Physiologus, perhaps

 

In the second century Physiologus the pelican was an icon of Christ

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY, RINGWOOD EAST
TRINITY SUNDAY (May 21^st) 1989

 

READINGS

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Psalm 8
Romans 5:1-5
John 16:12-15

 

I can do no more on Trinity Sunday than offer to you a few questions, a few thoughts, and a “so what.” The Trinity is perhaps the only Christian doctrine that is utterly distinctive. The doctrines of Creator, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Incarnation: all of these we share with one or more other religions.

As any good Jehovah’s Witness will tell you, the word “trinity” is never mentioned in the Bible. Yet, as our reading from Romans demonstrates, the notion is clearly there. In embryonic form, certainly, but there. Paul is beginning to speak of a one in three, of a mysterious relationship between the Creator, the Son, and the Spirit who enflamed the disciples with her strength,

We are at peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ …

God’s love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit

which has been given to us.

Yet if God is one, how can this be so?

Hear, oh Israel the Lord your God is One.

This is, in Jewish thought, the first of the ten Commandments. It is small wonder that Jewish people accuse us of worshipping three gods, and Muslims accuse us of claiming that God – as Spirit – slept with Mary.

We are speaking in the midst of a mystery, and speaking of a mystery. Now I see as through a dark glass. Are we speaking merely of three faces of God? God in a kind of a Fatherly mood, God in a kind of a Sonly mood, God in a kind of a Spiritly mood?

Not so.

Such a view was centuries ago dismissed as heresy, though most of us, if not all, would embrace it from time to time.

Why indeed have a Trinity?

The reason is simple. If we believe, with John and Paul and all the New Testament, that Jesus is the way in which God’s nature – God’s face on which no person could look – is revealed to the world, that Jesus must be of the same make up, the same substance as the Father.

I cannot reveal to you what it is like to be a cat because I am a human. And if, since the Ascension, it is the Spirit’s task to make known to us the nature of the Son and of the Father, then she too must be of the same makeup or substance or stuff as Father and Son. All must be one.

So for centuries, the ancient Church Fathers deliberated until they eventually came up with a formula that best maintained unity of God, as revealed in the Old Testament, while accommodating the Father, Son and Spirit language of the New Testament. We say it each time we say the Apostles’ or Nicene Creed. Shortly we shall say it again, in another form [the Creed of Athanasius was used].

Nevertheless, in the end it remains a mystery. Three is not normally one, and one is not normally three.

So why not throw it out? Why not join the Jehovah’s Witnesses who dismissed the Trinity, or the Jews or the Muslims or the Unitarians?

I believe there is one very good reason. It is the same reason as explored in my Lenten sermons. As I travelled with you through Lent, I sought to emphasise the miracle that the God of Christianity is not merely the God “out there,” the God who makes and then exits from the heavens and the earth. God, who created humanity, enters utterly into the grot and experience of human beings. God takes into his own being[1] the experience of pain, of loneliness, of death. God cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

And God rises.

The fact is this: that each person’s experience of the triune God is the experience of the whole triune God. The only God we know is the God who self-reveals in Jesus Christ. We can only grasp so much, but Father, Son and Spirit, our Creator, our Redeemer, and our Comforter, are one.  God in trinity experience all of our human suffering, enter into our suffering, and offer from within us the hope that Easter, the Resurrection, is for us. For us, and for the starving, homeless, angry and bereaved people of the world. For us and for all who, like us, are flawed, tainted, imperfect.

For us.

So the Spirit now enters us to strengthen us in our knowledge of the Son who suffers for us, and to remind us of the Father who creates us.

That is the mystery. Unable to be made simple – like water, ice and steam – for God is not simple. Unable to be understood, only to be explored, believed, celebrated.

God, Father, Son, and Spirit.
God, Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier.
God, who suffers as we suffer.
God, who rejoices as we rejoice.

 

All shall one day be made clear, when we see no longer through a dark glass, but see God face to face.

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[1] In 1989 I was still wrestling with adequate forms for inclusive language, including of the Trinity. I would put this differently in 2026.