Sermons
3rd June 2007 - Trinity Sunday
The Christian understanding of how God reveals himself as a Trinity of persons and yet one God is notoriously difficult to put clearly into words, and often preachers have relied on visual imagery to demonstrate the basic idea just as today there are three rings on the front of the pew sheet, three symbols on the Mass book, etc. I have a friend who had to do an assembly for quite small children and he wanted to tell them about the Trinity so he took along a tricycle and held it up explaining how the three wheels were essential to the whole arrangement, how wheel was not a tricycle in itself, so not three tricycles (not three Gods), and how the wheels all worked together (but their activities were not confused), etc. etc. And my friend was feeling rather pleased with his demonstration and expanded a bit talking about other things with three bits, a triangle, and so on, until a little boy near the front asked a question ‘so if God were a car…’ ‘yes…’ ‘he’d be a sort of Robin Reliant is that right?’
So, rather than images and analogies I thought I would try the Gospel reading for today as a source for the doctrine of the Trinity which is a bolder thing than you might think as the Bible is not replete with explanations of the Trinity. The first thing to say about the gospel reading is that the disciples listening to Jesus in this part of the farewell discourse from St John would certainly not have had the faintest idea about anything Trinitarian. When Jesus says to them ‘I still have many things to say to you but you cannot bear them now’ he is not withholding the doctrine of the Trinity as a special treat to be delivered later on. But John does have him speak of the Spirit and of the Father almost in the same breath (which is no doubt why the reading is chosen for today), and I would like to talk a little about what Jesus might be trying to say to the disciples and to us about the action of the Spirit in order to gain a little purchase on this business of three persons, but one God, of the community of the Godhead at work and at converse, three distinct persons, the son begotten of the Father, the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son, all three to be worshipped and glorified.
Jesus calls the Spirit ‘the spirit of truth’ and he tries to teach the disciples that they must trust the action of the Spirit in their lives because the Spirit will speak with the authority of Jesus once he has returned to the Father. The spirit is to be the ongoing presence of the divine voice within the life of the Church and that presence today is the reason that we cannot take lightly the decisions that the church reaches. But for that divine voice to be heard afresh in each generation the church needs to remain a listening body, the spirit is the critical hermeneutic of the church, alive in interpreting tradition and present-day context, making the church a community both of memory and of hope. The spirit doesn’t add to the revelation that is found in and through Jesus, his voice isn’t an appendix to the main event, but bears witness to the Christ and maintains the life of Christ which is now the life of the Church. But the body of the church needs constant animation and a live body is much more difficult to handle than a dead one.
People sometimes express surprise that there is dispute and division of feeling within the church, but where that disputation takes place within prayer for the guidance of the Spirit it is no bad thing. The life of Christians is not like a still-life painting, the presence of the guiding hand of the Holy Spirit means that as Christians we are never standing still, never saying we have the whole thing sorted out top-to-bottom, because we can never bottle the spirit or hold it down This doesn’t mean we can’t give a thorough presentation of the faith, we can and we must, but we also need always to remember that we live in the ‘in between time’, in between the paradisal garden and the garden of the perpetual enjoyment of God’s permanent presence, and it is the role of the spirit to guide us during our lives towards that truth and presence which we might call Heaven. But to be guided you need to allow yourself to be led.
And this applies very much to us individually as well as to the whole body of the church. Between Ascension and Pentecost I encouraged you to pray for the guidance of the Spirit in your lives, to pray for some awareness of where God might be leading you, and now as we start on the long season of Trinity I urge you to be constant in that prayer for guidance, whether you are new to prayer or you are growing tired of prayer, persevere, be constant in your prayer in good times and bad, take some few moments in each day and simply lay yourself open to the action of God in your life, God stands at the door of your life waiting to be let in, open the door! For what might God be calling you to? A new start? A fresh approach to a relationship? An opportunity to forgive? A chance to love again where you have grown cold?
And remember, that voice of divine guidance might be the ‘still small voice’, it might be the little strand of thought that you have been pushing away for some time, the little nagging suggestion that there was more to life than all that you have accumulated in thought and possessions and people, the suggestion that if only you let that voice be heard there might be so much more to life, actually not so much more to life, rather, so much more life. God stands a the door of your life waiting for you to open the door, now, isn’t it time you got over there and let him in?