I hadn’t really registered the calendar when I somehow agreed to preach both Pentecost and Trinity… but it turns out to have been pretty enjoyable. This is my sermon for our churches for Trinity Sunday.  

Readings: Isaiah 6:1-8 | Romans 8:12-17 | John 3:1-17

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, oh Lord our God. Amen.

Welcome to Trinity Sunday. Or, as it is also known among some preachers in irreverent moments, ‘Heresy Sunday’—a day when whoever is preaching prays harder than usual that they will manage to avoid digging themselves into a heretical hole. It’s not quite the Thunderdome, but when it is your first time preaching it, it can feel a bit like it.

For how does one preach the Christian belief that God is, in reality, both one and three: “God in three persons, blessed Trinity”? There can a sense, I think, that this is an idea that is really quite complex and probably requires lots of philosophical and theological jargon. But what if we move away from worrying so much about explaining and understanding how God is three-and-one  and instead try and move towards knowing and understanding the God who is three-in-one and one-in-three more deeply. It is a shift in our attention and concern that, perhaps, helps us to connect more deeply with God.

As I prepared for this morning, a bit of me wondered whether I need to say more than: “God in three persons, blessed Trinity”? The simpler, the better, perhaps. And I could just sit down now? I have to say, I hope that at some point in my ministry I will be bold enough to simply allow a congregation to meditate on a sentence of scripture or hymnody or liturgy in the sermon space. I think the contemplation of a sentence or image describing the Trinity would be a good choice for that, I have to say.

Meditation is a practice that allows God to be God before us, before we worry about how we explain that God—to ourselves or other people. It is a particular kind of understanding—it’s different to being able to explain and the hows and whys of God’s existence, and it’s quite grounding. And when it comes to the Trinity, we really need God to show us this—to help us begin to recognise how this reality of God grounds our own lives.

So, I really thought about just leaving it there. But I thought that perhaps, before we get to that stage, together as a congregation, it might be helpful to reflect on why we have Trinity Sunday at all, and how it creates a good moment or space for meditating on and encountering God.

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I want to start with a story. Specifically, the story of God and the world that we are told and re-tell as a church during the course of our liturgical year. This year begins on Advent Sunday, and ends, in November with the feast of Christ the King. But there is, to borrow the language of television, a mid-season break that occurs after today. Having told the story of God’s sending of his Son; Jesus’ birth, life, death and resurrection and ascension, we reach a kind of denouement at Pentecost—the sending of the Holy Spirit into all the world.

Next Sunday when you come to church, the decorations on the altar will be green. We will be in what is called ‘ordinary time’, and we will spend most of the rest of the year exploring how to live in the world as God’s people, with the guidance and support of the Holy Spirit. But before that—today—We spend a Sunday reflecting on the reality of God as Trinity, and the unity of God: Father, Son, and Spirit, holy and undivided.  

Perhaps we might say that having listened to a story in which it might look like there are three ‘characters’—perhaps even three gods, which is one of the possible heresies—it’s helpful and important to remind ourselves that these three are the same One God. That they are three persons, three modes (the choice of words is endless and never quite right) drawing us into their life as God. For it is this life that is the source of all life and love, of our meaning and our purpose—all the living and working we will do. 

And of the theology and all of the doctrine, and the complex philosophical phrasing and arguing about how God is Trinity comes after the contemplation of God who is really, truly, three-and-one. It comes because of such contemplation and meditation, as Christians have tried to make sense of their encounters with God—directly and in the stories of the Bible.

One of the helpful ways theologians have found to describe their encounters with this God is in the idea of repetition. So, we say that though we might meet God in different ways, modes, forms, persons—there is something in these encounters that is repetitious. That tells us that each time, we are meeting the same God. This is how it’s been put by one theologian:

“Father, Son and Spirit [are…] God in threefold repetition… it implies no alteration in His Godhead… He is God in this repetition… the one God in each repetition”[1]  

That’s a line that we might meditate on, isn’t it? As you listen to it, don’t try to understand it intellectually, disentangling or grappling with how it works, or like you’ll have to explain it in an exam. Listen to it like it’s a line of poetry, or a motif in a piece of music, as something that unfolds as you contemplate it.

“Father, Son and Spirit [are…] God in threefold repetition… it implies no alteration in His Godhead… He is God in this repetition… the one God in each repetition”

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Today’s readings give us three encounters with God to reflect upon, that occur across the story of God’s interactions with humans in history: Isaiah’s encounter with God the Father; Nicodemus’ interaction with Jesus, God the Son; and St Paul’s description of the work of the God the Spirit. And in each encounter we find one God, who is the God of life. That is the motif that repeats for us, this Trinity Sunday. The God we encounter repeatedly gives life, and very specifically life with God.

Isaiah receives a vision of God the Father, powerful and sovereign—and so holy that Isaiah is terrified that he is going to die on the spot. The gift of life is given as the seraph touches his lips with that hot coal, and Isaiah is drawn into God’s life and work, being commissioned as a prophet.

Nicodemus goes to see Jesus, because he recognises that Jesus must be from God—and Jesus tells him the things that Nicodemus will see and experience in the process of being drawn into the kingdom of God. Into a life with God. Nicodemus will see Jesus lifted up, on the cross, and he will experience the gift of the Holy Spirit. We hope, I think, that Nicodemus (who is one of those who helps to bury Jesus) chooses to enter into this life—just like Isaiah did.

And finally, Paul, in the letter to Romans describes the way that the Spirit leads us into God’s life, sharing in that eternal life. I imagine that this is based on his own experience on the Damascus Road: his encounter with God and its consequences in his own life. He talks about it as ‘adoption’ because that was a practice very familiar to his Roman audience as a way of drawing people into a family, so that it’s life and name endured into the next generations.

In these three stories we encounter one God three ways.

·      God the Father, the source of all life

·      God the Son, the saviour of all life

·      God the Holy Spirit, the breath of all life

We see the gift of life being offered in each repetition—an invitation into life with God, into the very life of God.

This is what we recognise and reflect on, on Trinity Sunday.

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And so I want to offer you two sentences to take away and perhaps to meditate on, before we launch into the rest of the liturgical year.

• The line of the hymn: “God in three persons, blessed Trinity.”

• Or the line of the theologian: “He is God in this repetition… the one God in each repetition.”

Sit quietly, repeating the line in time with your breathing. Invite this God, holy and undivided, three-and-one, to meet you in that meditation.

I pray that as you do, you—like Isaiah, Nicodemus, and Paul—will encounter the life of God afresh, and find yourselves ready to embrace it. 

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[1] The full reference, for those who might want it is: Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I.I.350: “The name of Father, Son and Spirit means that God is the one God in threefold repetition, and this in such a way that the repetition itself is grounded in His Godhead, so that it implies no alteration in His Godhead, and yet in such a way also that He is the one God only in this repetition, so that His one Godhead stands or falls with the fact that He is God in this repetition, but for that very reason He is the one God in each repetition.”