Last Sunday we had a sermon about language. On the first Whitsunday the Holy Spirit breaks open the familiar and comfortable language of the disciples and shows them how to say new things in a new way to new people. Today we celebrate the newest and strangest of the things the church eventually came to say that God is three in one and one in three. God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit but that does not mean that He is three Gods, but still only one God.
Now that of course is a very difficult idea to get one’s mind round and it’s also very difficult to see why one should bother. We are quite happy to go on talking about God as one and to say the Our Father’ and to think about Jesus’ teaching and try to imitate his life, and some times to be inspired or inspirited by our faith and its worship but how that all fits together and makes sense well we leave it to the theologians who have time and inclination for that sort of thing. And sometimes what the theologians say will strike a chord with the wider church and simplified versions of what they say will trickle down into sermons in parish churches. And one of the things to have trickled down most recently is the idea that the Trinity allows us to speak of God as relationship and God as community. Because our society as I have said before is one of the loneliest there has been and because in our cities and in the countryside traditional communities have broken down the words relationship and community mean a lot to us and therefore we like to think of God in that way. And there is nothing wrong with that. But whenever a way of talking about God becomes popular we should also become suspicious. Because ways of talking about God can also be ways of exercising power and control. You only have to look at the political in fighting and national rivalry that lay behind the work of the fourth century councils that first defined the Trinity to see power politics at play. So what’s in it for whom in the language of God as community and relationship?
No-one these days can escape the news that the church of England and the world wide Anglican communion is deeply divided over various issues mostly to do with sex and gender but also more profoundly to do with culture, wealth and ways of reading the Bible. In a time of such divisions it is good to be able to stress the importance of community and relationship. Those who threaten to rock the boat – the awkward minorities who wont keep silent – are encouraged to keep quiet, to be patient, even to give up their misguided ideas because such ideas threaten the communion and its relationships. For some time now Bishops have been criticising the individualism of western society the me society whose one moral principle is that anything goes as long as no-one gets hurt. Now many of these criticisms are fair but one can’t help noticing that a leader’s life is made easier by a community in which no awkward individuals stand out, demanding to be allowed to be different.
Now of course the Trinity has also provided the Anglican community with another catch phrase to get round some of these problems. Even though God is one he is also a community three persons in relationship so the Trinity also seems to give us permission to talk about unity in diversity. So the Church of England will accept your individuality just so long as it doesn’t prevent you from being in relationship with other different individuals. So we end up with a picture of the Trinity as a kind of well regulated and well mannered club.
Which isn’t quite how Isaiah experiences God in the Temple. He experiences neither a theological proposition nor a blue print for communal living. He experiences the searing holiness of God. He looks at God and he sees the holiness to which humanity is called and he hangs his head in shame. And before Isaiah can go and speak to others of the holiness of God his lips have to be purged by a live coal from the altar of God. It is a strange image. It means I think a purging of his speech a wiping away of the easy and familiar ways in which he had been accustomed to speaking about God. Whatever he says now has always to be touched by God’s holiness.
Paul too speaks of the holiness of the Spirit of God, putting to death the deeds of the body or life led according to the flesh. By which of course Paul doesn’t mean what he is usually taken to mean. The deeds of the body means life lived according to the self regarding demands of our material appetites. Not that the body doesn’t need to be cared for, nurtured and loved but that life in the spirit sees your needs as important as my needs the spirit bears witness that we are all children of God. And if some of God’s children starve while others are overfed the holiness of God suffers insult and blasphemy.
There is then something in both these readings which seems to be showing that we cannot talk about the Trinitarian relationship in God without also talking about the holiness of God. And that holiness came into the world not to condemn the world but that the world might be saved. So we cannot, we should not talk about the Trinity, about who God is, without also talking about who we are to be. We cannot talk about what God is like, without also talking about what we are to be like. We cannot talk about the community of God and its relationships without talking about holy, just, wise and loving human relationships. Unity in diversity, the survival of the Anglican communion or of the ecumenical movement, even the smooth running of a bishop’s life, cannot for example be bought at the expense of what is holy just and wise in the relationships between men and women in the church, or in gay relationships, But equally the recognition of women bishops, or gay partnerships cannot be bought at the expense of our ability to build bridges with Islam or help the poorest nations of the world to grow educationally, and socially, peacefully. How to achieve these things together is no less hard than the attempt to understand God as three in one and one in three. It seems as astonishingly difficult as poor confused Nicodemus thought it would be to enter a second time into our mother’s womb. He misunderstood Jesus who was talking about rebirth in the spirit which might seem impossible but which could happen to you at any moment, blowing unexpectedly and transformingly into your life. And so though in this church it might surprise you to hear it that’s what we are all called to if we are rightly to understand the holiness of our Trinitarian God we are called to be born again Christians. Amen.
Stephen Tucker