Trinity Sunday
Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Isaiah 6.1-8, Psalm 29, Romans 8:12-17, John 3:1-17
Traditionally Trinity Sunday is when preachers begin their sermon by offering their apologies and excuses for boring congregations with the doctrine of the Trinity. And I’m a big believer in tradition. So [pause], sorry. It’s also traditional for theologians to use analogies to help us with that central Christian truth of how God is both three and one; Mostly by some bad metaphor relying on a dead plant, poor science, bizarre family dynamics or awkward third wheel relationships.
There is also great merit in Thomas Aquinas’ position which is to say of God that we know only ‘that he is and what he is not’. That, of course, did not prevent him writing an awful lot more on the subject.
But for our 21st century world we need something more modern, up to date; a fresh expression of trinitarian analogy. And perhaps the Trinitarian analogy for modern times is that of Take That. You see Gary Barlow has the talent – he has originality, the song writer, the prime energy behind the group. Then Mark Owen is sort of perhaps a bit like the Son in enjoying a brief disastrous solo career before returning to the group. And then there’s Robbie. Originally just a dancer but proceeded out of Take That to enjoy a highly successful solo career. So much so that poor old Gary, the Father so to speak, has almost entirely disappeared from view appearing only occasionally in adverts for Marks and Spencer’s and the Conservative Party. In 2010 the others rejoined Robbie for the full glorious reformation of Take That on Earth, bringing about the end of the world, but like the reunion of Friends, it didn’t quite live up to the hype and everyone remembered that actually the 90s weren’t that great after all. Apocalypse That.
It’s a bit of a stretch but it could be worse. Because the pop bands that I grew up with were all like Take That, with simple collective names that covered everyone. I’ve read in the annals of time, though, there used to exist groups that took the name of their lead singer, Diana Ross and the Supremes or Bob Marley and the Wailers. Now if we’re talking about bad theology, these 70s bands scream heresy. a heresy rife in congregations today; where the Father is seen as the real God, the frontman, while the Son and Spirit are sort of a backing band.
And it’s no wonder when you look at our creed. Personally, I don’t much like creeds - I’ll come back to this in a minute; But the modern translation of the creed that we normally use here has almost slipped into heresy. You see in the Greek, Latin and traditional English versions the first line provides the essential clause of the whole creed: “I believe in one God;” following this we have all the subclauses which qualify this belief – ‘in the Father Almighty..., And in one Lord Jesus Christ... ‘and I believe in the Holy Spirit,’ all these qualifiers of that first essential “I believe in one God; are connected and held together in one statement. The modern translation, however, has confused this by splitting the creed into sections each starting “we or I believe...” So ‘I believe in one God, the Father’, then ‘I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ’ and ‘I believe in the Holy Spirit’. Given that the point of the Nicene Creed was to stress that there is one God who is three persons Father, Son and Holy Spirit, it’s a bit misleading. They’re not three gods, or one God and two other things. We believe in One God.
So if you remember one thing from this sermon – God is more like Take That and definitely NOT like Diana Ross and the Supremes.
[Oh and if you’re worried about Jason Orange or Howie D... Don’t. No one else ever has. In any case Jason and Howie are a good reminder that all analogies (and pop groups) ultimately fail.]
Now it may seem odd that a vicar doesn’t like creeds. Surely this is your job; you say, your very career depends upon it. But the thing that troubles me about creeds is that they’re about power more than truth. So the original ending of the Nicene creed reads: But those who say: 'There was a time when he was not;' and 'He was not before he was made;' and 'He was made out of nothing,' or 'He is of another substance' or 'essence,'… — they are condemned by the holy catholic and apostolic Church. “condemned” or “anathema”. The Nicene creed was designed to solve an argument and it did so by cancelling the weaker party. There’s no position of orthodoxy or truth without a good deal of political backing.
Consider the case of Marguerite Porete. Marguerite wrote a spiritual text at the beginning of the 14th century called “the mirror of simple souls”. It was decried as being “filled with errors and heresies” and she was then arrested, tried and burned at the stake. The crowd is recorded as being moved to tears by the calmness with which she faced her sad demise. During the trial she was referred to as a “pseudo-mulier”, a fake woman. After her death, though, the book was again distributed anonymously but became widely regarded as a spiritual classic. Whether it was her gender or simply being ahead of her time orthodoxy’s violent “truth” lacked Christian mercy.
Such sniping from orthodoxy still occupies us today. There’s always someone wanting to exclude someone else – because of their gender or sexuality, or other spurious reason. And we should always be asking ourselves who we see as outside the grace of God? Have we drawn any boundaries that shame or exclude others? And is everyone in our social circle just like us? Or have we declared anathema Fulham supporters, Liberal Democrats, or other unfortunate souls whom the world has hated.
Because God is bigger than our creeds, God’s bigger than Take That, he’s even bigger than the Beatles. Whether you’re in the heights of the heavens or the depths of Hell there is nowhere outside his love and mercy. One of the greatest Christian witnesses to my mind is the philosopher Simone Weil, who until just before her death, refused baptism because she preferred to count herself with those the Church said were outside grace. Perhaps we don’t need to draw lines of where and who is in and out. We can let God be God.
Analogies aside, we can know God best through the two great acts of God: Creation and Salvation. By Creation we can know something of God. As all things come from him each bears the mark of their creator:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
Equally, though, being created they are none of them God, who is uncreated.
By Salvation we have the specific revelation of God as love. This God cares for all creation. His command is for us to love God and our neighbour. His promise is our hope for peace. That for us who are always between life and death, there is something more which gives us meaning and hope. And Salvation is effected by God being with us. First as one of us in the person of Christ, and then through his Spirit which remains with us to the end.
What these tell us is not so much who or what God is, but how God is related to us. When we try and think about the nature of God we tend to get tied up in knots. We inevitably think of God as Father, as an old man up there in the heavens. And when we think of the Spirit, our mind’s eye conjures up the darkness of space and the spreading of light, or of some vapour, or gas, like a creepy horror movie. If we remind ourselves that these are just pictures, that’s fine, but they limit how we see God, and where we see God in the world.
Dante’s Divine Comedy gives us a truer picture, when he writes: ‘now my desire and will, like a wheel that spins with even motion, were revolved by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars’. Or if Europe is anathema to you, an American/English poet wrote: At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is… Love is itself unmoving, Only the cause and end of movement. Which is to say, in the words of that other great poet, Richard Curtis: ‘Love actually does make the world go round’.
So whether you’re here celebrating the love you’ve found in this world, or the recent return to communion abruptly stopped after a lifetime of faithful attendance; or if it’s a first entry for one in your family to that great cloud of witnesses who have lived and died in the belief that God is love; this is the God who in our small ways from 9 months previous to 90 years and a day, we strive to bear witness to, in the love we have for one another. Amen.