St John, Burgess Hill Trinity Sunday 30.5.21

Shortly after I was ordained priest I had a crisis of faith. I went back to where I had trained. It was a chance to work out what should happen next since I hardly believed in the reality of God anymore. While there I was taken under the wing of Fr. Daniel, one of the Mirfield monks. He gave me this advice: ‘Maybe, John, it is not God who's gone but your vision of him. Why not pray an honest prayer, like, ‘God, if you're there, show yourself. Give me a vision of yourself that's to your dimensions and not mine’. With nothing to lose I prayed Fr. Daniel’s prayer over two cliff-hanging days. Then God answered. He chose a leaf on a tree in the monastery garden. I was walking along with no particular thought in my head when my eyes fell on the leaf and it was as if it spoke to me. ‘He made you’, the leaf seemed to say. I was bowled over. As I moved forward I saw the great Crucifix that stands in the garden. ‘I made you. I love you’, the figure of Jesus seemed to say. ‘Father, Son...what about the Holy Spirit?’, my mind was spinning. The Father was saying ‘I made you’, the Son ‘I love you’. Could it be that the Spirit was saying ‘I want to fill you’? A group of monks prayed for me to be filled afresh with the Holy Spirit and from that day forward God has seemed closer to me in people and nature as well as in church. 

This experience has helped me understand what it means to pray ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen’. It was as if my vision of God had grown too ‘samey’ and needed to get ‘different’ and only God could do that, the living God who speaks to anyone prepared to lend an ear to him. In reminding me ‘I made you’ God used a leaf to speak to me – a leaf out of his book of nature!

God is different from us and yet the same as us. We humans are individual persons but God is three persons in one God which goes beyond reason. That is the great thing about God - his frontiers are beyond ours so he can invite us into new territories by what he chooses to reveal to us. The supreme territory is the life of the resurrection. Because of its core historical events, in Christianity talk of God is inseparable from a vision of him beyond this world. Austin Farrer makes this plain in one of his sermons: ‘You can equivocate for ever on God's very existence... but a God who reverses nature, a God who undoes death, that those in whom the likeness of his glory has faintly and fitfully shone may be drawn everlastingly into the heart of light, and know him as he is: this is a God indeed, a God almighty, a God to be trusted, loved and adored’. The Bible says ‘God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them’ and the gift of reason is seen as the mark of that image within us. By reason we can evaluate the goodness, truth and beauty around us as pointing to God as being more of the same. Yet there are things our minds cannot grasp like suffering and death, people who forgive one another and the immensity of space. Such realities reveal themselves to us as being bigger than our minds or beyond reason.

God has sameness to us and difference from us. Since God is one in himself and one with us in Jesus Christ we can experience his sameness. He is our loving source and ending, our Father. We are the children he loves and wants to be with him for ever. God’s sameness appeals to us as reasonable beings. Since God is revealed in history as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons in one God, he is gloriously different from us, with space and power to bring all other persons into communion with himself. This space and power was revealed upon earth in a human life of 33 years. God’s space, power and holiness is so different from ours it needed bringing to focus, so we could see it, through God becoming a human being in the person of Jesus. ‘As a magnifying glass concentrates the rays of the sun into a little burning knot of heat that can set fire to a dry leaf or a piece of paper, so the mystery of Christ in the Gospel concentrates the rays of God’s light and fire to a point that sets fire to the spirit of man’. So wrote the great Christian mystic and writer Thomas Merton.

I got into a conversation at Sainsbury’s. The young man at the till didn’t go to Church but I’ll not forget what he said: ‘God’s all powerful but they make him to be a wimping wimp!’ This observation brought back to me a frequent complaint made by the great explorer Laurens Van der Post about the Church’s domestication of God which might be behind non-attendance of folk like my friend at the till. The explorer wrote: ‘One of the strangest ideas ever conceived is the idea that religion is the opium of the people, because religion is a call to battle.. human beings in their rational selves.. shy like frightened horses away from a God who is not the source of opium for people but a reawakening of creation and a transcending of the forces and nuclear energies in the human soul’.

Van der Post was imprisoned by the Japanese during World War Two and lived under the threat of execution. A date was set. The night before he records experiencing a tremendous thunderstorm outside his prison. He saw in this storm a strengthening as if from the awesome truth of a God so different he can raise the dead. The Japanese were not ultimately in control. The storm witnessed a greater than human power which in the end would decide all. He was spared execution. God’s all powerful - may he forgive us for making him ‘a wimping wimp’! 

