The idea of the Trinity, like other concepts that we now regard as fundamental to Christianity, came quite late to Christian theology and took a little while to be universally accepted orthodoxy-indeed our Unitarian neighbours do not accept it now, but then some of them wouldn’t care to be called Christian either. This doesn’t seem to hold them back from working to bring about what we would call the kingdom of God.
Most Christians, however, having settled on the doctrine of the Trinity, have set about justifying it by reference to both Old and New Testaments. And to find mentions of, or allusions to, a Father Creator, a Redeeming Son and comfort and inspiration from a Spirit, in the scriptures isn’t difficult. Naturally, Jesus features rather more prominently in the Gospels, but the idea of a son of God as, for example, a Messiah or Suffering servant, can be found in the Old Testament too and equally the God of Creation and Nature is not absent from the New. Both Old and New feature a life giving breath and inspiring, but sometimes unpredictable, breeze. Attempts to see all three put together are, in my opinion, less successful. For example, Andrei Rublev’s marvellous depiction of Abraham’s three angelic visitors is a fascinating and beautiful work, but it’s really quite difficult, beyond the incidence of the number three, to see anything remotely Trinitarian in the story it depicts in Genesis.
I suggest that the attempt to find the Trinity in the Bible is perhaps misconceived. I do not suggest that the doctrine nonsense. While I do not think it is to be found in the Bible, I do think it is worth asking why we want to believe in a Trinitarian God- or to put it bluntly, what the Trinity for. What is its relevance our mission in promoting the Gospel?
Some answers to those questions might be that the Trinity forms the basis of much of our worship- you only need to count the number of times we say the doxology or invoke the Father and to the Son and Holy Ghost…” to see that.
We might also think it important in defining who we are. As my remarks on the Unitarians may have indicated, I don’t think such definitions, which tend to fuel exclusivity, are always very helpful. Nevertheless, while we should respect Islam and Judaism, it would be insulting them to suggest that because we are all Abrahamic monotheists, we are all really the same. We are not.
More helpful, I think, is to see the idea of the Trinity underlying our mission which should indeed be grounded in creative love; inspired and provoked by the comfort and capriciousness of the spirit; and executed with the human kindness (and occasional anger) which we see in Jesus’ earthly ministry. The stories of Moses and the Burning Bush and Nicodemus’ nocturnal and mysterious conversation illustrate some aspects of this.
They do so, however, by reference to elemental thinking which is much older than any ideas about the Trinity. The 5th Century Greeks were drawing on older ideas in thinking that Earth, Air, Fire, and Water were the fundamental components of the world and all matter. Similar ideas certainly influenced the writers of Genesis and Exodus (who may have been roughly contemporary with those Greeks) and John too. Man is created out mud; dust mixed with water but is brought to life by the breath of God. That same airy breath which expressed God’s creating commands, ordering the chaos, inspiring and comforting God’s human agents, is present in Sinai near Mt Horeb where the Burning Bush introduces fire as a mysterious, apparently immaterial expression of forceful emotion but also the source of warmth (and cooking too). Water is as vital as air in bringing about and sustaining life, but
equally it cleans as it refreshes. All four have corresponding negative aspects; it is to earth that we shall return in death; the wind is unpredictable and the hurricane destructive, as fire and water can be. Together they capture the ambivalence at the centre of creation, as destruction makes construction possible.
It a different aspect of God’s creative force that is the emphasis of Moses encounter with the burning bush. God appears as an un-consuming fire, but announces himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob- so, the God of history and specifically the God of the Israelites and while mysterious and intangible like fire, he is nevertheless, grounded in the present and indeed warns Moses that he is on holy ground. God has heard the plight of the Israelites and like fire is angry and will let his rage speak and act. As I have said before, I think his name YHWH, rather than meaning an eternal “I am” is better understood as “The one who brings into being”, the continually creative force of the world and all that is. It is a force which can illuminate and warm like fire but may turn destructive at God’s will. The crucial point for us is perhaps that we believe in a God who is active throughout history, for whom History- that is human affairs- are as much part of creation as forming mountains and butterflies. But God relies on human agents-like Moses and, of course, us.
If the story of the Burning Bush is extrovert, being about mission and action concerning a nation; the story of Nicodemus is the opposite. Christianity is as much and sometimes, (mistakenly, in my opinion) more, about ourselves and our own salvation, our individual spirituality and our personal relationship with God. The upshot of Nicodemus’ strangely disconnected and secret interview, is that for salvation he needs to understand the force of water, spirit and fire; he is bogged down by earthly concerns and needs to switch to another wavelength to realise his full human potential, or what Jesus calls “eternal life”. That’s not, I suggest, something other worldly but a life lived on earth influenced and inspired by unearthly elements-or “born of the Spirit”. And that is, of course, as true for Nicodemus as it is for us.
I suspect these readings were chosen for Trinity Sunday as they illustrate the as yet inchoate ideas which will formulate Trinitarian thinking. I believe they do tell us something important about who we are and what we are to do but it’s possibly gratuitously contrary of me to say today that they do that without being shoe horned into the doctrine of the Trinity. Amen.