The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

Trinity Sunday 2016 (Year C)
Proverbs 8. 1-4, 22-31, Romans 5. 1-5, John 16. 12-15
I have always rather dreaded having to preach on Trinity Sunday; not so much because I don’t understand the doctrine of the Trinity (although it’s true I don’t) but worse because I don’t feel much inclined to try. This is in part because it either seems a bit facile (think of those metaphors about ice, water and steam) or else simply a mystery about which there is no point in cudgelling one’s brain. And outside the very Junior Church, I’m not sure it’s always very helpful to use the family imagery of father and son (although that metaphor is not as unhelpful as the obsession with virgin births and the mother of God). More fundamentally, however, I find it quite hard to see how it matters. I want to ask what it has got to do with the Gospel; what has it got to do with the message of salvation, the promise of the Kingdom?
To be fair the new Lectionary takes a more cosmological than triune line, necessarily you might think as there are no really express references to the Trinity in Old or New Testaments. It’s an idea which appeared long after the Gospels.
There is however a strong theme, running through the Old Testament, of God as not only a physical but also a moral force, at once creator and lawgiver. We hear it in Proverbs as in today’s reading, but also in the Psalms and in Isaiah- the bits of the OT which we hear most frequently. It’s striking, I think that the writers of the OT conceive of God as creator and organiser of the world and also, and thereby a moral force; there is link between the physical creation, nature and natural phenomena and the moral organisation of the that creation, and especially its most sophisticated creatures- human beings.
The beginning of Genesis talks of the spirit or breath of God moving over the chaotic waters and organising them into recognisable categories; St John’s Gospel echoes that beginning calling the spirit the “Word”- and of course identifying it with Christ, (which is I admit, the beginning of a doctrine of the Trinity). The “word” in Greek is “logos” and its root meaning is dividing and collecting, because that is what words do; they turn incoherent noise as in the wailing or burbling of a babes and sucklings into something that may be as wonderfully complex and sheer as Shakespeare. The spirit of God, his life giving breath, realises his words, his instructions not only bring creation into being out of disorder, but they become tangible things too, sun, moon, trees, animals and finally man.
But however beautiful we may think creation may is (and we shouldn’t forget that it can also be pretty ugly) we are missing something. The existence of God as the intelligent designer of the universe doesn’t itself explain why we are as we are or what we are for. Paley’s famous argument for the existence of God compared creation to a watch. The argument runs that if you had never seen a watch before and you found one lying on the ground, you would assume that such an intricate and complicated mechanism must have been designed and made by someone. The world is much more intricate and complex, so it must have a designer, and that designer is God. This argument may prove that God exists, but it doesn’t tell us why God made the world, nor what it and we are for. A watch is for telling the time; what is creation for?
These questions may not trouble us too much of the time, but they are important in informing our relationship with God and our fellow creatures-indeed all our fellow creation. They concern our motivation by which I mean that feeling which we have which makes us at least think we are more than simply complicated agents and instruments, automata, in a vastly intricate chain of causes and events.
There is help at hand from the history of God’s relationship with his world, as recounted in the Bible. The first, most obvious and most important point is that the Biblical God, and the one we believe in, cares about his world; each step of creation, was, we are told “good.” God cared about it and liked, even loved it. So too he cares about us, indeed delights in us as the Psalmist says, which why he is angry when we spoil creation, but relents (usually) when punishing us.
The root of that spoiling is always lack of righteousness; the absence of the right relation with God or man going off on his own track. This erring is surely intimately connected with the idea that we are created in God’s image; we are like him, or capable of being like him and relating to him and even conversing with him. And right from the start when Adam helps in the naming of animals (the logos, or Word at work, collecting, categorising and creating) we are his partners in the creative project. It is when we fail to respect that partnership that we go off the rails.
The breath that is God’s Word is also the breath of Life; it enters Adam’s nostrils and he becomes a living thing. This brings with it all that life entails; growth, change, decay and death, and usually pain along with joy and pleasure.  But God is himself that breath and so life, and thus can sympathise with his creation. This is perhaps another aspect of man being made in God’s image, and because of that, there exists the possibility of sympathy-suffering or experiencing together, and the shared image, even a shared identity. Because of this man can communicate with God, to the extent that God is almost defined (if the infinite were definable) as that with which man must communicate. Prayer is what we feel we have tell God; our joy and thanks, our sorrow and regrets and our anxieties and hopes. Here I concede, the Father/Son metaphor has force; the necessity for prayer is rather like the feeling that, I think, most of share in having to tell those we love, our parents and others what we feel whether, sorrow, guilt, worries or joys.
All this comes to a head in the man Jesus, but rather than as a Son of God, I suggest we should see Jesus as a man who shows us what God is (it’s seldom somethings sons do for their fathers). Jesus was, however, someone who personified God, explaining without reducing him and most importantly, showing us by example what we may ourselves be, opening up our own divine potential. This manifests itself in both Jesus’ challenge to build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth and his promise of an eternal life; one which is not overcome, as he was not finally overcome, by the restrictions of pain, decay and mortality.
So we are challenged to join in God’s creative work, and that does I believe give us an answer to what creation and, we are for, or at least it gives us motivation and a goal. And it emerges from what is I suppose a Trinitarian view of God; expressing his creative force, his human sympathy both emerging from and realising the spirit which is life giving and loving. And these facets or aspects of God are held together by a sort of logical necessity as each implies the other. This is a somewhat less personalised view of the Trinity, no Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but I hope you find it, as I do, helpful in bringing you closer to an understanding with a God and a relationship from which love and creativity emerge. Amen