May God also forgive those of us who put him into words and make him seem neat and tidy. Theology is putting together human words about a reality beyond words. It is necessary because God in Christ, so different from us, has made himself the same as us by taking flesh and bidding us write words about him. Scripture takes precedence over all such words, a library of inspired documents, presenting God as awesome yet accessible in Christ. 

All religions claim some sort of revelation of God. Hindus see many gods expressing affinity or sameness with ordinary life. Muslims see one God above and beyond us whose utter difference from us seems to exclude any sameness. Christians are in the middle with three persons in one God, a God who is personal like ourselves but also beyond us as the ground of our being. 

God for Christians is different from us not just because of what he says about himself through scripture - or to put it inclusively what God says about Godself - but on account of our experience of that difference as believers as I found in the monastery garden and the supermarket and Van der Post discovered in prison.

Engagement with God is a calling forth both of the light of reason and the light of faith which together lift us beyond ourselves into his praise. As the word of God written in the prophet Isaiah states: ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9).

St Bartholomew, Brighton Trinity Sunday 16th June 2019

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’ll project 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 six months when readings in church have followed the life of Our Lord up to his death and resurrection and the sending of the Spirit at Pentecost.

This Sunday we sum up 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. 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?

Or take that of a trellis supporting a vine. The word trellis means ‘woven with three threads’. God who is three is like a trellis supporting a fruitful vine, the church of Jesus Christ we’re part of. Unlike the trellis supporting a vine, the Trinity’s a living trellis. Without his life giving support the vine that’s the church would be a fruitless enterprise.

How you see God - theology - is vital because the God you attend to will change you.

In the eucharist we draw life from the living and true God through Christ who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit. It’s the way things are. God’s a fact - Father, Son and Spirit - though people have a million ideas about him. If people turn their backs on the Trinity they regress into muddled ideas of God which take you nowhere.

Not only ideas, spiritual experiences alleged to be of God mislead if they’re not seen in the light of the grace of Our Lord, the love of God the Father and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes people say to me ‘I feel God’s presence daily and don’t need your dogmas’. C.S.Lewis had a good answer to such a person: ‘I quite agreed with that man… he had probably had a real experience of God... and when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds… he… was turning from something real to something less real… if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he will also be turning from something real to something less real: turning from real waves to a bit of coloured paper. But here comes the point. The map is… only coloured paper, but… it's based on what… thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic...it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single isolated glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you’re content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America’.

The doctrine of the Trinity is a God-given map to the world opened up by the resurrection, a world you can’t reach by your own insight or efforts but, as the Gospel says, through the Spirit of truth who leads you into all truth. (John 16:13) As we heard in the passage from Romans we have hope of sharing the glory of God through faith that brings us the peace of Christ and God’s love [being] poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. (Romans 5:1,2,5). This is the wherewithal, the map if you like, to get to glory.

We come from God, we belong to God, we go to God.

Attending to God is our calling from all eternity. We were each of us made to see the King, the Lord of hosts, in his beauty. We began as babies attending very much to ourselves and end, or should end, by attending to God. What changes isn’t self love so much as the self that we love. As our lives expand in relationships into maturity we 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.

So to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, be ascribed as is most justly due all might majesty dominion and power, now and for ever and to the ages of ages. Amen.

Trinity Sunday at Ascension, Haywards Heath 27th May 2018

Today we celebrate the revelation of God as an eternal fellowship of love, three persons equal in majesty, undivided in splendour, yet one God.

The doctrine of the most holy and undivided Trinity is challenging, relevant, intriguing and essential – four headings to steer our delving this morning into foundational truth and life.

Firstly it’s a challenge. Reason takes you so far in Christianity. We could never have invented God in three persons, it’s revealed truth. Then you have the question of weighing other revelations – Islam and Hinduism besides the Judaism from which the Trinitarian revelation came.

Preachers go on leave this Sunday for fear of a seemingly cold, calculated, mathematical doctrine. Three in one and one in three. Why three? Why not one, says Islam, why not more says Hinduism, why not none says the atheist mocking our feeble attempts to get our mind round God three in one.

There’s the challenge set before us in Trinitarian faith but that challenge is based upon historical events. These clearly reveal the nature of God in the coming of Jesus, whose death and resurrection we’ve been following up to Ascension Day, and the coming of the Spirit on Pentecost day. It’s a challenge that might lead you to the church library or the internet so you can better answer for your faith to those who believe in one God, no God or many gods as opposed to one God in three persons.

