A Sermon preached on
Holy Trinity Sunday
A sermon preached by
John Hull in the chapel of the Queen’s Foundation,
Today the Church celebrates the Holy
Trinity. It is not as obviously dramatic and exciting as Christmas and Easter,
but it is the summary and climax of the Church’s year. Many churches celebrate
September and October as the time of creation, and this is followed by the
season of Advent, when we prepared for the coming of God in mercy and judgement,
which was followed by the celebration of Christmas and then the series of
events through Lent, the entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, Good Friday, the
Resurrection, the Ascension, and finally the coming of the Holy Spirit at
Whitsun which was last Sunday. So we have celebrated the actions of God the
Creator, the Redeemer, and the Life-Giver and now we put them all together into
today which is the celebration of God.
Today is also Father’s Day, which is
perhaps not a very happy coincidence. I say this because if we speak of God in
the traditional way, then two-thirds of the persons of the Holy Trinity are
male, the Father and the Son, and the third is kind of neutral, since the word
for spirit, pneuma, is neuter, neutral in Greek. To combine this with Father’s
Day seems to emphasis the maleness of these descriptions. Speaking strictly,
there is no reason why we shouldn’t refer to Mother, Daughter and the Holy
Spirit, but this language tends to jar a bit. It is more difficult to find it
in the tradition and anyway we would still have the problem of attributing
gender to God. For this reason, many people today prefer to speak of Creator
God, Eternal Word and Holy Spirit, and another style is to speak of Creator,
Redeemer and Life-Giver. I wanted to mention this because I do not think that
we should just accept the traditional language uncritically but should be aware
of its limitations.
The first positive thing I want to
mention about the Holy Trinity is that it is a social Trinity, the life of a
social God. The Orthodox Churches of the East have a beautiful way of
describing this. They use an ancient Greek word which means ‘dancing in a
circle’, like the chorus in the ancient Greek theatre. This means that the
persons or the modes of God weave in and out of each other in a blissful,
dynamic circle.
The social God offers us a model for
human community. If God was a solitary God, so to speak, it would be too much
like the rule of a benevolent dictator, and if it was a binary, just two
persons, the Father and the Son, this would suggest a kind of mutual
preoccupation of one with the other like two human lovers, who only have eyes
for each other. But three is a society.
Moreover, it is a society of equals,
for the persons of the Trinity are equal in that they equally form the Godhead
and so Christian communities should also be communities of equality, of mutuality,
and of joyful sharing.
Secondly, the Holy Trinity is an
inclusive society. On the one hand, it is true that God is in Heaven and we
humans are on Earth. God is often described as being wholly other i.e.
completely different and unique from us. But for Christians that is only half
of the story. In John chapter seventeen, sometimes described as the High
Priestly prayer of Jesus, Jesus prays that those who love him may be one with
him, just as he is one with the Father. In other words, the unity of love
within the Holy Trinity includes us within its blissful circle. Again, we can
turn to the Eastern church to find a word for this. The Orthodox Churches speak
of the process of theosis, the way
that human beings may be transformed so as to share the very nature of God.
There is indeed a place in one of the later letters of the New Testament where
the apostle speaks of ‘becoming partakers of the divine nature’.
This means that in our human
communities we should also seek to be inclusive. The church becomes the mirror
of the Holy Trinity when everyone is accepted whether male or female, white or
black, rich or poor, gay or straight. There are borders around the Christian
community, but they are porous. The church is marked out by a series of welcome
mats and not by a brick wall.
Now our thoughts must take a darker
turn. God is not only social and inclusive but is also a suffering God. In the
early church, people did not like to speak of God the Father as suffering. They
somehow thought that this was inappropriate for the divine nature. They
believed that it was only as the Son of God in the person of Jesus Christ that
God suffered.
Today, however, that point of view is
much less common. In his wonderful description of the unity of the human body,
Paul says that when one member suffers all the other members of the body suffer
with it. If this is true of the human body, how much more true must it be of
the three-personed God, each of whom dwells in and for the other? Just think of
it in human emotional terms. How could the Father see his Son suffering on the cross
and not suffer with him? This would take us into the cruel idea that the Father
sent the Son to suffer or even punished the Son! This would indeed be God the
abusive father. But we believe that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to
himself, and in this action God accepted responsibility for the suffering
world, and participated in it.
Finally, God is the one who was and is
to come. Some people say that this could also mean the God who was is, and will
become. For if God is the perfection of being, why should not God also be
perfect in becoming? If we think of God in this way, we may regard God as being
God in process. The life of God is enriched with all the novelty, the newness
of life. In this sense, God is continually being magnified, surpassed by none
but continually surpassing himself. So God is not the cold, distant first
cause, the one who setting everything in motion stands back at a distance to
watch it. No, the Holy Trinity is the companion of the cosmos, the one who
adventures in freedom with the freedom of creation. The one who as the Jewish
proverb says ‘endows our finite days with eternal worth’.
Let us then rejoice in the richness,
the harmony, the suffering heart and the promise held out by God the Holy
Trinity. Let us model our communities upon the society of God; let us be
inclusive as the all-loving God; let us participate in the suffering of the
world from which God has nowhere to hide, and let us live in hope that beyond
all expectations, beyond all despair, there is one who is to come who is still
to be.
O sacred and profound Trinity! Thou
art a depth in which all our thoughts are drowned! How great is thy wisdom; how
beautiful thy plan for the world. Draw us into your life that we may be sharers
in your nature, and come at last to the fullness of your life. Amen.
References
John
17:11, 21
2
Peter 1:4
1
Corinthians 12:26
2
Corinthians 5:19
Revelation
1: 8
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