Trinity Sunday

May I speak in the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Well, this is all rather daunting, our vicar James is here and Michael, our curate is not. Why am I fazed? It’s because traditionally the vicars’ all take leave on Trinity Sunday so that they don’t have to listen to the curate preaching heresy. No wonder then that I’m feeling a tad unsure of myself. It’s all very complicated but let’s together try to make sense of a Truly Mysterious and fundamental core belief for Christians’ both young and old.

Today we speak of the one God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God is one and indivisible. Yet we profess to believe in God the Father, who made the world; in God the Son, who redeemed us on the ‘cross’; and in God the Holy Spirit who lives within us. They are not three gods but one God. It’s not hard to understand why Christians have been accused of undermining the unity of God by this very doctrine we honour today. Not really suprising because it took 426 years before the early Christian church agreed on and recorded what we now claim when we repeat the Nicene Creed.

The New Testament doesn’t explain the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Yet over the first two centuries of Christianity, reflection on the experience of faith in Christ led the Church to develop this doctrine. We see glimpses of it in the very earliest ways Christians prayed. Think how often Christian meetings all over the world are brought to a conclusion by saying the Grace, those words which come straight from St Paul – “the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Love of God and the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all.”

This isn’t the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, of course, but it indicates how God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, proves inseparable from the way Christians have always lived their life in Christ. It’s still used regularly by millions, perhaps billions, of Christians across the world today.

We should remember the Athanasian Creed says that God is incomprehensible. We cannot get our minds around God. Yet that creed reminds us that God is more perfectly one and united than we can possibly be or imagine. In God there is a mutual relationship of love, which is more outgoing, perfect, and complete than the love found in any of us or our relationships.

If you had the chance to have a chat with Jesus, I wonder what would you ask him? Reading on a little in our gospel this morning, the disciples were totally confused. A little while you will see me, then you won’t see me. This was all so confusing for them and remains so for us.

Let’s explore some of the analogies curates have used in the past. The Trinity is like water. Water has three states: solid, liquid, and gas. Although the water changes form it is still H2O. Just as water changes form so too does the Trinity take different forms.

I am conscious of the vicar sitting behind me. His blood pressure has just increased. No! Emphatically, no! No one molecule of H2O can actually exist as solid, liquid, and gas at the same time. To suggest that this is like the Trinity, is to teach the heresy of modalism.

The Trinity is like an egg. In one egg you have the yoke, the white, and the shell – composing one full egg. The vicar has now decided I will not preach here again. No! That is tritheism. Our God is three persons in one substance.

The Trinity is like the light (Son) and heat (Spirit) created by the sun (the Father). The vicar has just decided I should lose my permission to officiate. No! That is Arianism. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are fully God.

These ‘helpful’ analogies have strained our doctrine beyond the limits of elasticity. They are deformed. They are not Christianity.

So, what am I to say on Trinity Sunday? “Three persons in one substance”. No, we must give up this picture of three distinct individuals. There is only one substance, God, but there are three persons. The Greek word is ‘hypostases’, which is better because no one really knows what it means.

What the Church has tried to formulate for us is that there are three aspects of the one divine being. The word ‘aspect’ already has one sailing perilously close to the limit! Nevertheless, three aspects. Your idea of God cannot do without all of them together, and none of them can be reduced into the others.

One aspect is that God is the absolutely transcendent ground of all being, from whose creativity all things were made, seen and unseen, beyond our capacity to comprehend. A second aspect is that God is the superlative intelligence, without which was not anything made that was made, yet which takes form, and lives among us, full of grace and truth, as an embodied mind and self-illuminating consciousness. The third aspect is that God is the dynamic energy, the giver of life, which imparts being to the forms conceived by the divine wisdom, valuing them, affirming them, delighting in their peculiarity and particularity.

All very abstract. Well then where do we go from there, we must begin and end with Jesus. Where else?!

If I didn’t know Jesus, I don’t think I would believe in God at all. Looking at the world, what I would see is meaninglessness. Lots of war and starvation.

The reason that I do believe is because I have witnessed Jesus and had my vision of the world transformed by what He did and what He said and who He is. I understand Him as the only-begotten Son of God; given to us because “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” What kind of love is this? Who gives such a gift?

It is looking through Jesus that I come to see that world, governed by God. When I look at the world through Him I see not a stream disappearing into an ocean of oblivion, but the Way, the Truth, the Life. The conviction of this is a voice within me that enables me to cry out to God: “Abba! Father!”

God is the one whom Jesus called ‘Father’. Jesus is the one whom God called ‘Son’. The power that enables us to see and confess this is called ‘Spirit’. So, you see it begins and ends in Jesus. The belief in God as One and Three – as Trinity – stems from the starting point of Jesus and flows back to Jesus.

“Would you like to know your Lord’s meaning?” asks the Lady Julian of Norwich, medieval English mystic. “Know it well, love was his meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love.”

On this Trinity Sunday, as we ponder the nature of God and his kingdom, just as the disciples did, we too have unanswered questions. Some theologians prefer to speak of ‘Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer’ rather than the traditional ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’. For myself, the Trinity of ‘Persons’ is completely indescribable by using human vocabulary.

Do we get it, this ‘Doctrine of the Trinity? In our Christian journey we learn more about God, day by day, as we walk with Jesus throughout our earthly life. Walking in the power of the Holy Spirit, and onward into the kingdom of God, our Father, by the grace of his Son, Jesus Christ.

Amen.

The Rev’d Maureen Lunn
St Mary Magdalene Enfield, 15/06/2025