Secondly the doctrine of the Trinity is utterly relevant. How good it was to see the countercultural coverage on marriage last weekend since marriage as a union of life-giving love points us, because human beings are in the image of God, to God who is himself a union of life-giving love. Keeping true to ourselves as human beings, and true to the life-giving nature of marriage is keeping true to God no less, God as he has revealed himself to us.  God as love within himself. How could God be so without the distinction of persons within him?

Challenging, relevant – thirdly the doctrine of God should be intriguing. The eternal fellowship of love that is God draws us in to himself. What after all is the Church for other than to serve God’s purpose to bring as many souls on earth as possible into fellowship with him?

The doctrine of the Trinity is revealed first of all in Our Lord’s coming into a human family with Mary and Joseph, into village life in Nazareth, then into the missionary partnership of the disciples. That divine society continues after his resurrection and the gift of the Spirit as one, holy catholic and apostolic church which is God’s never-ending family!

How intriguing God is, and we are. If you want evidence for God look in the mirror and read Psalm 8 You have made (us) little lower than the angels and crown (us) with glory and honour. More than that, a human being in isolation isn’t a true human for, in John Donne’s words, no man is an island. What’s intriguing about God as divine society mirrors what we find intriguing about ourselves, namely our desire for society and friendship. This desire will be fully satisfied only in the communion of saints who can be thought of as standing near God as a corona or crown around the sun.

Challenging, relevant, intriguing – lastly the Trinitarian doctrine of God is essential.

It is essential because Christianity is a religion of salvation and that salvation stands or falls on the divinity of Jesus Christ. We read Jesus words in the Gospel all that belongs to the Father is mine…the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you (John 16:15) Does my eternal destiny depend on my own good works, lacking as they are, or on a relationship freely offered me by God in his Son?

In Jesus do we really meet with God himself? That, as they say, is the twenty four thousand dollar question hidden behind keeping a feast day for the Blessed Trinity.This doctrine might sound cold and mathematical but it follows a logic of love, love beyond all measure, extravagant, unconditional love for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son Jesus Christ so that all who believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life. (John 3:16)

To believe this is to believe God isn’t One but One God in three persons.

It’s challenging to so believe – God is God and has revealed himself this way and not another way.

It’s relevant - the way we see God affects the way we see ourselves and steers us from unworthy pursuits.

It’s intriguing because the loving fellowship of God in three persons chimes in with our sociable nature and draws it to joyful completion in the communion of saints

It’s essential doctrine because without it the divinity of Christ falls, the word of God is emptied of power and the sacraments become empty ritual as God’s coming to us in Jesus and the Spirit is denied.

May all I have shared enrich the eucharist we now offer through, with and in Jesus Christ, to whom, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, be all might, majesty, dominion and power now and for evermore. Amen.

Trinity Sunday 22 May 2016

Anne and I were on a train to Darlington last week. I looked up to see these words above me. Hello, my name is carriage number 55789. How am I looking today? Let us know if there are any areas needing some tlC. Tweet us @northernrailorg#55789

I didn't tweet but it got me thinking about the Trinity. If a train that's carrying me to Darlington can invite me to speak to it, how much more the One in whom I live and move and who accompanies me to glory.

He has spoken - God - in deeds more than words. The Spirit of truth... will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. John 16:13 We know about the Trinity because God in Trinity has spoken through his deeds of creation, resurrection and Pentecost to show us himself. You couldn't make Christianity up, it’s a revealed faith no more no less and it’s the function of the Spirit to wake us up to it. Not to convey anything new but to give us a constant update of what’s been revealed once for all in Jesus Christ. 

The first reading from Proverbs catches this, as the reading on the Darlington train caught me last week. Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice?... The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. Proverbs 8:1, 22-23 Wisdom is God’s coming forth to us, his speaking out from the depth of his being as ultimately Christ and the Spirit have spoken in history.

And what is God saying from his depths? Our second reading tells us from the receiving end as it speaks of experiencing God in three aspects. We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ… and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (Romans 5:1,5) God who speaks and acts to reveal himself comes real to us in Jesus so that for over 20 centuries believers have spoken of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.(2 Corinthians 13:14 )

Today's Feast of the Blessed Trinity summarises what the church has set before us about Jesus in the Christmas and Easter cycles ending with last Sunday's celebration of the coming of the Holy Spirit. The Paschal Candle is back at the font but the warm light of the risen Lord burns on in our hearts by the Holy Spirit to the glory of God the Father. This is the grand reminder of Trinity Sunday.

