgy, in our relationships with God and one another, the pattern of which, They reflect to us; for trust in the evolving In-Sights which the Spirit wants to reveal in us, in the Church and in the world of God; and for Gratitude to God for the centuries of struggle to articulate Truth of the three fold revelation with which we live and live to make our own.
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and shall be for ever, Amen.
