I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard some appalling Trinity Sunday sermons in my time! Too many of them have taken up crass analogies like St Patrick’s shamrock to show how a single leaf with three elements can explain to us the mystery of the divine nature as three persons in unity. And my mind always cuts to that 1990 film Nuns on the Run and the scene where the gangster played by Eric idle is dressed as a nun teaching a doctrine class which he concludes, “So God is like a Shamrock: small, green and split three ways”.
These attempts to explain the Trinity always seem so contrived and, worse than that, they seem utterly irrelevant to the day-to-day business of our lives. Why does this weird metaphysical conjecture matter to us? Even the Christian poet John Milton described the Trinity as “a bizarre and senseless idea”. How much more, in our own age, are we sceptical about these esoteric formulas drawn up by councils of men centuries ago, and even a couple of centuries after the life of Christ himself? In short, it all seems about as real to us as angels with six wings waving burning coals around. Surely we should concern ourselves with more important things.
Well before we address those charges, let’s think for a moment about things that, we are told, really do matter. Let’s think about the narratives we are given of what is most real and important in the world. Here are three which are popular at the moment:
• One of those narratives might be a socio-economic one, that what matters most in life is maximising our consumer power and being competitive in the markets in which we operate. That narrative might have been shaken a bit in the last year, but it still holds very strong.
• Another narrative that’s popular at the moment is a modern take on tribalism, the idea that a human being’s fundamental identity is bound up with the country where they were born and the colour of their skin. Preserving the tribe is what really matters, or so it would seem for many who exercised their vote on Thursday.
• Yet another big narrative of what really matters is offered to us by a form of scientism. It might hold that human beings (along with all other organisms) are nothing more than clumps of molecules assembled in such a way as requires them to perpetuate the existence of their own genetic makeup or succumb to the cruel logic of the survival of the fittest.
You may be able to think of others. But those are three widespread accounts of what is most real and fundamental in our world. In many ways they shape a lot of popular thought even if we wouldn’t totally sign up to them.
Now what if the doctrine of the Trinity was not an esoteric attempt to describe otherworldly realities, but actually a narrative to compete with these others – a fundamental description of what is most real in the universe? That is not how we usually think of it but that is what I want to suggest it should be.
For those of you unfamiliar with what the doctrine of the Trinity actually states, it is this:
Neither the person of Jesus Christ nor the Holy Spirit (who was given to the disciples after Jesus’ Ascension) are in any way subordinate to or created by the one Creating God. Each of the three has a distinct identity and roles but they are (to use the Aristotelian language of the Creed) of the same substance, they are co-inherent. In other words, the life of God is a communion of three separate but completely interdependent persons.
So far, so esoteric you may be thinking! But the next step is to realise that this life of communion is not merely a description of the life of God but is the very shape of God’s desire for the ultimate ordering of all creation. How the Trinity lives is how we are to live. That sounds a bit extreme and demanding to our ears. But in the Eastern Orthodox Church it is much more strongly recognise that the very purpose of the Christian life is theosis, deification, whereby in imitating God we participate in God’s Trinitarian life.
So what would this look like and how would it be different from life now? Well, in the three other perspectives I set out earlier – competitive consumerism, extreme nationalism, and reductionist scientism – each in their own way present us with an adversarial, self-interested way of living that views others as a threat or someone to define myself against. The life of the Trinity is one where we give of ourselves to sustain others as we grow in our love for them. It means not simply ensuring our security, identity or status by excluding or even benignly ignoring other people.
Those are easy words to agree with. But they become deeply challenging as we push ourselves to think what that might mean in different areas of our life. We can, hopefully, easily recognise why voting for the BNP is beyond the pale, although many churchgoers in this country appear not to. But the challenge of our Christian lives is to think deeper about the areas where the call to reflect the Trinitarian life is less obvious or just really countercultural.
• Does it mean, for example, recognising our responsibility to use energy while holding in mind those around the world already affected by climate?
• Does it mean refusing to invest our money in an arms trade that we feel perpetuates a military-industrial complex?
• Does it mean giving a higher proportion of our precious time to getting involved with church and community initiatives?
It may mean some of these things. It will certainly mean a lot more. Because, as with any of these other fundamental narratives, what we really believe to be most real and of most importance is what will shape our entire lives and the way we live them. It cannot but do so. Because this doctrine of the Trinity is so bound up with what we must believe about ourselves. We who have been created in God’s own image and likeness will rediscover ourselves when we live in this Trinitarian way.
Rowan Williams put it quite alarmingly when he was asked recently what human life was for. He replied “we’re made to the politicians” (this was before the expenses scandal!). But he goes on, “By that I don’t mean we are all designed by God to stand for parliament… But we are made to work creatively at our society; to make it reflect more fully that pattern of inter-dependence, interrelation – which I believe God has willed for us.”
But the challenge of Trinity Sunday is not, in the first instance, a call to social activism. Because the primary way through which we are drawn into the life of God is in worship and from that, all else flows. Coming to church to praise God, for God’s own sake, is the means by which we are drawn into the Trinitarian life. That is why the angels in Isaiah’s vision are praising God in the threefold rhythm, “holy, holy, holy”. They are drawn into God’s threefold communion.
And it is not for nothing that the Eucharist is described as Communion. In the Eucharist God communicates himself to us as we enter into communion with God; through the gifts of bread and wine all creation in its ecological brokenness is brought back into communion with God; and we who are participants in this sacrament enter into communion with one another: “Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread.” And when we participate in the Eucharist, fully, actively, attentively and prayerfully, this narrative of what is most real in our world really does start to form us in God’s likeness.
When people ask you why you go to church, you probably don’t say that it is to participate in the Trinitarian life of God. But as we listen to the Choir join with the angels in praising God to the threefold rhythm, “holy, holy, holy”, let’s remember that we are being drawn into the life of God. And that’s why the doctrine of the Trinity isn’t “bizarre and senseless”. It is the Christian statement about what is most real in the world and what matters most.