We were up near Darlington to enter the worlds of 2 year old Olivia and Toby who've both doubled in size and age since we last saw them. Lovely to enter the joyous world of children whose fascination with life is such a great teacher.  Oh to see the world through 2 year old eyes! Such simplicity and trust are in the gift of faith, along with fascination concerning the word of God and the paradox of his three in oneness. Just as children take things on trust from their parents, we children of God trust God as he acts in love towards us and speaks of himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. 

God is love. As we dwell in God he dwells in us and we in him. In the coming of Our Blessed Lord we see how much God loves us. In the pouring of the Holy Spirit into our hearts we receive God’s love so we can overcome all that comes against us, putting love where there is no love and seeing love grow around us. This is what St Paul is speaking about in that second reading from Romans 5 when he says: suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts (Romans 5:3-5)

The Feast of the Blessed Trinity is about God being love in himself and the revelation of that loving wisdom on earth inseparable from suffering. You can’t love in abstraction, you have to give it, give yourself to others which means no escape from suffering. The sign of the Trinity is the sign of the Cross, I crossed out, since Jesus came down from heaven to earth to suffer on the cross for us.

Just before I travelled up through Darlington I gave the last rites to James Nicholson’s brother Peter in a tearful ceremony with his niece Elizabeth. Few have suffered as much hospitalisation as Peter whose funeral is to be here on Tuesday week. Few families have given as much loving attention over so long a period, year by year, week by week, day by day as the Nicholson’s. Suffering produces endurance,  and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts That love remains with Peter and the family as they gather the fruits of perseverance, the character building that fits us by grace, through suffering, for glory.

We started with a talking train and thought of the One who also speaks to us as he carries his faithful to glory.

I end with a voice speaking this morning as if from that glory. Here is a 2 min clip Peter recorded for Premier Christian Radio. It speaks of the day of death now arrived for him when grace blossoms into glory, into the vision of the triune God face to face, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

May the Blessed Trinity be Peter's healing and ours, to whom, Father, Son and Holy Spirit be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion and power henceforth and evermore. Amen.

Trinity Sunday 31st May 2015

With God-talk we need less to know what we’re talking about than to know who it is we’re talking about!

I pray that in what I share I can be a window into the God I love and serve and into his words just read to us at this eucharist.

The words were about holiness and love for Isaiah said one seraph called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.” and John said God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.

If we believers are to be windows to God it’s through holiness and love that show we don’t just know what we’re talking about we know who we’re talking about, for when we know God personally he shows through.

One of my heroes is South American, not Guyanese though but Brazilian. He’s an icon of holiness and love called Helder Camera whose cause for canonization as a Saint has been opened this month by Pope Francis. As a bishop he spent his life in the service of the poor, abandoning his palace and giving away Church property to provide land for the homeless. When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint, he used to say. When I ask why the poor have no food they call me a communist.

He was, as you can tell from that comment, a controversial Churchman, a pioneer of the social gospel in our day, taking the church out of its buildings and sacristies to be alongside hurt and need in the community.

Yet when Helder Camera tells the tale of his life it’s the mystical rather than the practical which takes precedence. He writes of how encounters with the Holy Spirit kept changing him and how a very big change occurred near the start of his ministry through the visit of a French friend. The two toured Rio’s shanty towns and Gerlier his friend suggested Helder’s talents would be far more use in the service of the poor than anything else.  Camera writes of that transformative conversation:  And so the grace of the Lord came to me through Gerlier’s presence.  Not just through the words he spoke: behind his words was the presence of a whole life, a whole conviction.  I was moved by the grace of the Lord… thrown to the ground like Saul on the road to Damascus.

I thought of this graphic description when I followed our first reading on how Isaiah’s encounter with holiness had practical effect. The seraph [who had cried of God’s holiness] touched my mouth with [a live coal] and said: “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!”

I wonder if today you recall the impact of God’s holiness upon you in your recent life experience? Whether the Lord is inviting from you that sort of painful cleansing as his springboard into a new realm of service?

I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!”

Once or twice in my life that’s happened to me. It happened when I was an undergraduate at Oxford studying Chemistry and stumbled across a Church with holy worship and a holy priest which so impacted my life that I accepted a call to priesthood. Or again when a letter from a priest called John Dorman came rather as a surprise of the Spirit inviting me to consider training Amerindian priests in the interior of Guyana. Or again when I encountered the spiritual force of the lady who in the end became my wife through whom once again my life moved forward in a new and more fruitful direction.

