language of the heart

 

SERMON PREACHED AT ST PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN
and at St Peter’s, Queenstown

TRINITY SUNDAY (June 15^th) 2025
 

It was a somewhat shonky tradition of the church, at least in the Anglican tradition, that Trinity Sunday was the Sunday on which vicars and rectors headed off to ski, fish or play golf, and leave their curates to preach. Sadly or otherwise in my 38 years of priesthood I have only had a curate for a total of ten days, and they did not include Trinity Sunday.

In reality I would not take that course of action. The Doctrine of the Trinity dwells at the heart of my faith. Though as an aside I should mention that when the Bishop of Grafton in New South Wales licenced Anne to work with me in my parish he was very careful to make sure that she was my coequal priest and not my assistant. Nearly 30 years later it seems that all is not fair and just in the universe and I still don’t get to boss her around, but I have to submit it to her authority. Whoever said life was fair?

More seriously though, the Trinity is a doctrine that inspires and energises my faith. I have told the story many times before, probably even here, of Anne’s university friend who one day proudly announced that were it not for the ridiculous doctrines of a virgin birth and the Trinity he could subscribe to Christianity. He was Muslim, and his Islamic faith would not have to change at all.

Yet perhaps more than anything else this incomprehensible doctrine dwells at the heart of Christianity. While I do not subscribe to “turn or burn” doctrines of salvation, and believe that Anne’s friend was and is close to the heart of God as a sincere Muslim, I continue to believe that this is the revelation granted to the early Christians, by which our distinctive relationship with God stands or falls. At least, this side of the grave. Bye

We can't go into the history of how the doctrine formed or how it has been abused over the centuries, and I acknowledge every year that our Jehovah’s Witness friends are correct, the word Trinity does not appear in our scriptures. But our scriptures, the writing of which was complete within seventy or so  years of the first Easter at the very latest, are profound in their attempt to express, in love language,  how God is encountered. God: Eternal Creator. Incarnate God Man of Nazareth. God, throughout time and space in the sometimes overpowering experience of Holy Spirit, who we honoured last week.

Do not expect me in a short time to go into the complexities of the oneness and threeness of Godhead. The language of Trinity is the language of love. Like love it is beyond the limitations of words. It is the language of eternity, language that tells us that the God who flung universes across the heavens is the God who chooses not to sit out there beyond the universe is but to enter into and experience the very depths of human suffering. To experience it and there bring life and light and hope, spread light and life and hope throughout eternity. Light and life and hopoe accessible to all who open hearts and minds to that which is beyond human understanding but who comes to dwell with is, in us, in word and sacrament..

As a lover of contemporary or so-called popular music one song, a song which I like, torments me more than any other. “What if God were one of us,” sang Joan Osborne, though she was not guilty of writing it. I want to scream at the speakers: “you missed the whole point of Christian doctrine, of divine love, light, hope in the deepest  darkness.” Faced with the horrors – no less – of a Trumpian Presidency opening floodgates of violence across his nation and releasing dark genies from delicate political  teapots across the globe, a God who remains utterly distant has very little to say, very little to do except open his or her bucket of celestial popcorn and watch the ensuing debacle.

What though of a God who is one of us, a God who enters the depths of human experience in one unique event 2000 years ago? An event which ceases to be anchored in space and time, ceases to be limited to first century Palestine, ceases to be anchored to our limitations. An event which becomes eternally good news. News that is good, as long as the event of Jesus Christ is not just the coming and tragic going of an itinerant and eccentric wordsmith in an unimportant corner of the Roman Empire.

But the language of love. God’s love for us. Our response through 2000 years and more tells us that in the events of Jesus’ birth, life, teachings, suffering, death and resurrection, all human experience is taken into the heart of God. And, as we are taken into the heart of God, so divine, eternal  hope is made available to those of us. As we open our hearts to God, no longer at the outer edge of universes, that hope is known to us in the risen Christ of scripture and liturgy.

Like the infamous advertisement, there is  more. For through the Spirit all that we need to experience of God is made present and available to us. Present even as Iraq and Israel train their warheads on another, as the streets of the USA begin to burn. Even when our doctors or the police bring us terrible news of our own mortality or the mortality of those we love. Even when we dwell stunned, or anaesthetised perhaps, at the news of an airliner crashing into student apartments claiming some 300 lives. Even then the light of resurrection, the light of hope can break through.

Though of course while we are still trapped in mortality we cannot grasp the whole dimensions of hope, hope brought to us by a triune God, often mediated to us but friends and loved ones, even healthcare professionals.

Never will we get our heads around this. It is the language of the heart. If we open ourselves up to the mysteries of God in worship, in study, in fellowship, then we can through a lifetime journey grasp some small glimpse of the essence of God's love for us. The God who does not let our mortality or the mortality of any living being have the final word but promises and gives us hints of hope beyond our limitations. The God who suffers with us and teaches us moment by moment that there is another day, a celestial day, even when as the hymn puts it, “Change and decay in all around we see.”