Psalm 8, Romans 5:1-5, John 16:12-15
In John’s Gospel Jesus says of the Father and the Holy Spirit “All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” Today is Trinity Sunday.
It may seem a strange way to start my sermon this morning but throughout the week whenever I began thinking about the Trinity I kept being transported into the hospital room as my mother was dying.
It is over a decade since I lost my mother but as she was approaching her last breaths I can recall a desire for prayer. Both my father and I are ministers but neither of us in this moment offered to pray.
It is a strange thing to be present as someone dies and to contemplate your own mortality. How do we make sense of the eclectic experiences that make up our existence as we sit in the liminal space of our own mortality? On reflection I am wondering where God was in that moment.
That moment was a space of faith and doubt poignantly captured in a poem by Pádraig Ó Tuama entitled, ‘Do you believe in God?’
‘Do you believe in God?’
Though I've lost God, God is
The only language that I speak.
I need to describe this loss.
I thought he appeared
and disappeared. Now God’s
nowhere, though this loss
is like memory carried in a gust
of air, a scent. I make myself
describe what I have lost
with attention to the yearning
I still have. But I fear
God became a word
to bear all I could not bear.
God bore it well. No
containing now. An empty shell.
I have a need, or grief,
for what was never there.
I have lost God. God
is the only language that I speak.
The last line stands out echoing the poem’s beginning: “I have lost God. God is the only language that I speak.” ... God is the only language that I speak.
The poem addresses the ambiguity of our relationship with God. God’s complex and mysterious presence and silence through the rhythm of our existence. How do we make sense of this God to whom we have come this day to worship?
What names shall we call this God by?
Today is Trinity Sunday. And today we name God as Father, and as Son, and as Holy Spirit. The Triune God who is one in three and three in one. What sense might we make of this naming of God?
My mother was by her profession was an English teacher and she loved words and language. Any teacher might tell you that the way to explain something is to use an analogy. So, I have something in my suitcase that might either help us or confuse us.
My favourite analogy to explain the Trinity is to juggle. For me the pattern and movement of the balls is the analogy. There is this wonderful Greek word perichoresis which is sometimes use to explain the divine dance of the three person of the Trinity. But when the balls cease to move the analogy falls apart as most analogies do.
Most of the ones that we might try fall into one or more of the ancient heresies. Water which can be also or vapor suggests the heresy of modalism. This was promoted by Noetus and Sabellius. The sun in the sky which is the star itself, its light, and heat is a form of Arianism. Whilst a 3 leaf clover partialism – three segments composing a whole.
These attempts to explain the hidden nature of God all fall short and remind me of the writings of Gregory of Nazianzus the Bishop of Constantinople who was instrumental in solidifying the divinity of the Holy Spirit and altering the Nicene Creed. In his oration on the Holy Spirit, he declared of the Trinity:
“I have very carefully considered this matter in my own mind, and have looked at it in every point of view, in order to find some illustration of this most important subject, but I have been unable to discover anything on earth with which to compare the nature of the Godhead.” Gregory of Nazianzus (c.329 C.E. -390 C.E.) Fifth Theological Oration. On the Holy Spirit 380-381.
Attempts to domesticate the mystery of God’s life as Father, Son and Spirit always fall short. So let me offer three reflections from our three readings about how we experience God as Trinity, and which might help us to contemplate who God is.
Reflection 1 - Psalm 8
In Psalm 8 which we used as our call to worship we caught a glimpse of God who is the origin of all things, and the place God gave humans within the creation. It ties us back to the story of creation in genesis 1 and to The Nicene Creed describes God the Father with these words.
We believe in one God,
the Father,
the almighty,
maker of
heaven and earth,
of all that
is, seen and unseen.
The Psalmist wrote of human beings, “You have given them dominion over the works of your hands.” There are been many occasions in recent years that I have posed the question in a sermon “so how’s this whole dominion thing working out for us?”
I was reminded about this during the week when I read about the interview between David Attenborough and Prince William reflecting on the state of the oceans. The Psalm gives us responsibility for the fish of the sea and whatever passes along the paths of the seas. Attenborough says in the interview, "What we have done to the deep ocean floor is just unspeakably awful. If you did anything remotely like it on land, everybody would be up in arms," The interview reminded me of the Ted Talk I watched in 2011 with Jeremy Jackson talking about the great pacific garbage patch. “How’s this whole dominion thing working out for us?”
This Psalm also inspired a poem
City Lights
by Peter
Lockhart
When I look
at your heavens;
the work of
your fingers;
the moon
and the stars that you have established,
I wonder
why the number of stars
is
diminishing:
the moon is
not so bright
and the
stars are fading...
...and
disappearing
Thank God
for the fluorescent stars,
stuck on my
daughter's ceiling,
a dim and
facile sign
to remind
them of what is:
the wonder
of your creation,
to which we
are blinding them
with our
city lights
and
landscaped lives.