God is holy and loving. He is different to us and yet he is the same. It is his sameness we encounter in the love spoken of by St John. God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.  Whilst his holy difference from us wakes us up and shakes us out of complacency his love is unconditional and affirmative.

To use a bathing  analogy,  one quality, his  love, is like a hot bath. The other, his holiness is like a cold shower bracing us for fresh action.

On this feast of the Holy Trinity we celebrate both qualities of God, holiness and love, difference and sameness, and for ourselves the call to confidence in him and humility before him.

Confidence in God, knowing God’s love, is the basic treasure, which undergirds all we are as godly folk. It’s among the most urgent needs of Church members today. Those drawn into his service are moved to do so by finding such confidence, the confidence that the following of God’s call will bring about God’s provision so you have to follow it, at whatever cost.

I wonder if you’re sensing such a call, such an invitation at this time from the Holy Spirit? Don’t neglect it! Follow it!

If confidence in God is the one pole of godliness humility before God and people is the other pole, as 2 Corinthians makes plain when it talks of believers having ‘treasure in earthen vessels’.

How can we be effective instruments of a holy God without humility, readiness to attend to God in unfashionable lower places, witnesses to the humility of Christ present hidden away especially in the hurting and needful?  This is the underpinning of all Christians are about as the servant hearted folk we are, gifted with healing ministry from the Lord earthed in that under rated most humble ministry of listening. The holy, loving triune God wants to work in us and through us. We need both humility and confidence in him to be such instruments. As Christians hoping to witness and point to a God who answers prayer we need to know what we are talking about - we need to know who we’re talking about and pointing others to. I believe it’s as we listen to God faithfully in prayer that we’re best skilled up to listen to him speaking in our needy sister or brother.

We can only point authentically to him if we ourselves are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory… coming from the Lord, who is the Spirit to come back to 2 Corinthians (3:18).  Such transformation comes from contemplation of God as the holy friend he is and there’s no ‘quick fix’ about it.

Getting more of God in our life requires dedication and determination, even if it will end up being a grace given from above. But this much is clear, our apostolate, our sense of being ‘sent’ as Christians, will be utterly ineffective unless it comes as an overflow from what is growing within us.

What are we doing, then, I ask you, to cultivate the interior life?  We welcome God Sunday by Sunday in word and sacrament.  How are we savouring that gift in prayer day by day?  In our discipline of bible reading, study, self examination and service to those in need?

Where people are meeting deep down with God in Jesus Christ and he is taking hold of them, all that they say and do will be permeated with him. Think back on people whose lives have touched your life and shaken you out of complacency and apathy, the holy people who’ve influenced you for good and for God.

Is there a greater force or influence than that of holiness?

The devil is very keen to distract those of us who work hard for God from the prior work of spiritual renewal.  There is so much to do – so much human need out there - that we want to sail out there and serve it without giving the attention we need to give to the interior life.

Let Mother Teresa have the last say. It’s not how much we do that matters but how much love we put into what we do.

Come, Holy Spirit,  through this eucharist and show us our need of the love and holiness which is yours alone so that together we transmit it to others.

Feast of the Most Holy Trinity 26th May 2013

Today we celebrate the revelation of God as an eternal fellowship of love, three persons equal in majesty, undivided in splendour, yet one God.

The doctrine of the most holy and undivided Trinity is challenging, relevant, intriguing and essential – four headings to steer our delving this morning into foundational truth and life.

Firstly it’s a challenge. Reason takes you so far in Christianity. We could never have invented God in three persons, it’s revealed truth. Then you have the question of weighing other revelations – Islam and Hinduism besides the Judaism from which the Trinitarian revelation came.

Preachers go on leave this Sunday for fear of a seemingly cold, calculated, mathematical doctrine. Three in one and one in three. Why three? Why not one, says Islam, why not more says Hinduism, why not none says the atheist mocking our feeble attempts to get our mind round God three in one.

There’s the challenge set before us in Trinitarian faith but that challenge comes from historical events. These clearly reveal the nature of God in the coming of Jesus, whose death and resurrection we've been following up to Ascension Day, and the coming of the Spirit on Pentecost day. It’s a challenge that might lead you to the church library so you can better answer for your faith to those who believe in one God, no God or many gods as opposed to one God in three persons.

