Trinity 2024
The Trinity is not a problem to be solved, but a relationship to be encountered.
There is a great clip from the film, Nuns on the Run where the two characters Brian and Charlie are hiding from gangsters dressed as nuns.
Brian has to teach a class about the Trinity
Brian: Explain the Trinity.
Charlie: Hmm, well it’s a bit of a mystery. You’ve got the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. But the three are one---like a shamrock, my old priest used to say. Three leaves but one leaf. Now the Father sent down the Son, who was love, and then when he went away he sent down the Holy Spirit, who came down in the form of a….
Brian: You already told me—a ghost.
Charlie: No, a dove.
Brian: The dove was a ghost?
Charlie: No, the ghost was a dove.
Brian: Let me try and summarise this. God is his son. And his son is God. But his son moonlights as a holy ghost, a holy spirit and a dove. And they all send each other, even though they’re all one and the same thing.
Charlie: You’ve got it. You really could be a nun!
We can knot ourselves up in the Trinity.
You will have heard other illustrations: water, steam and ice; or one person who has three roles: mother, architect, gymnast : both of those are pretty wrong.
Or a venn diagram with overlapping circles.
Or a chord formed from three notes
Or those lovely celtic crosses with three interweaving chains.
But the problem with all of those is that they miss what is at the heart of the Trinity – which is relationship.
At the heart of the Bible revelation about God is the language of Father and Son.
It is about a relationship of love, trust and praise – not just of the Son loving, trusting and praising the Father, but of the Father loving Son. At the baptism and transfiguration, the voice comes from heaven: ‘This is my Son, my beloved, in whom I delight’.
So the Son is sent by the Father and speaks the Father’s words, and the Father has given the Son all things.
The Son glorifies the Father and the Father glorifies the Son.
We say in the creed that the Son is ‘eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one Being (existence) with the Father’
It is a brilliant and relatively simple way of saying that the Son is a separate person to the Father, but of the very essence of God; that he is not created and has always been there in relationship with the Father.
It is a way of saying that they have one heart, one loves, they delight and desire in what the other delights and desires, and that they have this relationship of mutual love, mutual trust and shared glory.
But this is not a closed circle of love: so that creation is left like a gooseberry looking in at it from the outside.
It is an open love. The Father gives that which is most precious to him - the Son; the Son gives himself for us; and the Son then sends us the Spirit from the Father
If I was going to image it, then we can do no better than to look at Rublev’s icon of the Trinity – which I am sure I will explain at some point – with three angels representing the three persons of the Trinity in communion around a table.
Or another that can be helpful is the illustration of three people sharing a hug. We look at them from a distance and we can’t quite work out whether it is three persons or one person.
But this hug is so glorious, so radiant that looking at it is like looking at the sun. We can’t, but lightening is sparking out of it, reaching out to us and – and this is the amazing thing - drawing us into the hug.
Isaiah has a vision of the glory of God
“In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty”
I’ve recently read Edwyn Bevan on Symbolism and Belief. He speaks of how in every culture, height is used to show power. The high King, the high throne. If you are higher than another person you have a physical advantage over them, and you can see more clearly than them.
And the ancients often spoke of God or gods as being on top of a high mountain or up in the sky. Bevan argues that the reason for that is that the top of the high mountain, or the sky, was that for them it was beyond their reach, inaccessible.
To speak of God as high and lofty is to speak of the otherness of God, the transcendence of God.
But notice here that God is high, but the hem of his robe touches the temple.
I love that: the very bottom, the fringe of his robe brushes the temple; but it fills the temple, just as his glory fills the earth.
There is a story told about a little girl who asked her dad, ‘Is God everywhere?’ Yes, said dad. ‘Is God in this room?’ Yes, said dad. Is God in this jar? Dad realised there was a problem, but he had started and he had to finish, so he said, Yes. The girl put her hand over the top of the jar and said, ‘I’ve got him’.
We can’t ‘get’ God. God is in the jar, because those atoms in the jar are filled with the glory of God. But God is far far bigger than the jar
God is totally other and beyond, but his glory, his love, his fire, his Spirit fill the earth.
In Orthodox theology they speak of that glory as the uncreated light that penetrates through this creation, a light which was visible on the face of Moses when he came out of the tabernacle having met with God, the light that Peter, James and John saw coming from Jesus when he was transfigured. There are saints who have been able to see that light and reflect that light. It is the light of the glory of God filling this creation.
And the Seraphim, the ‘burning ones’, worship this God.
They sing ‘holy, holy, holy’ which Christians have understood as referring to the three persons of the Trinity. We will echo that in our communion prayer.
And maybe we have read too much into that, but it is interesting that when God speaks to Isaiah, he says, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’
But, and this is important, the God who they worship is not just out there, beyond us, untouchable, but the God reaches out to us.
Isaiah is given this vision and he is broken. ‘Woe is me’.
He is broken because God – the otherness, the power, the beauty, the purity, the holiness – is both so far from him, so beyond him, but has also come so very close to him.
We think of Peter fishing in his boat, who suddenly sees who Jesus is. He says to him, ‘Go away from me for I am a sinful man’.
And Isaiah hears the praise of the angels, and he compares them to the words that come out of his mouth: ‘I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips’.
He hears the praise of the angels, as they declare the holiness and presence of the God of truth and beauty, of the ultimate reality in this universe; and he thinks of his own words and the words of his community: words that are grumbling, moaning, complaining, cursing; words that pull down and destroy, that criticize and slander others, that speak half-truths or untruths.
And he is filled with shame – a shame that in the presence of God makes him want to shrivel up and die.
But God in his mercy reaches out to him.
The burning one brings a burning coal from the altar and touches his lips with it.
Isaiah is forgiven, ‘Your sin is blotted out’; and he becomes part of the hug, of the fire.
And God calls to him, ‘Whom will I send?’. And now he can reply. ‘Send me’.
We may not have had the vision of Isaiah or Peter or of Jesus transfigured.
But that does not make the reality of what they saw any the less.
In a few moments we will say the creed.
They are familiar words – perhaps too familiar and we do not realize what we are saying.
We say, ‘We believe’, and for us belief is what goes on up here in the head.
But the Greek word ‘pisteuo’ could also, probably better, be translated as ‘I trust’.
When we say the creed we are declaring not only our intellectual assent but our trust in our God revealed to us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
You see, it is about relationship.
We are using words that the people of God, the Spirit-people, have used for 1700 plus years to declare their faith and trust in the mystery that is at the heart of God:
We declare our trust in God who is Almighty, uncreated creator, eternal, Light, who is holy, holy, holy
Our trust in God who has self-revealed as Father, Son and Spirit, as relationship
Our trust in God who has reached out to us
- Who has sent his only Son (John 3:16) – who came to touch our lips
- Who has given us his Spirit
who draws us into the worship of heaven, that heavenly hug
And sends us out into the world to proclaim the otherness and presence of God, his glory and praise and goodness and love and mercy
And when we proclaim the holiness, the glory of God, the foundations of this world are shaken.
