SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELISTNAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
TRINITY SUNDAY
(31st May) 2015
Readings: Isaiah 6:1-8
Psalm
29Romans 8:12-17
John 3:1-17
I
was well into my thirties before I first heard the expression “Daddy-o, Laddy-o
and Spook” – perhaps under the influence of James K. Baxter we might say
“chook”[1] – as a description of the
Most Sacred and Mysterious Trinity. It tickled my fancy, and while I might be
wrong I suspect the Most Sacred and Mysterious Trinity has (not have!) sufficient humour to understand
and enjoy the irony of it: it exemplifies humanity struggling with the
impossibility of encapturing the mystery of divinity. If we are offended by the
gentle playfulness of the expression, or dismiss it as disrespectful, then we
are ourselves missing the point that the mystery of tri-unity is simply beyond
the fumblings of human expression or the meanderings of human comprehension.
I
remember well as I entered theological college the despair of those of my
colleagues who had entered training from a scientific or pragmatic background.
If we are used to a world in which e = mc2,
or in which one foot equals 30.48 centimetres, or the square of the hypotenuse
is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides (a2 + b2 = c2) then there is
something desperately bewildering about three-in-one and one-in-three, or even
about a human who is simultaneously divine, and indeed a triune divinity who
has eternally absorbed humanity. I watched the theologs struggle, and wondered
why. I came from a world in which
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune – without the words,
And never stops at all
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune – without the words,
And never stops at all
(Emily Dickenson)
I saw no need to reduce God, the source of
hope and love and faith and life and light to mere equations. Which is not to
say, incidentally, that I accepted the much touted theological equation that
“God is a metaphor,” because I maintain God the Creator is far beyond the
limitations even of metaphorical language: God needs no vehicle, in grammatical
terms.
Still: metaphor is a useful tool, and
probably more useful than the modern penchant for scientific rationalism, when
we come to explore the mysteries of God. The Trinity, I emphasize, is the
doctrine by which Christianity stands or falls. Jettison Trinity and we no
longer have the God of our sacred scriptures, no matter what Jehovah’s
Witnesses might tell us. Anne had a friend who once declared to her that, if
Christianity got rid of the doctrines of Incarnation and Trinity he could go along
with it. Ali was a Muslim. Rid ourselves of the doctrines of Incarnation and
Trinity and we are likely to find ourselves either Muslim or Jewish. Both are
fine faiths, but neither of them is the Christian faith (nor, I suggest, is
Unitarianism or the Jehovah’s Witness faith).
The Trinity is the doctrine by which
Christianity stands or falls. But if all we have is a divine and even darker version
of the story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac, then we have no good news to
share, just a murderous god. So much of our language of faith has hooked into
the imagery of blood-sacrifice and failed to move on from there. We are left
with Daddy-o murdering Laddy-o, for us. To be left there is to be left with an
image unrelenting in its brutality, an image out of which much inhumaneness in
the name of God has been spawned, not least against God’s chosen Jewish people.
To be left there is to be left too with a binitarian, rather than a trinitarian
faith. To be left there is to be left with no language of love, and it is no
accident that this God-as-murderer binitarian faith often spawns the language
of anti-Semitic, anti-gay, anti-other hatred.
The language of the Trinity, deeply immersed
in the exploration by the first Christians of countless Hebrew and Greek
Testament texts, the language of the Trinity is the language of love-making. It
is the language of God making love and making creation and making redemption
and making hope. It is the language of making possible our reciprocal making of
love to God. Just as the rhythms of human love-making are not merely about
procreation, not merely explicable by the need to propagate a species, so the
language of the Trinity is the language of eternal love, interpenetration, and
the making of room even for us in the complexities of the universe and its
eternities.
The language of the Trinity is the language
that is born deep in the bowels of Jewish and Christian people as they were
grasped by the magnificence of a Creator, who didn’t need to create, yet
a Creator who does not leave humanity or creation abandoned, a Creator who
cares and redeems. It is language that is born deep in the bowels of Christians
as they realized that all the justice and forgiveness and righteousness and
healing and redemption that the God of the Hebrews had made known to the Old
Covenant People of God, all that was now available to them in the person
and life and death and above all resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, our
Christ-Messiah. It is the language that is born deep in the bowels of worshipping
Christians as they realized that all the meaning and pressure and impact of
Jesus of Nazareth the Christ-Messiah was not limited to a few years in first
century Palestine but was spreading out through space and time to all who would
open themselves up to that meaning and pressure and impact no matter where or
when. Trinitarian language is the language of praise and adoration and love-making
to and from God in an eternal interchange, an eternal dance that is far beyond
mere human rationality.
The language of the Trinity is the language
that says the experience of humans journeying through birth and suffering and
death, through grief as well as through laughter, through war as well as peace,
reunion as well as separation, depression and elation, through the whole gamut
of human experience, is taken up in the Ascension, deep and inexplicably into
the eternal heart of Godhead; there God the Creator, God the Redeemer, God the
Vivifier participates in your experience and mine, even when we don’t know or
acknowledge or understand it and even to the point where we might cry out “there
is no God”, for Jesus did that too. There in the heart of the triune God our
whole experience is transformed into, caught up in the Easter promise of
eternity and we are invited to journey eternally in Christlight.
TLBWY
1 comment:
I really liked it and will give it a bit more time again when in the zone....
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