Secondly the doctrine of the Trinity is utterly relevant. I was thinking this week as Parliament moved us towards same-sex marriage that marriage is a union of life-giving love because human beings are in the image of God who is himself a union of life-giving love. Keeping true to ourselves as human beings, and true to the life-giving nature of marriage is keeping true to God no less, God as he has revealed himself to us.

The world, all of life sprang from him – notice we talk of God with a single pronoun despite his three persons, also with a male pronoun on account of Jesus. The feminist rewriting of God as the Mother, the Daughter and the Holy Spirit may be attractive to some but is actually an irreverent rewriting of how God speaks of himself in revelation. Rewriting the Trinity as creator, saviour and sanctifier achieves inclusive speech but at the cost of depersonalising God.

God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is supremely personal. At our beginning and at our end there is God and there is love because God is love within himself. How could God be so without the distinction of persons within him? How do we know all of this – we do so from Christian experience as our second reading reminded us. St Paul writes we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ through whom we have gained access by faith…God…who has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit (Romans 5) The doctrine of the Trinity is true and relevant to our experience by which the coming of Jesus and the Spirit help us know God as loving Father.

Challenging, relevant – thirdly the doctrine of God should be intriguing. The eternal fellowship of love that is God draws us in to himself. What after all is the Church for other than to serve God’s purpose to bring as many souls on earth as possible into fellowship with him?

The doctrine of the Trinity is revealed first of all in Our Lord’s coming into a human family with Mary and Joseph, into village life in Nazareth, then into the missionary partnership of the disciples. That divine society continues after his resurrection and the gift of the Spirit as one, holy catholic and apostolic church which is God’s never-ending family! Joy is its characteristic, out-of-this-world joy, that’s the most intriguing of all qualities. In the presence of the Lord there is joy for evermore writes the Psalmist.

How intriguing God is, and we are. If you want evidence for God look in the mirror and read Psalm 8 what are mortals that you should be mindful of them, mere human beings, that you should seek them out?

St Nicodemus writes of each human as being the macrocosm compared to the microcosm of the cosmos. In mind and spirit like God we can contain the universe. Being in God’s image we too are intriguing – we point beyond ourselves. O Lord our governor, how glorious is your name in all the world. You have made (us) little lower than the angels and crown (us) with glory and honour. (Psalm 8)

A human being in isolation isn't a true human for, in John Donne’s words, no man is an island. What’s intriguing about God as divine society mirrors what we find intriguing about ourselves, namely our desire for society and friendship. This desire will be fully satisfied only in the communion of saints who can be thought of as standing near God as a corona or crown around the sun.

Challenging, relevant, intriguing – lastly the Trinitarian doctrine of God is essential.

It is essential because Christianity is a religion of salvation and that salvation stands or falls on the divinity of Jesus Christ. We read Jesus words in the Gospel all that belongs to the Father is mine…the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you (John 16:15) Does my eternal destiny depend on my own good works, lacking as they are, or on a relationship freely offered me by God in his Son? In Jesus do we really meet with God himself? That, as they say, is the twenty four thousand dollar question hidden behind keeping a feast day for the Blessed Trinity.

This doctrine might sound cold and mathematical but it follows a logic of love, love beyond all measure, extravagant, unconditional love for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son Jesus Christ so that all who believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life. (John 3:16) To believe this is to believe God isn’t One but One God in three persons.

The essential truth behind today’s Feast has been told from Advent to Pentecost to reach its summary on Trinity Sunday.

It’s challenging, of course – God is God and has revealed himself this way and not another way.

It’s relevant - the way we see God affects the way we see ourselves and steers us from unworthy pursuits.

It’s intriguing because the loving fellowship of God in three persons chimes in with our sociable nature and would draw it to joyful completion in the communion of saints

It’s an essential doctrine because without it the divinity of Christ falls, the word of God is emptied of power and the sacraments become empty ritual for God’s coming to us in Jesus and the Spirit is denied.

Truth and life and worship are all thrown together in Christian religion so if we would live our lives best we should always take heed of revealed truth, however hard to grasp, and to worship which is our real grasp of it.

As Michael Ramsey wrote The Church’s perilous office of teaching is inseparable from the Church’s worship of the mystery whereby it exists.

May all I have shared serve that worship of God we now enter at the eucharist through Jesus Christ, to whom, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, be all might, majesty, dominion and power now and for evermore. Amen.