Psalm 104.1-10
OT Reading: Ezekiel 1.4-10, 22-28a
NT Reading: Revelation 4
Theme: Thank God for the Trinity
My theme on this Trinity Sunday evening is simply this: Thank God for the Trinity.
Both our readings tonight were inspired by visions of the throne of God in heaven. With the prophet Ezekiel and the seer of Revelation we were dazzled and awe-struck by sparkling jewels, by the wonder of the rainbow, by fire and lightning, by the limbs and faces of strange mythical creatures. With the twenty four elders and the whole company gathered around the throne, our knees buckled as we glimpsed the splendour and majesty of Almighty God. Such visions leave us speechless. What can any of us say?
Our Old Testament Reading concluded with these elusive words: This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. Seated above the likeness of a throne was something that seemed like a human form (Ezekiel 1.26). Was that a hint of the humanity of God? Perhaps. Even then, there was no hint of God in Three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, much less anything to suggest how the three persons of the Trinity might relate to one another and to us. Yet we miss so much if we go along with the prioritisation of monotheism which seems to be implicit in tonight’s choice of readings. Thank God for the Trinity.
Writing about the new play Temple, which is based on the confrontation in the autumn of 2011 between the Occupy London movement and the chapter of St Paul’s cathedral, Giles Fraser comments as follows: ‘St Paul’s, designed by a scientist, speaks vividly of the cosmological God, the omnipotent God of the stars and the heavens’ (the God of tonight’s psalm and readings, one might add) ‘but it finds it much harder to speak convincingly of the poor, incarnate, vulnerable God of Bethlehem’. It was that other manifestation of God that Fraser found ‘much more clearly articulated within the camp’ of Occupy London protesters than inside the cathedral. In his article he goes on to suggest ‘that the internal dynamics and tensions within the cathedral were those of the Trinity itself, each an articulation of the same God but pulling in different directions, one towards the eternal, another towards the temporal.
Fraser is surely right to point to a tension, which is inherent within the Christian faith itself, and specifically within the doctrine of the Trinity, between the God of almighty power who rules the universe, and the perpetually vulnerable God of Love, who is on the side of the poor. The cathedral allowed itself to get caught up in a dynamic of confrontation, which quickly led to the resignation not merely of Giles as Canon Chancellor but within a few days the Dean himself. However, the doctrine of the Trinity, far from being at war within itself, is wonderfully able to resolve such seemingly conflicting tensions, as it leads us into a richer understanding of the nature of God. That is why I prefer to use the mathematical language of a triangle of forces which leads to a creative resolution of the tensions that arise from forces pulling in different directions. Thank God for the Trinity.
The God whom we encounter in the oldest parts of the Bible – not of course the book of Genesis, but the much more primitive narratives about David and his court – David’s god is not so very different from the gods of the surrounding nations – a tribal warlord, demanding, powerful, even capricious. There was no room for the subtlety of a God in Three Persons in a religion which still needed to differentiate itself from the surrounding culture of polytheism. It took many centuries, and the experience of God’s continuing involvement with his people in defeat and exile, before a richer understanding could grow about the god who was the origin of all creation, the source of all creativity, a god of mercy as well as a god of justice, a god who desired a loving relationship with his people, and ultimately a god whose love for his people was as tender as it was strong. And there was a strong sense that the best was yet to come.
As of course it was. But the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth was still deeply revolutionary. Jesus seems to have seen himself as fulfilling the promises of the Hebrew scriptures, but in ways which diverged radically from popular expectations. His understanding of those promises, reflected in the gospel accounts of his life and teaching, would later enable the Church to develop the doctrine of the Trinity. Jesus knew God as his loving Father, and taught us to claim for ourselves the same relationship of love and obedience. Knowing that God was not only the perfect expression of power, but equally and yet more wonderfully the perfect expression of Love, Jesus understood, as God’s Son, that Love must necessarily make him vulnerable, so vulnerable indeed that he must be prepared to experience in himself the full cost of such vulnerability. It is by the mystery of Love – his Love for us to which we respond with our love for Him – that we in Christ are caught up into the divine humanity of his relationship with God who is both his Father and ours.
Perhaps that is why we do not need to understand the Trinity. In prayer it is our privilege to be drawn into the Trinity. As we open our hearts in yearning for the presence of God, our inarticulate desires calling Abba Father as St Paul reminds us, are graciously shaped by the Holy Spirit. As the Spirit conforms our hearts little by little to the will of Christ, we become familiar in Christ with the second person of the Trinity, and through Christ with God our Father. Within the Trinity there is no conflict between power and love. In the wisdom of God, Love has triumphed precisely through its vulnerability and weakness, treading the royal road to new life in the power of the Spirit.
Was that the risk which the chapter of St Paul’s found it so hard to embrace? As we stand beneath the dome of our great cathedral, we are still knocked sideways by the majesty of its conception, by the smallness of mortals like ourselves in the presence of almighty God. That is one aspect of the truth about God. But it is not the whole truth. In Father, Son and Holy Spirit we experience not just the power of God but his Love also, challenging us as profoundly as any vision of his power, but reaching out to us, not to throw us to the ground, but to draw us into that loving embrace which gives us the strength to face whatever the world has to throw at us. We know that love makes us vulnerable. We know that we may get hurt as he was hurt. But we know too that in the power of the Spirit there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. In the mystery of that love we know that we are safe.
We fall to our knees in the presence of almighty God. We are raised to our feet, gently and graciously, as we respond to the love of God reaching out to us in Christ Jesus our Lord. In Christ we are sent on our way by the Spirit who strengthens and empowers us. Let us then thank God for the rich interplay of divinity and humanity and spiritual empowerment that we find in our experience of the Trinity.