According to Genesis 1 God who is the author and origin of all that is created humans in God’s own image. Yet despite this we flounder when it comes to caring for all that God has made. As I reflect on my mother’s life, I treasure the memory of her love of nature and bird watching. The fragility of the beauty of the creation and of the preciousness of life that I was reminded of in my mother’s hospital room is countered by the hopeful question in the Psalmists mouth “what are humans that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” Here is hope that God cares for us even when we fail to care for what God has made.
Reflection 2 – John 14
The presence of the Holy Spirit in the world and her coming is described by Jesus in John when says, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.”
But what is this truth that the Holy Spirit guides us towards. In the post-truth world, our relationship with the concept of the truth is strained. Whether we recognise it or not we are all philosophical heirs of the Enlightenment and its children modernism, postmodernism and meta modernism.
Many of us are still caught in the trap of the modernist thinking that evolved into an unhealthy scientism which left no room for mystery. It also shaped the way we began to read the Bible and led Christians into both literal and liberal ways of interpreting the Bible. In this world truth is objective, universal, and discoverable through reason, science, and progress. But for anyone who understands the philosophy of science we know that science is grounded in doubt and the drive to discover new insights.
The truth that the Holy Spirit leads towards is the crucified and risen one who is coming to us from the future and is in all things already. The cosmic nature of Jesus is described in the first Chapter of Paul’s letter to Colossians.
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
On the one hand you could say that if you want to see God, look to the Christ who is coming to us from the future. Yet, you could also say that through the power of the Holy Spirit he is already with us everywhere. Aub Podlich invites us to be challenged by the irony of our attempts at seeing God in his poem ‘Ground, Air, Mother’
You want to see God?
Does a worm see the garden
in which it tunnels?
Do you see the air
you gulp into your lungs?
Does a baby see the mother
in whom he comes to life?
You cannot capture me
like a passing butterfly,
netted with the eyes,
pinned to a board of words
for every scale and spot
to be observed.
You can no more encapsule me
with words or pictures
or your very best intentioned
ideas of Me,
then you can net
the slippery waters of the sea
I am not One to be seen.
I am Ground to hide in,
Air to breathe,
a Mother in which to be born.
I am a Life to be lived!
See me?
Is it not enough
that I am One
who sees you
through and through?
As I contemplate the mystery of the coming Christ and the presence of the Holy Spirit I am reassured that any sense of silence or absence in my mother’s hospital room was no less or more than the silence of God that Jesus himself experienced on the cross.
Reflection 3 – Romans 5
In the work of the great Reformer Martin Luther 500 years ago the importance of the words of Paul to the Romans cannot be underestimated.
“Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.”
There are a few key words here for us to think about in our relationship with God and with Jesus.
Grace, justified, sanctified, peace, forgiveness, repentance
"Christ died for us while we were still sinners" Romans 8
Consider these words from the Japanese biologist and theologian Kagawa Toyohiko
Transcendence and Incarnation
Takayama Chogyū taught, “By every means, we must not fail to transcend the present time.” To this statement, I should like to add the following, “Those who know the way of transcendence must know the way of incarnation.” This is the way to which the Kegon Sutra[27] points and the way taken by the carpenter of Nazareth. In the carpentry of the carpenter’s son scorned by gluttons and drunkards, there was no dream of separating labor and religion.
Neither fasting nor maintaining the purity rituals, he was friend to sinners and confidant to prostitutes, thoroughly stained by the dirt of everyday life. That was the way of his incarnation. As a criminal condemned to death, he thus took the downhill direction by dying on the cross. He whose end was a bloodbath of the flesh entered into the final religion. When the final word of the criminal condemned to die on the cross was spoken, the world and every last one remaining in it was drawn into God. (A Few Words in the Dark Kagawa Toyohiko)
This is good news and as I contemplate again the scene of my mother’s hospital room the faith which I have that draws me in is precisely this mystery. Beyond how I felt or thought, beyond what she was experiencing the miracle of God’s grace was present because in and through Jesus the world and every last one remaining in it was drawn into God, including my mother.
As I look upon the world on what is happening in the protests in L.A. and across the USA, in Israel and its new attacks on Iran, in Ukraine and Russia there is a senselessness and hopelessness. But Just like the ambiguity and liminal space of my mother’s room I contemplate the work of the God who we name as Trinity: through Jesus the world and every last one remaining in it was drawn into God
Today is Trinity Sunday. Any attempts at divine definitions fall away and fail before the mystery of who God is because God existed before we had a word for God and any attempts to name or describe God are inadequate. Paul wrote, “Faith is hope in things not seen”. but through some miracle of the Holy Spirit we glimpse God who has come to us in Jesus and receive the gift of faith which draws us forward to follow him.