Trinity Sunday – 2021
John 3:1-17
Marian Free
In the name of God, who creates, redeems and sanctifies. Amen.
At the beginning of the week Quinn, knowing that it was Trinity Sunday today, helpfully sent me an article to read. I was very grateful to receive anything that might give me a different perspective on one of the most difficult theological principles of our faith, but I have to confess that I didn’t find the article at all useful for my purposes. The author, as I recall, warned against trying to preach on the doctrine of the Trinity and suggested instead that the preacher focus on relationship – our relationship with God the Trinity. I have to say that theology (at least academic theology) is not my strong point, so over the past 27 years I have made very few attempts to try to explain the doctrine of the Trinity. So, at least I was safe on that point! Unfortunately, the author of the article really didn’t provide me with any useful way to speak about relationships or at least none that would have helped me to preach on the topic. In fact, nothing that I have read in the past week has given me any ideas that I felt could be used to expand our understanding of and relationship with the Trinity.
Preaching on the Trinity today was not helped by the readings. Apart from the threefold ‘holy’ in Isaiah’s vision, there is little to suggest that God can be experienced as three and yet as one. I’m not sure how to explain this because I would have thought that there were a number of texts throughout our biblical texts that at least hint at the threefold nature of God. In other words, the Trinitarian nature of God is not just a theological principle, nor did the idea arise in isolation at the Incarnation or at Pentecost. It certainly, did not develop in a vacuum in the third or fourth centuries of the current era when the Athanasian Creed was penned. That is to say, that while our forebears in faith believed firmly that there was only one God, the Old Testament does provide clues that the oneness of God is complex and that the one God who we profess can be experienced in more than one way. From Genesis on, there are references to the Spirit (Moses was filled with the divine spirit and the prophets were empowered by the spirit of the Lord. In the Book of Proverbs (3:9), the figure of Wisdom is described as co-creator of God (much in the same way that John’s gospel speaks of the ‘Word’ – ‘In the beginning was the Word and the word was with God’ and so on.
Christians can argue that God’s nature did not fundamentally change with the birth of Jesus and the coming of the spirit (of course that would be ridiculous). However, in the light of the Jesus’ event our understanding of, and the language we use for God changed.
This is evident in the earliest Christian writings – the letters of Paul. Completely unselfconsciously Paul uses the expressions God, Lord and Spirit interchangeably (notably in Romans 8). Most famously perhaps is the greeting with which he concludes 2 Corinthians “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you all.” I don’t imagine for one minute, that Paul, being a Jew was abandoning the one true God of his ancestors, but that he now felt God encompassed Jesus and the Spirit. Later, Matthew’s gospel would conclude with Jesus’ instruction to the disciples that they: “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, The Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
The language we use for God has ancient roots, it was only in the face of division and that the church felt it necessary to come up with an agreed position or doctrine as to how God could be both one and three. It is this, the doctrine of the Trinity, that I find it so difficult to explain or teach, but that does not mean that I am not absolutely convinced of the importance of worshipping God as one and God as three and I am equally convinced that our relationship with God should be with God the Trinity – Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier.
Perhaps the book that has had the most impact on me is The Divine Dance by the Franciscan brother Richard Rohr. Unfortunately, it is impossible to share with you the contents of the book as Richard does not write in a linear fashion but circles around on himself so that while it is possible to get the sense of what he is saying it is not so easy to explain it. It is the images, not the words that I have found particularly helpful, and I share them in case they help you to make sense of the extraordinary nature of God.
I now think of the Trinity primarily in terms of relationship – the relationships within the Trinity and our relationship with the Trinity as part of the Trinity. In my mind’s eye the Trinity is something like electrons held within a sphere. In this image the electrons are pure energy – spinning within the space – bound not by a nucleus, but by each other, relating to and dependent on each other participating in a never-ending dance – moving in and out and around, touching and separating, empowering and being empowered, drawing energy from one another yet never being depleted. The power of this image for me, is that there is room for all of us to join in the dance. The sphere which I can hold in my imagination, is in fact boundless. It can hold within it all creation and all creation is invited to be caught up in, to be part of and to be held by the whirling, spinning energy that is the Trinity. Our relationship with God is one of participation in, not separation from and, if our energy flags, it is of no consequence – the energy of the three holds us, heals us and restores us until we are ready to re-join the dance.
As the members of the Trinity relate to and energise each other, so we, taking our place in the relationship that pre-exists us draw our power and our renewal from the very source.
In the end though it is all about the heart and our relationship with the one God whom we know as Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier.
Swallowsrest 