Trinity Sunday 7th June 2009

This month I want in my preaching to look at the diocesan vision starting this morning appropriately on Trinity Sunday. In Chichester diocese our Life Together vision focus is attending to God, building Christian community and commending God’s love for the world.

So this first Sunday we’ll look at attending to God. This has components in the diocesan vision linked to worship, Christian spirituality and stewardship.

People who love one another often get to look like one another. People can get to look like their pets. Forget the pets! As I’ve been visiting and getting to know you I’ve been marrying you off wrongly at times. Other times I’ve seen it as almost obvious that two of you are an item as they say.

We are here as Christians to attend to God and to grow like him. Remember the memory verse from the Ascension? The Son of God became the Son of Man so that children of men could become children of God?

Theology – the science of God – is vital because the God you attend to will change you. Attend to a wishy washy God and you’ll go wishy washy. Attend to a moral policeman and you’ll get censorious. To an indulgent God and you’ll enjoy yourself at the expense of others. Worship God as the genie in your lamp and he’ll never change you. Worship God as a distant Father figure and you project your own bad life experience and make it ultimate.

Attend to the Trinity and you’ll become a child of God and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.

The Christian religion calls us to attend to a God who’s revealed in holy scripture and affirmed by the catholic creeds and the church’s liturgy. Today’s collect affirms that the confession of a true faith is to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity and in the power of the divine majesty to worship the Unity.

What does this mean? That God’s shown us through Jesus he’s Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Trinity Sunday’s slotted in at the end of a five month period when the readings in church have followed the life of Jesus up to his death and resurrection and the sending of the Spirit at Pentecost.

This Sunday we sum up all of Christianity as we affirm God to be three persons in one God. Why? Because that’s what he says he is. We’d never work this out for ourselves. It’s revealed from the action of God in history.

There are various illustrations in use by preachers. Take the water one - Ice, water and steam are one substance with three forms – or take the love one - If God is love how could he be love before the world was made other than by being love within himself?

This year a new illustration occurred to me for today’s Feast. It came the other day as I saw a vine supported on a trellis. The word trellis is like Trinity. It means ‘woven with three strands’. God who is three is like a trellis that supports a fruitful vine, the church of Jesus Christ we’re part of.

Unlike the trellis I saw, the Trinity’s a living trellis. Without his life giving support the vine that is the church would be a fruitless entreprise.

Our attending to God has two components. We worship together and we pray on our own. The branches of the vine are held by the vine which is held to the trellis in the vineyard.

To attend to God we gather with the Lord’s people on the Lord’s day around the Lord’s table. We come to celebrate as our gospel reading affirms: for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. Or as our second reading from Romans 8 expresses it, more in terms of the implications for us of this good news, that we are children of God, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.

Attending to God at St. Giles is primarily about worshipping him. In the 2007 congregational questionnaire 80% of us said we came to church to worship God. 75% said prayer was an important part of our service. As we look forward at St Giles we will be asking how we can better enter into worship. We’re bound in some measure to address the other two components of attending to God in the diocesan vision which are Christian spirituality and stewardship. The prayer and giving of individuals are the building blocks of the worshipping body.

In that awesome first reading from Isaiah we gain insight into what it means for individuals to attend to the Trinity. Isaiah is caught up with the seraphs before the Lord, sitting on a throne, high and lofty…the hem of his robe filling the temple.

He heard a song that has been used in Christian worship for 2000 years at the Eucharist: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.’ In those three ‘holy’s the Old Testament text hints at the Blessed Trinity, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Incidentally the chant the priest uses at Parish Eucharist in the run up to the Holy holy, or Sanctus the so-called Preface, may go back to Isaiah. It’s an ancient Jewish chant that links what we do here on Sunday right back to the Temple.

Back to the passage. Given this vision of the true God Isaiah senses the falseness within him and says: ‘Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!’

So it can be when God shows himself to us in prayer. We’re brought down to acknowledge our inadequacy before God. We make Isaiah’s Sanctus acclamation; holy, holy, holy then we kneel before the altar. Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The live coal comes to touch our lips. It is Jesus who comes to make us worthy of God, he come to us at God’s altar bringing Holy Communion in his body and blood. Then the service ends And I said, ‘Here am I; send me!’

Attending to God is something the Trinity calls us to individually and corporately. It’s something that puts a demand not just on our lips but our lives. The thrice holy God seeks to consecrate three aspects of our life: our time, talents and treasure. This, the mantra of stewardship, reminds us that Christian worship goes on beyond the hour given on Sunday. It is a continuous offering flowing from that hour of souls and bodies and bank balances offered day by day ass a living sacrifice to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit.

Attending to God is our calling from all eternity. We were each of made to see the King, the Lord of hosts, in his beauty. We begin as babies attending very much to ourselves and end, or should end, by attending to the beauty of God for all eternity. What changes isn’t self love so much as the self that we love. As our lives expand in relationships into maturity wee see that our self interest is one with that of the whole human community and of God three in one who made and makes it. This is how the Trinity saves us.

Attending to God is a work of salvation. It’s an offering that’s ongoing. Through it self-love is liberated by grace into the love of neighbour and of God who is within himself relational and holy. He is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the glory of the eternal Trinity and the power of the divine majesty to whom be praise now and for ever. Amen.