bloody impossible doctrines of love!

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S NORTH OAMARU

and St Alban’s, Kurow

TRINITY SUNDAY (June 12^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

 

Proverbs 8: 1-4, 22-31

Psalm 8

Romans 5: 1-5

John 16:12-15

Let’s start, unusually enough for me as one dwelling at the extreme edges of chaos, but let’s start from something like the beginning. If there is something that drives me bananas then it is the countless stream of Christians – mainly clergy I’m afraid – who reach the point where they decide that because they cannot understand or explain the Trinity then it is all nonsense, a barrier to church growth, and let's get rid of it.

As John Franklin said in our Gospel Conversations  this past week, to explain the road code to a three year old is a hopeless task, indeed a pointless task. As it happens I know, admire and obey the road code, at least most of the time, and that is enough without knowing the intricate reasons for its design. There are as it happens reasons why most countries in the world drive on the right and we of the once British Empire drive on the left, but that really doesn’t concern me, and so I leave it alone. As the much-covered Iris DeMent song goes, “Let the Mystery Be.” Perhaps the comparison’s not quite the right one for me and there will be others for you. I'm more or less happy to accept the workings of a  continuous variable transmission – though I confess it would not be my choice (give me a good old clutch pedal and gear stick any day) – but while the words make some sense to me the scientific constructions are way beyond me. The same will be said of photosynthesis or a myriad other things that make up my life or yours each day.

I’m lucky I guess, that I have no difficulty with the theology of Trinity. But nor do I want to explain this wonderful language of love, because like all language of love it collapses in a puff of inadequate logic. The readings we have today, and countless others we could have, are merely scratching towards the immeasurable mysteries of a Triune God.

So it is the language of love. It is the language of being loved by God and of loving God, of being known by God (as the great Psalm 139 puts it), and of knowing God at least in some miniscule way, and of wanting to know more of God. 

This is the God who inexplicably decides to create or generate or whatever a universe – or an infinity of universes perhaps – and does so. That same God breathes divine image into at least one species on at least one spinning orb in that infinite universe amngst infinite universes, allows us the freedom to run our own lives. Sometimes as we see in Ukraine  we do so with disastrous consequences through our own fault or at the mercy of the fault of others or of nature.

 But where those consequences are disastrous, and indeed always because life as we know it is finite, God enters into our experience in a moment of time – or perhaps I can say entered into our experience in a moment of history – to give us, if we accept it, a way to gain access to the eternities that we have lost in our finiteness, never had because finite, but which dwell just beyond our sight. God enters into our finite existence, into our too-human floundering, not remaining out there beyond the universes, but entering your existence and mine, entering the depths of being human and being mortal, and there births eternity. 

Despite us and for us, even though as yet we cannot get it intellectually.

But this beyond-comprehension God not only does not remain out beyond the edges of the universes, but does not enter into human experience just once 2000 years ago and leave us forlorn. This God enters into the very deepest depths of human experience, into the bitternesses of human despair, angst,  loneliness, boredom or what the French call ennui, enters into every human experience throughout space and time, even in little old North Otago. And when God enters into that experience at any time in space, there human beings who are open to God’s presence can be touched and transformed.

And through all that God is the wonderful Community of Being, and for that matter Community of Becoming, Father, Son and Holy Spirit – breathing love and hope that otherwise would not be available to us, breathing resurrection hope when otherwise there would just be a clanging echo chamber that a far-off-God or perhaps no-God left behind a millisecond after some immeasurably gigantic and inexplicable explosion billions of years ago.

Trinity? The language of love from and for the God who is and always is Creator and Creating, Redeemer and Redeeming, Life-giving and Renewing, Making and Flinging universes across infinities, and yet caring for a sparrow that falls and those dying in Severodonetsk, and even for you and for me.

Amen.