threefold mystery

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN, and the GLENORCHY MISSION HALL

TIRNITY SUNDAY

(May 26^th) 2024

 

READINGS

 

Isaiah 6: 1-8

Psalm 29

John 3: 1-17

I have spent some time over the past week or two reading two theological, or at least metaphysical writers both of whose names will be familiar to some of you. I am working systematically through the synod addresses of Bishop Penny Jamieson. I am reading, or if I’m going to be honest reading about because I’ve always found him impossible to read, Lloyd Geering.

I have to say I am profoundly moved by some of the thought of Penny Jamieson. I equally have to say that while centenarian Lloyd Geering is universally regarded as a delightful human being, his writings have left me cold for at least 40 years.

But what has this to do with Nicodemus?

Maybe something. Maybe nothing. Perhaps it is a little forced, but I would have to say that Bishop Penny’s writings have generally left me with a sense of being bathed in light. However profound Geering and others like him may be I find myself still bathed in darkness. Hang on to that thought, because on this Trinity Sunday we have, particularly in the Nicodemus reading, a journey from darkness to light.

Darkness to light. Perhaps not abstract notions when we’re dealing with massive electrical collapses at Saint Peter’s, now thank goodness nearly solved. But in metaphysical terms very much abstract, very much metaphorical. And to attempt to get our heads around the mysteries of the Christian Trinity using only the language of the intellect is to remain deeply enmeshed in darkness. I remember only too well numerous sermons attempting to explain the Trinity.

They all failed. All will. To understand the failure of these explanations, we should to describe colour, or taste, or love itself. Let alone the Trinity the language for which the early Christians strove. For this is language of love.

Increasingly then over my decades of faith I have leaned on the traditional language of the early church. They too were, like Nicodemus, stumbling in the dark and slowly, glacially, entering impenetrable light. Their fallible language is as good as any since, and as flawed as any since, but hallowed by time despite the flaw

To speak of the Trinity from time to time I will use threefold phrases such as Creator, Redeemer, and Giver of life, or Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Hope-bringer. I so in recognition that I don’t want our language of God to be over-masculinized. But when I do I will do so and always add the traditional and yet still inadequate formula, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Partly that is because I will always have ringing in my ears the admonition of my great a much-loved theological mentor Dick McKinney who expostulated wildly at the misconceptions, combinations of innumerable three-part word sequences that were floated in sermons and lectures as an attempt to improve our language and understanding of the Trinity.

All fell abysmally short and dissolved our mysterious God into shallow meaninglessness. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are flawed labels, but they are hallowed as I said by the test of time. They speak however inadequately of identities beyond human understanding, beyond human inadequacy. Not, thank God, “Father” as I am a flawed father. Not Son, as I am a flawed son. Each comparison is with the being beyond our understanding.

As our Jewish friends, and indeed even Muslim friends will remind us, our creator God is far beyond our understanding, much less our control, absolutely holy, absolutely incomprehensible, for to comprehend God is neither more nor less then too attempt to reduce God to the levels of our intellect. Ringing throughout the Hebrew scriptures our God’s famous admonition “no one looks on me and lives” (Exod. 33:20).

Hymn writer Walter Smith nails it beautifully:

Immortal, invisible, God only wise,

in light inaccessible hid from our eyes,

most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days.

Perhaps we grasp some comprehension of that when we see footage of early nuclear explosions, such as the tragically named Trinity bomb in the New Mexico desert, or the nuclear testing scenes in Maralinga, French tests at Mururoa, and m ore. Even in those early unenlightened days the spectators turned their back on the blasts: light unwithstandable. An obscene imitation if you like of Godlight, but imitation nonetheless.

Unable to look on God, or the “face of God” as Exodus more specifically puts it, we are given, we believe as Christians, the entire being of God made visible to, even tangible to, human beings in the person and work of Jesus Christ. All that we can never know, understand, with stand of God the Creator enfleshed in the person and work of the historic man Jesus.

Yet the cost of being human is mortality. Even without the horrors of crucifixion the Godman, the enfleshed God, has to pass through the insults and obscenity of a death. And so as Jesus frequently says in the records of the gospels I cannot stay here (to transliterate slightly). I must go to my Father.

All we can know of Jesus is primarily recorded in the writings of four men who we know as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

In John’s writing particularly we find Jesus wrestling with that very issue. I must go so that the Comforter, the Advocate, the Representative, the Ambassador, the myriad inadequate words that describe the Spirit of God, can come and release me to be all that I am, have been, even will be, through space and time. The justice, the compassion, the love, even some lesser glimpsed attributes of Jesus such as tenderness, creativity and humour, all these are attributes of the Creator God made known in this one life, then made known through space and time by the emanation of the mysterious one we call Holy Spirit.

I could go on to explain that these are not three blokes in the way that they sometimes have to be expressed in art or in books like The Shack. Nor three phases like ice water and steam, but something else completely beyond our comprehension. The finest lectures I heard at theological college were lectures by those such as Dick McKinney, delving into the mysteries of Trinity, deeply aware of the inadequacy of their presentation. And if theirs were deeply inadequate, mine will be deeply inadequater, so there, almost I must leave the attempt.

But I do want to emphasise that the language of the Trinity is the language of immeasurable love. The unknowable God made known to us because God wants to know and love and redeem. The unknowable God made known to the smallness of the human mind in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, through scriptures and through other means enflamed by the one we know as spirit, released through space and time and always within and around us to draw us into that immeasurable love and light – until such time as God’s creation winds up in what we call the eschaton, the end of time, the beginning of timelessness, when at last we as Paul puts it see no longer through a darkened glass but face to face.

Nicodemus makes a journey across three appearances in John’s gospel, a journey from darkness to light. I want to suggest, albeit a little sternly, that theologians the like of a Lloyd Geering, who find the language of faith somewhat to hard to handle, leave us stumbling in the dark, confronting Jesus by night and refusing to move or grow. It is a good thing that God’s patience is eternal. But I want to, in Maori terms, “mihi,” To give credit to our esrtwhile bishop, Penny, For what appears through her writings is a profound sense of the Christ who is light in times of darkness, who sustained her through times of considerable turmoil and pain and who is never limited by space or time or intellect.